Authors: Kate Rockland
Someone, maybe the landlord, had left a light on in the fur store. Alexis saw that the door was ajar. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered inside. Racks lined both sides of the wall, and hangers still looped around them. The store’s weathered white wooden sign—
FANNY’S FURS: SINCE 1920
—was broken in half on the ground. Splinters and nails showed. Two mannequins still stood in front of gold-etched mirrors. One had a fur collar on and nothing else. Alexis guessed the owners had forgotten to take it with them.
Suddenly Noah’s arm shot out beside her and tried the knob. The door creaked, then opened.
“Noah!” Alexis hissed. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for opportunity,” he whispered back, wiggling his thick eyebrows like some insanely tall Groucho Marx. She followed him, thinking she didn’t have a choice, and prayed to the breaking-and-entering gods they wouldn’t be found and arrested. The room smelled of mothballs.
“And there we have it, folks, the very first smile of the evening, and it’s all due to my corny sense of humor.”
He pulled Alexis into his arms and started twirling her around, humming a tune she didn’t recognize. Dust kicked up around their feet. She caught a glimpse of herself in one of the smudged full-length mirrors in the store, and was surprised that the two of them didn’t look as ridiculous as she’d imagined, given their difference in height. She put her bandaged hand up to her cheek. Her face flushed, and her twin in the mirror did the same.
“You know, when you’re annoyed the tops of your ears turn pink,” Noah said to her, bending down to whisper in her ear, even though they were the only people in the room. Traffic sounds congested outside the large window, but a heat rose inside Alexis as she realized that Noah wasn’t stupid, or simple, or any of the things she’d assumed he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t get her sarcasm; he chose to ignore it. Alexis had been acting like a bitch for so long she wasn’t sure where her true self and the famous blogger of all things skinny and mean ended. She was sure there had been a time, she
knew
there had been, before Mark was killed, when Alexis had been happy. When she’d enjoyed life more, not feeling so angry all the time.
Something about Noah’s wide-eyed optimism was so anti–New York and anti-Alexis, and yet … and yet he was exactly like Mark, who could always wring a smile out of her, who laughed off her suggestions that he was the favored child, who signed up for the Marines and therefore ditched a football scholarship that would have eventually brought him millions. There was something of Mark in Noah’s mischievous smile. His dimples. She was sure of it now as she allowed him to pull her into his arms and foxtrot around the store. She realized she was smiling.
“Oh! A second smile! Call the presses!” Noah yelled. He took the fur collar off the mannequin and wrapped it around the top of his head. It looked ridiculous, like a raccoon was sitting on his forehead. He kept dancing, and as the cars honked outside and the sky finally opened up and the rain rushed back in big, fat drops, Alexis felt a warmth spread all the way to her fingertips.
So when she found herself asking, “Do you want to come over for a drink?” she figured it must be the painkillers talking.
“Sure,” he responded easily, shrugging his shoulders like it was the most natural procession in the world. When she began walking back to her building with Noah, she suddenly realized two things: how bone-tired she was, and the fact that there was a large green bicycle strapped to the back of his car next to the kayak that had been there all along and she hadn’t noticed it.
“So you still bike?” she asked him. He had to take the key from her shaking, bandaged hand and open the door for them both. Noah had spent ten minutes folding up the bike and was now carrying it under his arm. Apparently it was worth a month’s rent and he couldn’t afford to have it stolen. She waited on the sidewalk as he unhooked straps and removed the kayak from the car’s roof.
“Any other sports equipment coming in with you?” she asked sarcastically. She checked her mailbox, full of invitations to various fashion and PR events around the city and magazines and bills. Their mailbox had a black-and-white Johnny Cupcakes sticker on it that read
MAKE CUPCAKES NOT WAR
that Billy had affixed when they’d moved in together.
“Yeah, I live in Brooklyn, so when I need to come into the city for these cooking classes I usually bike over the bridge. Tonight I drove, though.” She could picture his apartment: the essence of
male
everywhere, dog hair on his futon couch, sneakers scattered willy-nilly, a bike rack attached to the wall, a collection of jade plants on top of his refrigerator, a
Taxi Driver
poster as art above the couch, a brick wall facing his bed, soft gray sheets, a new stainless steel oven being the only extravagance, as surely a cook needed one.
“Do you think the bike and kayak will be safe down here?” he asked her, easily depositing both in the small entryway as if he were carrying feathers.
“No.” Alexis responded. “Better bring them into my apartment.”
She was aware of his eyes on her butt as she climbed the stairs, and was suddenly immensely grateful to Sarah and all her tough personal training sessions with squat after grueling squat.
Princess Pinkerton streaked out in front of the door as she opened it, and Noah had to do a little maneuvering to get inside her apartment door with the kayak, and after placing that in her tiny kitchen, the bike. The letters
3R
were in brass and hanging crookedly by a nail.
“Is that your cat?” Noah asked, bending down.
“Yeah, but don’t … Oh.” Princess Pinkerton, who never let anyone but Billy pick her up without scratching them silly, was twisting and flipping onto her back to let Noah pet her fat stomach.
This man could charm anyone,
she thought. She said a silent prayer that Princess Pinkerton wouldn’t choose this moment to show off her pooping-in-the-plant routine.
“I share her with my roommate, Billy,” Alexis said.
They sat on the couch, an eggplant-purple cashmere throw making a soft pillow for her back. Alexis crossed her legs and held up her bandaged finger, examining it. It was still throbbing.
“Why don’t you take one of those painkillers?” Noah asked. He got up, Princess Pinkerton jumping off his lap reluctantly, and walked over to her kitchen, which was a tiny letter-C-shaped alcove with tacky seventies brown and orange cupboards Billy had tried cheering up by lining their insides with poppy wallpaper. Maneuvering around the kayak and bike, he opened the fridge and poured her a glass of water from the Brita.
Alexis’s stomach clenched as she heard a door open down the hallway. The apartment was a railroad, so she could just make out two coal-black eyes peering at them from Vanya’s room, a trail of silver smoke drifting out from the bottom crack. Surely she wasn’t casting spells in there? Alexis shivered, picturing some poor man who was being spiked with pins from her voodoo doll.
“Hey, there!” Noah called down the hallway.
“Shhhh!” Alexis hissed at him as he set down her glass, using one of the Playboy bunny coasters Billy had brought home from a photo-shoot set to be ironic.
But Noah wasn’t listening and was, terrifyingly, strolling down the hallway to talk to Vanya, the witch. Alexis’s breath caught in her throat; she was that scared. She watched his tall frame maneuver away from her, her heart thudding in her chest. “She will put a spell on you!” she stage-whispered, but he ignored her. She heard his deep, soothing voice but couldn’t make out the words, and then he actually stepped across the threshold of Vanya’s room and entered, the door seeming to
suck closed
behind him.
Alexis paced up and down in the living room for an eternity before Noah returned, tossing a “Talk to you soon” over his shoulder at Vanya, then came back to the couch and put his humongous feet on the coffee table. He put his muscular arms behind his head, the image of a man of leisure.
“What happened in there?” Alexis whispered. “I thought you were a goner for sure!”
“Oh, I was just chatting with your roommate Vanya. She’s hilarious!” he said, grinning. His teeth were perfectly even and glowing white. She wondered if he’d had braces. “All that goth stuff is great, isn’t it? I used to be really into Ozzy Osbourne in college.”
She continued to stare at him.
He laughed his loud, goofy laugh. “He went a little far in his pigeon-head-biting-off days, but ya gotta admit the guy’s got some killer tunes.” He held his hands up in the universal rock-on symbol, his middle and ring fingers bent down with the others up like horns, and stuck out his tongue, which strangely turned her on.
Alexis scooted an inch closer to him. His hair smelled like coconuts and summer.
“Are you smelling me?” he asked.
Her eyes popped open. She realized she’d shut them for a moment. “Um…”
“’Cause if you are, I can’t say I blame you. The ladies love the
eau de
Noah.” He laughed.
She glared at him. “I was definitely
not
smelling you. Get over yourself.”
“
Sure
you weren’t.” But he just kept grinning at her. “How’s the hand?”
“Fine!” she sniffed.
“So what’s that scale doing in the kitchen?” he asked. “Do you use it to cook?”
She blinked. “No, I use it to weigh food.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You care that much? You’re such a tiny little thing, I can’t imagine you’d have to fight fat that hard. You’re like a small bird.”
She rolled her eyes. People were always telling her she didn’t need to watch her weight. It got old after a while. How did they think she got such a great bod? Maintenance.
“The idea is to prevent getting fat in the first place, to get to your adult size and stay there,” she responded. It was like reading from a script. “Mine is a two. Every girl I went to college with is now fat with three kids. That’s not going to be me. That’s the whole point of
Skinny Chick,
to promote healthy eating and smart food choices.”
Noah smiled. “Yeah, but it sounds like you’ve gone a little coo-coo crazy about it. I mean, I practically had to put that ice-cream sandwich in an IV to get you to eat it.”
She huffed out air. “Listen, I’m doing just fine without your opinions or help. I have my way of living and if you don’t like it, maybe this should be good night.” She stood up and teetered on her high heels for a second, before a wave of nausea hit her.
“Whoa.” Noah stood and leaned her against him. She felt his hard chest beneath his jacket. “Let’s get you off to bed.” And before she could protest, Noah had picked her up like a knight in shining armor and was manhandling her down the hallway to her room. He slid her onto the bed, fully dressed.
“Why don’t you stay on the couch?” she whispered to him in the dark, after she felt the coolness of her pillow against her cheek and moved onto her left side, the way she liked to sleep. “There’s a blanket in the wooden chest.”
“Oh, I don’t want to trouble you,” Noah said. “Besides, Oliver will be majorly bummed if I don’t come home.” He grabbed one of her boots and pulled. She wore her unicorn socks, which she’d had since high school. They’d been a Christmas gift from Bunny and there was a small crystal in the eye of the unicorn and pink pom-poms around the edge of each sock. They were hideous and Billy kept threatening to burn them, but they held sentimental value to her. She would have been mortified Noah was seeing this kooky side of her, if she wasn’t so damn tired.
“Unicorns. Cute!” Noah said. “Well, you pull off a woman’s shoe and there’s a whole host of surprises underneath. Go figure.” He pulled off her other boot and placed them carefully on the floor next to her bed. She felt like a child.
“So, Alexis.” He spread his large hands. “I hope your finger heals really quickly.”
She was seized with a sudden panic at the idea of him leaving. “Please?” she asked. Had she ever said that word, much less to a man? “Can you get someone to feed your dog, maybe?”
He seemed to be thinking, although she couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “You know what? Sure. I have this neighbor across the hallway from me, Maria. She’s a nurse, has five kids, and is always asking me if I got the flu shot. She has keys to my apartment and works nights, maybe I can catch her before she leaves for the hospital.” He dialed her, his phone a spark of white light against the darkness. After speaking to her briefly, he flipped his phone closed. “She said no problem.”
“Thank you,” she said. Noah seemed to have some kind of effect on her. She felt safer with him around. Softer, happier. She felt like the Alexis she’d been before Mark had died and her mother had picked up the bottle, and the falling-out with her father over quitting the law. She’d still had her convictions about diet and exercise then, but hadn’t she been a little less … strict? The private workout sessions, the scale, the constant weighing herself, the app on her phone that counted calories. That had all come … after.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Noah said, and he surprised her by leaning down and kissing her on the cheek. Warm with the smell of him, Alexis fell asleep five minutes after Noah quietly eased the door closed. She could swear at some point she’d heard Vanya standing near her door whispering, “Great catch,” but surely she’d imagined it.
In the morning, Alexis’s alarm clock clicked on and Billy’s voice screeched into her ears. “Aleeeexiiis, it’s me, Billy. I know you’re sleeping, but it’s time to wakey-wakey. I know you want to lie around in bed for another two hours, but you know who lies in bed, don’t you?”
“Fat girls,” she whispered into her pillow.
Suddenly her door burst open and Noah came storming in, wearing only blue-and-white Yankees boxers with a rip in a suspicious place on the back. His body was even better than she could have dreamed. His nipples were a brown sienna, his six-pack prominent, his legs long, calves strong, probably from all that biking, Alexis mused. She raised her eyebrows at him and suddenly remembered she was wearing last night’s clothing. Her one earring was tangled up in her frizzy mane of hair. She had cat-food breath. Her top was askew, which she quickly fixed.