The slam of a door across the hall was what broke through my morning musings, my brows drawing low as I climbed out of my chair, made my way across my apartment.
The place across the hall from me was vacant, since the old man living there died of a stroke a few weeks before.
It wasn't exactly sad to me that he died, that I had been the one to call the super, to stand by and watch the stretcher roll him out. Death was a part of life. Besides, eighty was more years than many people got. And dying alone, well, most of us do that too.
What was sad to me was the fact that he didn't have a soul in his life to come and clear out his shit after he passed.
Which meant the place sat for a while before the state came through, tried to locate some next of kin. Finding none, they cleared out his personal papers, took whatever was worth anything since when you didn't have anyone who gave a shit about you, the state got your stuff, and left the place furnished with the halfway decent crap the old man had there since the eighties.
When the ad went up for the open apartment, it was listed as a furnished rental.
From what I knew, there hadn't exactly been any interest. For obvious reasons.
There had been no U-Haul parked out front, no endless grumbling trips up and down the halls, a parade of friends who secretly wished they had a halfway decent excuse to get them out of having to pitch in on the moving thing.
I hadn't been doing shit all morning. I would have heard or seen something.
But the door slammed.
And when I got to the door to look out, I caught the back of a woman rounding the corner that led to the staircase.
Petite, blonde, dressed in an oddly ill-fitting black hoodie and gray yoga pants.
Who wore a black hoodie in the middle of the fucking summer?
She was gone before I could get a closer look, but when I went downstairs and ran into the super, he informed me - without me asking, obviously - that I had a new neighbor.
"Fucking cute as shit too. Envy you living right across the hall from that." My brows must have drawn together, because he went on to explain. "Just saying, she hears a noise at night, finds a spider in a corner or some shit, you're the closest door. Things, you know... go from there."
Right.
Because my first response to a scared woman would be how quickly I could get her to agree to have my dick inside her.
The only response he got to that was a sigh and head shake.
My super had never been a fan of mine, not liking that I didn't share in his chronic need to comment on the female residents' bodies whenever he was around me, and as I walked away, I could hear him mumbling under his breath.
Fucking weirdo mute bastard.
It wasn't inventive. Or particularly biting. And aside from hitting the asshole, there wasn't much I could do about it.
It was on the fourth day that I finally caught a good look at her.
We were both leaving our apartments at the same time, her yanking an almost comically large red purse over her shoulder as she reached for her keys, missing me for a beat while I got to take a look at her without being noticed.
As much as the super was a dick, he was also right.
Cute as shit seemed to sum it up. Not striking or gorgeous or sexy as fuck. Cute. Which, in my opinion, was harder to come across than the former three.
She was all of five-two with blond hair that just brushed her shoulders, light blue eyes, pouty, slightly oversize lips, and a gently squared chin. Young. She seemed young to me. Twenty-five, maybe. Or possibly just graced with one of those faces that would have her carded well into her forties. Who knew.
What I did know was that she had her body shrouded in a disproportionately giant black t-shirt that fit her like a dress, obscuring any figure that was beneath it.
"Oh, hey. Didn't see you there," she said, giving me a harried smile, reaching up to brush her hair out of her face, a simple silver bracelet sliding up her arm as she did so. "I guess we're neighbors, huh? I'm Annie," she told me, reaching out her hand almost as an afterthought.
As a whole, I didn't have a hard time with people. In this day and age, they tended to be a bit more sensitive to people who didn't act or weren't as able as they were in some way or another. They might watch you with pinched-together brows for a minute, trying to suss out what was going on, but then they would give you a polite smile and move on.