Chapter 57: Before Christmas Eve
He stood in the bathroom doorway for a moment, thinking about Robert Durst, and then decided not to.
Robert was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight had been planned for a week, Jade had been specific about the invitation in a way that left nothing ambiguous, and Andrew had learned from his previous life that the category of things worth worrying about and the category of things you could actually affect right now were not the same category.
He checked the panel out of habit.
[Boxing (Proficient): 92/100]
[Yoga (Proficient): 88/100]
[Cooking (Proficient): 82/100]
[Observation (Proficient): 59/100]
The Yoga number made him feel better about the evening's prospects than he probably should have admitted.
He put on cologne with the moderation of a man who understood that more was not better, did a set of push-ups to get the blood moving, and checked his reflection in the bathroom mirror with the honest assessment of someone who had put in the work and was comfortable with the results.
"Not bad," he said to nobody.
Christie was on the couch with her practice exam when he came out, dressed for the cold.
She looked up, clocked his outfit, and her expression moved through mild surprise to mild disgust to the particular resignation of a teenager who lived with someone she'd chosen not to fully understand.
"You smell like a department store," she said.
"Finish the reading comprehension section."
"I did the reading comprehension section."
"Do it again."
She threw a throw pillow at the space he'd already vacated.
The cold hit him immediately outside — the specific December cold that New York produced when it meant it, the kind that had opinions about your coat choice. He turned his collar up and moved fast.
Jade's building was about twelve blocks, mostly straight. He knew the route well enough to navigate it without thinking, which left his mind free to do what it was going to do anyway, which was run through the Robert situation one more time and then, having run through it, put it aside.
Robert knew his name and address. He'd stood in the hallway with his hand at his waist and a smile that had stopped working, and he'd left when it became clear that confrontation wasn't available. That was information. Robert was calculating — he didn't act when conditions weren't right. Which meant Andrew had time, and time meant options.
Tomorrow: call Corleone, report the visit. Upgrade the door lock. Figure out whether there was anything in his life that Robert could use as leverage and remove it.
Tonight: none of that.
He arrived at Jade's building with a slight flush from the cold and took the stairs rather than the elevator because four flights was not a hardship and he was feeling good.
Outside her door he stopped, straightened his jacket, and knocked.
A pause. Then the sound of the chain being checked — she'd started doing that since he'd mentioned Robert, which he felt complicated about — and the door opened.
Jade was wearing a silk robe in a shade of green that he was going to remember for a long time, and the expression she had when she opened the door was the combination of shy and amused that he'd come to understand meant she'd been thinking about this too and was pleased with herself for it.
"You're on time," she said.
"I'm always on time."
"You're usually four minutes late."
"Tonight I jogged."
She stepped back to let him in, and he closed the door behind him.
The morning came in slowly.
December light in New York had a particular quality — low and pale, arriving through windows at an angle that made everything look considered. Andrew was aware of it before he was fully awake, and then he was aware of Jade, sitting up against the headboard with her knees drawn up, watching him with the unhurried expression of someone who had nowhere to be and was fine with that.
"Morning," he said.
She reached over to the nightstand, where she'd apparently already set up a small wooden breakfast tray without him noticing: toast, butter, a jar of strawberry jam, a glass of orange juice. The toast was slightly overdone on one side, which he found more endearing than anything perfect would have been.
"You made breakfast," he said.
"Don't make it weird."
He didn't make it weird. He ate the toast and drank the juice and felt the particular contentment of a morning with no agenda.
[Cooking (Proficient): 83/100]
Even appreciating someone else's cooking, apparently.
She ran a bath after breakfast, and they spent the morning in the slow domestic way that felt like a rehearsal for something permanent — she borrowed his opinion on a picture she was thinking of hanging, he fixed the kitchen cabinet door that had been sticking, they argued briefly and without heat about whether Groundhog Day was better than Home Alone as a holiday film and reached no conclusion.
By early afternoon they were on the couch, Jade's feet across his lap, a soap opera on that he had no investment in but watched anyway because she was watching it with the absorbed attention she gave things she genuinely enjoyed, and there was something restful about being adjacent to that.
She yawned. He yawned. The radiator clicked.
"Andrew." Her voice had the soft quality it got when she was most of the way to sleep.
"Yeah."
"Can we just keep doing this? Like. This specifically."
He looked at the window. Outside, the first real snow of December was starting — not the flurry kind, the actual kind, coming down with the deliberate quality of snow that intended to stick.
"Yeah," he said. "We can do this."
She made a small satisfied sound and was asleep in under a minute, her head against his shoulder. He turned the TV volume down to almost nothing and watched the snow and thought about nothing complicated for a while.
She'd grown up in Austin — her mother and older sister, a small house, not poor but not easy, the kind of childhood where you learned to be self-sufficient because the adults in your life were already managing their own weight. She'd moved to New York at twenty-three for reasons she described as I needed to be somewhere bigger than I was, which Andrew had understood immediately.
The yoga certification had come later, and she was good at it in the way that people who'd needed something for themselves first were good at teaching it to others.
She wanted three kids eventually. She'd mentioned it once in the specific offhand way of someone testing whether a thing was speakable, and he'd neither flinched nor over-responded, and she'd tucked it away and not mentioned it again but he could tell it had registered as data.
He kissed her hair carefully and didn't wake her.
He got back to the apartment at four. The snow was serious now.
Christie was on the couch, practice exam face-down on the cushion beside her, watching television with the purposeful relaxation of someone who had earned a break and was taking it defensively before anyone could suggest otherwise.
"Don't say it," she said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were making the face."
He sat down and she pointed at a stack of bills on the coffee table. "Those need to be dealt with. The auto-pay on the utilities ran out — I think it was set up by whoever had the apartment before. And you've got like four premium cable channels that you never watch."
Andrew looked at the bills. Evan, the previous tenant, had apparently set up auto-pay from an account that had since expired. The premium channels — he looked at the list — were all sports packages, which tracked.
"I'll call it in," he said.
"There's a voicemail too," Christie said. "I didn't listen to it."
He picked up the phone. The utility company's hold music was a jazz arrangement of a Christmas song he couldn't immediately identify. While he waited, the voicemail light blinked.
He hit play.
"Hey, Andrew, it's Monica—"
He turned the volume up.
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)