The Boy Next Door

I dragged myself over to my drum set. The one set up in the corner of my disorderly but clean one-bedroom apartment wasn’t quite as tricked out as the one that I used for gigs, but it was good to practice on all the same.

I had been lucky to find this place. It was one side of a duplex unit, but I didn’t have to worry about the noise because my next-door neighbor, Mr. Lake, was almost entirely deaf. He never complained, and I could bang out my frustrations until I was able to relax again.

Except that tonight, I was just getting started when I suddenly noticed a banging at my front door. I frowned, sticks stilling in the middle of the beat for a new song that I had been hoping to work on for a couple of weeks now.

I slowly stood up, wondering who could be there at that hour. Maybe one of my bandmates?

I pulled open the door to find a stranger standing there, though, dressed in a green silk robe and glasses, her arms crossed over her ample chest and an angry expression on her face. Her red hair escaped out of the bun that she had tried to pull it into, and it was a furious electricity that animated her.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” she snapped.

I glanced at my watch, belatedly realizing that I wasn’t wearing it.

I shrugged. “Late, I guess.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at me. “Late, I guess,” she mimicked, clearly not impressed. “It’s after midnight, and I need to work tomorrow, so stop banging on your damn drums!”

I blinked at her. As pissed as she clearly was, I couldn’t help but notice how cute she was too. I felt a stirring of interest in my groin. It would be so easy for me to pull her inside, to open her robe, to suck kisses along her skin…

Except I didn’t even know who she was or what she was doing there on my doorstep. Besides, she had interrupted my drum practice, and the only way that I was going to make it with the band was if I kept practicing hard like I had been. I couldn’t deal with interruptions like this. No matter how cute they were.

“I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t just come over here and demand that I quit playing,” I said, jutting out my lower lip.

She stared at me incredulously. “What, would you rather me call the police?” she asked finally. “I thought I was doing the nice thing by giving you a warning before I did that, but I can call them now if you’d like. I was just trying to be neighborly.” She spat out the word like she thought I was being anything but.

“Neighborly?” I asked blankly. What the hell was she talking about? I had never seen her before. I frowned, trying to figure out what to say next. Finally, I found my voice.

“Who are you?”

2

Leah

I wasn’t sure that I had ever been this pissed before. Apartment-living situations always had their drawbacks, but after viewing a string of terrible places there in Los Angeles, I had thought that I had finally found the perfect place. It was a one-bedroom, so I didn’t have to worry about roommates who were unclean, unfriendly, or otherwise unfortunate people to share a place with.

I had been skeptical about the proximity to my neighbor from the very start. The duplexes on this street were relatively well spaced out, enough so that my neighbors on the one side didn’t bother me. But what about the person on the other side of the walls from me?

The landlord had sworn up and down that he had never received any complaints from his previous tenant about the person living next door. Well, that tenant must have been a fan of loud banging all night long, because that was all that I had heard for the last half hour now, and it was driving me crazy.

I mean, seriously, what kind of person living in such close proximity to his neighbors like this thought that it was okay to make so much noise at all hours of the night? Some asshole wannabe rock star, apparently. Welcome to LA.

And now he was acting like he had done nothing wrong.

“I have to work tomorrow,” I said, emphasizing the word “work” as though maybe he hadn’t heard it before. I hadn’t moved to LA for a new job just to be kept up all night the day before I started said job. I didn’t want to start things off on the wrong foot with my new neighbor, but seriously, what did he want me to do? I had tried putting in earplugs, and I had tried covering my head with my pillow, but nothing had worked. It was after midnight now. Enough was enough.