A Fresh Start

He must have been at work the day that she had moved in because he had totally missed the moving truck and all the moving activity. He noticed her in the elevator one afternoon, carrying a shopping bag, and was surprised to see her get off on the same floor as him and walk down the same stretch of hallway. She was his next-door neighbor.

He found himself staring while she found her keys in her purse and stuck them in the door to let herself in. She seemed oblivious to him. Something about the way she looked struck him as 'young and innocent.' He went inside his own apartment concocting a story about her, how she was a grad student who moved to New York from somewhere out in the Midwest. She went to NYU and studied something like... political science, he decided. She'd done Model UN and Debate team and has had the same boyfriend since high school and they were trying to make it work long-distance now that she was in New York. That was the girl next door to him, in his imagination.

He saw her again the next day, she was leaving when he was coming back from his run. She looked much the same as the day before - nondescript jeans and t-shirt, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail, little or no makeup. She wore a pair of Chucks and a crossbody purse. Something about her entirely generic outfit suggested 'old fashioned' though, the cut of the jeans, the way the t-shirt was tucked into them, almost as if she stepped out of the early nineties. Maybe that's what the kids were wearing these days, the cyclic nature of fashion coming back around.

She was pretty but young. Definitely too young. Oh and of course there was that long-distance boyfriend back in her Midwest hometown that he'd created.

The third time he ran into her was at the mailboxes downstairs. She stood there with the box open, an envelope open in her hand, looking over some sort of letter that was making her frown.

"Crazy bills?" He asked her, trying to strike up a conversation. He was a pretty social guy. She didn't react right away, then looked up at him, her grey eyes wide and glassy.

"I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" There was some tiny speck of an accent in her voice, but it didn't sound MIdwestern.

"Yeah," he smiled at her. "I just asked whether those were some crazy bills." She looked down at the letter she was holding, then folded it back up, shaking her head.

"No. Crazy other things," she replied, her voice quiet. She turned to close her mailbox.

"I've seen you around a few times, you're right next door to me," he told her. "I'm Adam." He stuck out his hand. She switched her keys to the same hand with her mail and shook it.

"Tessa," she told him. They walked towards the elevator together.

"Where did you move here from?" He was still expecting her to say somewhere out towards the Heartland, so her reply was surprising.

"PA," she told him. The look on his face must have been a confused one because she clarified "Pennsylvania." He had understood her the first time, he was just surprised by her reply.

"Yeah, that's... not that far at all. Where in Pennsylvania?" The elevator had arrived and he gestured for her to step in.

"South Central PA. Near Lancaster." The way she said the name of that city was different than he'd heard it pronounced before and emphasized her accent somehow.

"And your accent?" He asked, without beating around the bush. He was curious.

"It's a South Central PA accent," she smirked at him. Oh, he liked that smile, that was a nice smile and it made her eyes lighten a shade.

"I had no idea that was a thing," he shook his head. "Did you come out here for school?"

"No," her smile disappeared. "Just... life, change." She looked down at her hands, or maybe at the mail in them. "I'm way too old for school anyway," she muttered. Ok, so he was wrong on the first two counts of his invented story. But how old could she possibly be to make her think she was too old for school?

"I don't believe it," he told her. "You don't look any older than twenty-three." She looked up at him wide-eyed again, as if he was crazy. The elevator dinged and the doors slid open on their floor. She didn't react right away so Adam gestured with his hand towards the door. She stepped out.

"Are you making fun of me?" Her voice was soft, her eyebrows drawn together. She made eye contact and then looked off down the hall towards her apartment.

"No! No, not at all," his own brow furrowed too. "I honestly thought you're... in your early twenties. I'm sorry if that came out wrong." They stopped at her door, having already passed his.

"I'm thirty-two," she didn't look at him when she said it, focusing on finding the right key in her hand and opening both locks. He'd been wrong about this as well. Nothing about his concocted story about this woman turned out to be correct.

"I'm thirty-five," he told her, shrugging. She gave him a sideways look and nodded, her lips pressed together. She raised her hand in a brief wave and disappeared inside her apartment, closing the door.

If he was wrong about all the other things, he guessed there wasn't a long-distance boyfriend back home either.

****

Tessa collapsed on her bed, covering her face with her hands. That was absolutely exhausting. Having conversations with people, especially male people, handsome male people, who were tall and fit and had dimples, took a lot out of her. His comment about her age left her completely dumbfounded. Why would he possibly think that she was that young?! There was the possibility that he was trying to flirt, but... no, that wasn't a possibility. He wouldn't flirt with her.

She realized that she still had her mail in her hands and tossed it on the floor. She wasn't in the right headspace to think about lawyers and mortgages and Felix right now. And yet thinking about the hot neighbor next door seemed to be just as anxiety-inducing.

He was handsome, really handsome, like the protagonist in a romantic comedy handsome. He had auburn hair, cut short and neat, parted on one side. He was probably six foot tall and athletic looking, though there were no bulging muscles anywhere, just a lean, toned body. He could pass for younger than thirty-five, as he claimed to be, but his eyes gave away his age a bit. The lines at the edges of his hazel eyes that made him look kind and wise and like he could see right to the bottom of you, was what flipped his appearance from boyish into mature.

Adam was a sophisticated New Yorker and she was... plain, stupid, naive, a complete doormat from Pennsyltucky. This has been drilled into her head over the past thirteen years and there was too much evidence now, after all this time, to support that. She imagined the types of women he must date. An image came to mind of a tall, confident businesswoman, some sort of executive in a skirt suit with perfectly tanned, shapely legs stemming from a pair of three inch heels. They probably went to cocktail parties and fancy restaurants and kept things casual, seeing other people. She imagined now that smart, sophisticated people didn't get duped into staying in long-term relationships that went absolutely nowhere, they just dated around, had hot, satisfying sex, and moved on. But she was neither smart nor sophisticated.

On Friday night, Tessa was downstairs, in the building's basement, doing her laundry. She figured it was probably the best time because no one else would be wasting their Friday night on chores. They'd be out to dinner or movies or vegging out with their families in front of their TVs, relaxing at the end of the workweek. She checked it out last Friday and as she predicted, she had the laundry room all to herself. She sat on the floor, with her back to one of the dryers, and read a George Kingsley novel. She always had some kind of a rich Wall Street executive as the main love interest, a man who's always been too consumed in work to have a relationship, but his mind was changed when he met this particular intern, or that quirky barista, or the smart and sexy CEO of a rival company, or the crazy popular actress whom he didn't recognize because he's never had time to keep up with pop culture. They were fairly predictable and the men in these stories were always tall, rich, and handsome, but despite the lack of variation, she kept coming back for more and more of these stories.

She came back again this Friday, loading a washer with clothes and another with her sheets and towels, and sat down on the floor with her paperback. She was in the middle of a steamy sex scene where Lucas, the rich, sexy lawyer who never had time to go out with the same woman twice, was delivering orgasm after orgasm to Isabelle, a lawyer from another firm who had a ballbuster reputation. Tessa didn't hear Adam come in and jumped when he started talking.

"I've always thought that the ones where they have the guy on the cover wearing the suit and tie are a good deal classier than the ones where the guys are shirtless, with those oiled up pecs and six-packs." He was grinning at her while loading his laundry into the washer. She gaped at him silently, not knowing what to say. Her face felt heated with embarrassment. "Is it good?" She nodded. He finished loading the washer and set it to run. "Can I see?"

Tessa stuck the post-it note she'd been using a bookmark into the book and handed it up to Adam. He slid down to the floor next to her, almost too close, nearly touching, and looked at the back cover. His eyes moved quickly over the lines of text as he read. He opened the book where she had placed her bookmark and Tessa wished the floor could open up right then and swallow her up. His eyes flew over the page, widening a little and he drew his bottom lip in between his teeth.

"Wow, I really interrupted something here," he handed the book back.

"It's ok," she barely squeaked out.

"Tell me, what's the appeal of a book like this, to you personally?" It was a really unexpected question. She expected some sort of teasing about reading smut or a joke at her expense about having to read about it because she couldn't experience stuff like this in real life.

"Umm... escapism," she looked down at the cover, fanning the pages in her hand. "It's like... fantasy. Fairy tales for grown women." He was quiet. When she looked up at him he was studying her intently, his eyebrows drawn together.

"Which part of this is fantasy?" He finally asked.

"All of it. That you just meet this perfect person and have this amazing sex with a gazillion orgasms daily, forever, and you don't need anything else in your life to make you happy, because you're with that person." She wasn't sure how she pushed all of that out of her mouth. It was some kind of momentary verbal diarrhea which she was never predisposed to.

"I don't think it's fantasy," Adam shook his head. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and she noticed an old, faint scar there, about an inch or so long. "I think it's more like highlights. The way you see people posting on social media. No one really talks about their day-to-day, paying bills and doing dishes and fighting with their kids. It's all highlights, just the best parts, the cute project the kids did, the picture-perfect dinner they cooked, that one time in the past year you actually got out of the city for a weekend. That's how those books work," he nodded towards the paperback in her hands. "Lucas and Isabelle are gonna move in together and they will argue about which restaurant to order from or who left the toothpaste open on the sink or about the dumb way one of them loaded up the dishwasher, but it's not relevant to the story, so it doesn't make it in. The book is just like reading their Facebook feed. All the best stuff."

Tessa sighed. What was he doing here? Why was he talking to her about stupid romance novels? Why was he making her like him? This didn't seem fair. She was starting to develop a serious schoolgirl crush on her next-door neighbor. And what was the point of that? Nothing would ever happen between them.

****

He was really good at reading between the lines, of getting the gist of a situation with few details provided and a new Tessa origin story already formed in his head by the time his laundry was done. She just got out of a long, unfulfilling relationship, possibly a marriage, in which being in love with that person just wasn't enough. Where a ton of other daily minutiae of life got in the way, drove them apart, and left her cynical and starting over. He liked this story better. It made her more real. She wasn't a young girl in search of herself, even if she looked like one, but a fully actualized person who knew precisely what she didn't want.

He felt like it would be too forward to ask her to confirm his theory about her previous relationship. Instead, he asked her about how living in Brooklyn has been so far. She made a facial expression that suggested it hadn't been great and talked about how expensive everything was here.

"I'm making almost twice as much here as I was in PA, but my rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than the mortgage was on a two-bedroom house with a garage and a yard! The car insurance is crazy expensive and the utilities are so much more too, even though I am not paying for water and heat here, it's still more! I guess I was just naive to think that by earning more money, I would actually have more money." She shook her head. He nodded along, understanding her frustration.

"What do you do?" He asked her.

"I'm a Quality Assurance Analyst. IT." Her washers announced they were done and she busied herself with transferring things into dryers. He watched her, considering offering her help, but feeling weird about potentially touching her wet panties at this point in their acquaintanceship.

He wanted to tell her that most people in the building didn't actually sit in the laundry room waiting for their clothes. They put in a load and went back upstairs to their apartment then came back when it was done, but if he told her this and she accepted it as the normal thing to do, it would be the end of their conversation and he wanted to know more about her.

"Do you have any family and friends out here?" He asked her as she came to sit back down next to him, perhaps an inch or two further away than she had been before. She shook her head.

"I can't say that I had a lot of friends out in PA either though. And... I guess the whole point of this was to get away from everyone I knew there." She didn't look at him when she spoke.

"Can I ask you what happened?" She turned to look at him, gauging his expression, examining him for a long moment, thinking how to reply. He waited patiently for whatever morsel she would share.

"I left a lengthy and disastrous relationship that had gone on for far too long," she finally said, letting out a sigh afterward that felt like she was reliving the breakup all over.

"Were you married?" He pried.

"No," she shook her head. He waited for something more, but she looked away, flipping through the pages of her book absentmindedly.

"I've been there," Adam decided to volunteer. She didn't look up right away. "I was with someone for a very long time too and we lived together and... there was even a ring," he admitted, "but things didn't work out." She looked at him then, her forehead creased, as if it was hard for her to imagine that he'd have an experience that at all resembled hers. "It was a few years ago, I was seeing this woman who was this perpetual student. It was a mixture of perfectionism and indecisiveness where she constantly dropped classes and changed majors, but maintained a nearly perfect average because she never followed through on a course she didn't think she'd ace. But we were together for six years, engaged the last two, living together for three, and she just couldn't..." he searched for the right words to describe Marina. "Stick with it. She had been in school for a solid ten years then, still not having earned any degree and I wasn't begrudging her that, really. But it was just a symptom of the rest of her inability to commit to any one thing. She couldn't make any plans for more than a week in the future and we had never set a date for the wedding, no matter how many times we've talked about it, and then she admitted to me that she had been seeing other men." Tessa cringed at this. "Yeah, men, plural."

"That's... unbelievable, I'm sorry," her voice was quiet. Adam forced out a smile.

"I'm fine. It's been three years. I'm over it now," he tried to assure her.

"I just can't believe someone would do that to you. You're so..." her eyes seemed to roam him up and down while he waited expectantly. "Handsome and put together and you seem like a really decent guy besides. I mean, I've only talked to you a couple of times," she looked away from him now, out towards the dryers across from them, "maybe I am not the best judge of character, no, I am definitely not the best judge of character because I had stayed for way longer than six years, but you seem like a really good guy. So far. From what I can tell," she finished her machine gun fire rant. Adam smiled at her.

"Thanks," he touched her shoulder and she seemed to tense at his touch. He wished she'd share more about herself but he didn't want to push her. It was fine for him, he had distance and perspective from his relationship, hers was probably still fresh and raw.

They sat in silence until his washer had finished and he moved his clothes over. Then talked a bit more about books. Adam told her he read a lot and she must have assumed it was just for entertainment, somehow it didn't come up that he did that for work. Her laundry was done and she loaded it up into laundry baskets, stacking one on top of each other to carry both up at the same time. He grabbed one from her and offered to help.

As they rode up in the elevator, he disclosed to her how most tenants didn't stay down in the basement waiting for their laundry and he didn't usually do that either, but he had enjoyed chatting with her. Her eyes widened in response, she blushed, and pressed her lips together, but didn't say anything. He set her basket down just inside her front door and she gave him that same small wave she had last time before closing it.

The following week, when he ran into her, catching the closing doors of the elevator, forcing them to reopen, he found Tessa crying. She quickly wiped at her face when she saw him, but she wasn't quite able to pull herself together.

"What's wrong?" He reached out instinctively to touch her shoulder and she flinched, as though a shot of static electricity had passed between them. She shook her head, pulling in a deep breath.

"Nothing, just stupid..." Tessa kept shaking her head, looking down at her feet. Adam looked her over, trying to take in the details, reading into what may have caused her to be upset. He spotted the orange envelope in her hand.

"You got a ticket?" She laughed, a guffaw that came through the tears, her eyes rolling up towards the ceiling.

"One hundred and fifteen dollars for parking too close to the hydrant!" She slapped a hand against her thigh. "Not in front of the hydrant, mind you, I knew that you're not supposed to block the hydrant, but apparently you have to be a whopping fifteen feet away from it! Did you know that? That you had to be fifteen feet away!?" She looked pleadingly into his eyes.

"Well, I... grew up here, I guess." He really didn't want to make her feel stupid. She was upset and all he wanted to do was comfort her. Seeing her in tears definitely caught on something in his chest that he couldn't describe. The elevator doors opened on their floor and they stepped out, Adam slightly ahead of Tessa. "Is it different in Lancaster?"

"I don't know! I've never lived in the city and hardly ever went anywhere that didn't have a parking lot. Maybe it's 15 feet there too and I'm just a dumbass!"