Professional Documents
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Odd Job in 5B
Odd Job in 5B
Carson March
Beautiful Strangers
Romance
Boy-Girl
18 mins read
My building was old – the kind of old that wasn’t quite charming enough to be
deemed unique or even quaint, but old enough that random things would stop
working or fall apart. I’d come in the lobby and find a single strip of wallpaper,
a gold foil with a raised velvet pattern from the early 1970s, detached from the
wall, and curled in on itself on the floor. Sometimes the buttons refused to light
up in the elevator, or the door would open and close three or four times before
finally shutting; I’d gotten into the habit of using the stairs, even when my arms
were full of groceries.
He never spoke to me. He never spoke to anyone, actually, and at times I even
wondered if he talked at all – either by choice or some genuine incapacity. I’d
pass him in the hallway or the storage room and if he happened to look up at all,
I’d just nod or smile and carry on. He was as much a part of the building as the
decades-old fake flowers in the lobby and the water fountain out front that I’d
never seen filled with water, unless it was melting snow.
When small things went haywire in my own apartment, I tried to fix it myself,
partly because I had concluded that being self-sufficient didn’t mean just paying
my bills but also figuring out why the tap was leaking without intervention.
But when the main ceiling light stopped working, I had to recognize that my
handy-woman skills did not include electrical. I’d have to call the landlord, who
would call Isaac, who would come fix it. I’d done that a week ago and had no
idea when Isaac might get through his other to-dos and get to mine.
The knock jolted me into a sitting position, heart racing, the old fear of the dark
and bogeymen still enough to send a tingle of adrenaline through my limbs. One
part of my brain knew it must be Isaac but still it took me so long to get up off
the floor and move to the door that the knock came again just as I started to undo
the deadbolt.
I edged the door open and peeked around. Definitely Isaac. This was the closest
I’d ever been to him, and I was surprised at how handsome he actually was –
dark hair, a slight 5 o’clock shadow over his jaw and cheekbones, and grey-
brown-blue eyes, something like a tortoiseshell of speckling and light in his
irises.
He stared back and for a second I thought he was appraising me, too, and I
wondered if he liked what he saw.
“Lights?” he said, gruff and low, his head nodding beyond me.
“Oh yeah, yes. The lights. They’re not working. Um, are you – do you need to
come in,” I asked, flailing in my conversational attempts, and caught off guard.
He nodded.
“Of course, yeah, ha, of course you can’t fix ‘em out in the hallway right,” I
said, tittering. “Come in, just um, yeah, ok so it’s the light switch right inside the
door and it turns on the light in the living room.”
As he crossed the threshold, I closed the door behind him, and swept my arm out
ahead of us at the words “living room” as though I was introducing him to the
grandeur of my sprawling estate, and there would soon be a tour of the library,
the conservatory and the gardens.
In fact, “living room” really meant “the entire place.” It was a bachelor
apartment – a small raised area held my bed, bedside tables, and a single
bookshelf; the main area held only a single large old-fashioned arm chair, a TV,
more book shelves, and a corner nook where I’d created a small eating area – not
a table, exactly but a raised surface surrounded by pillows on the floor, where I
could sit and eat. The kitchen was really just a small square off the main area,
with enough space for a stove and a small fridge. The only separate private
“room” was the bathroom and the sliding door had long since stopped working,
so even that wasn’t exactly private.
“Can I help you with anything or um, maybe are you hungry, it’s like dinner
time, I could make something?” I asked, words still tumbling out.
“Ok, sure. I’ll just go… read… or I’ll be right here if you need… help.”
He nodded this time, so I wandered away, wondering if it was better to sit on the
bed – which seemed somehow vaguely suggestive – or to plop down in the
armchair and read, which seemed lazy of me, while he worked.
Instead, I let myself drop down to the pillows in the nook, and pulled over a
stack of paper that had been already sitting on my little “table” and pretended to
leaf through them while watching Isaac instead.
He bent over to dig into a small tool bag I hadn’t even realized he was carrying,
and caught myself watching the way his shirt stretched over his shoulders and
back and could feel the heat rising in my face as I craned a little to get a better
look – like some kind of cliché scene out of a Golden Girls episode in which
Blanche admires a plumber, or some similar thing.
Cliché or not, it was hard to stop. And with his back turned to me, I could look
as much as I wanted without any hesitation. He started to unscrew the plate on
the switch and I watched his biceps bunch slightly under his sleeves and when
he ducked a little to look inside the now-open switch, I noticed how his hair
curled a little at the back of his neck, like he was a week or two overdue for a
haircut.
I heard the groan and its paired scream-giggle at the same moment Isaac did: we
both looked upwards at the exact same moment as the sounds of whoever lived
in the apartment above me made their way through the thin walls, snaking in
strange echoes through vents and drywall and the floorboards, so that it sounded
like each groan was two or three coming from deep in a cave and each scream-
giggle was chasing down long tunnels.
I had long since gotten used to the amorous pair upstairs. Every once in a while
they’d fall out of bed with a thump, or the groaning/scream-giggle combination
would go on a little longer than normal but for the most part, they were speedy,
efficient and it was hard to hold a grudge against them when they seemed to be
enjoying themselves so much.
In fact, I’d mostly learned to tune them out. But what had seemed cute and easy
to ignore with a pair of headphones when I was on my own in here was suddenly
impossible to avoid with Isaac listening at the same time.
I pointed up, as though he couldn’t already tell where the noise was coming
from.
“They’re loud,” I said, after a particularly jarring groan came through the ceiling
above us.
Isaac nodded. I thought he shrugged too but his movements were so sparse and
careful that it was hard to tell. It was so dark in my apartment, the only light
coming from the bathroom and the bedside lamp – both of which I’d been
leaving on all night the last week to help keep the room from being pitch dark.
Outside, the January gloom didn’t help, and suddenly the noises above me and
the darkness and the vague chill sitting here close to the old single-pane window
left me feeling more alone than I had in a long time. What is it about suddenly
having someone in your space to remind you how empty your space normally
is?
“Can you tell what the problem is?” I asked, raising my voice slightly over the
noises.
“Yep.”
“Dead mouse.”
“Yep.”
“Yep.”
From above, a shout, and then a long extended groan. I knew from experience
this indicated one of two things: they were done for the night, or they were done
round 1. I prayed it was the first.
He left the bag on the floor, and stepped out into the hall, closing the door
behind him.
Was he going to the nearest Home Depot or was he going to the basement for
some mystery stash of tools that must be stowed away somewhere. Or did he
need cigarettes at the corner store, or a donair from the place on the corner? Who
knew.
I wandered over to the bed and lay down, picking up the book I’d been half-
heartedly reading the night before. A romance novel about a woman who is
ditched by her boyfriend and moves back to her small town after she inherits the
local bakery from her ailing grandmother – cue good looking local carpenter and
a bakery that needs new shelves. Talk about clichés. I shrugged. Some clichés
were fun – and they distracted you from things like other people’s sex noises and
empty weekends of isolation.
I’d read about three pages when there was a knock and then the handle turned
and Isaac let himself back in. He behaved as though I wasn’t there, or as if he’d
never left: no hello or information about what he was doing, just settling himself
to the task.
As far as I could tell, he was cutting out the drywall around the light switch now.
He was moving slowly and methodically, being careful of the adjacent wires.
Every 10 or 15 seconds he’d lift a small flashlight and check his own progress. I
didn’t want to look too closely, afraid of what a dead mouse inside the wall
might look like.
As I drew my eyes away from the ceiling, I noticed Isaac had dropped the
drywall knife on the floor and appeared to be cradling his hand.
It took me a second to absorb what he’d said – so many words all at once. Then I
jumped up and grabbed a towel from the bathroom.
He paused.
The movement loosened his grip on his own hand, and blood poured out over his
palm.
“Oh my god, it’s bad,” I said, jamming the towel over it myself now, not waiting
for him to take it.
I nodded, feeling pleased at myself for knowing what he meant – my dad had
been on blood thinners after a surgery, to keep his arteries from clotting up. It
also meant that he bruised more easily and if he cut himself, even shaving, it
took forever to stop bleeding. My mom had been irritated by all the stained face
cloths.
It was hard to imagine what Isaac might be on blood thinners for – he was no
older than me and looked healthy – but I wasn’t going to debate it with him.
“Here, come into the bathroom,” I said, dragging him a little behind me.
I thought of clichés again: the lion and the mouse, the wounded soldier and the
helpful nurse, the –
A groan, fuccckkkkk, and the slow first thumps of the headboard upstairs broke
into my thoughts. The sound of bed springs and the bed’s feet moving slightly
against the floor made me imagine the pair rolling over in bed, changing
positions, their bodies all tangled up.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, sorry, just talking to myself. Here at least wash it, and then I’ll find a
bandage or something,” I said. “There might be like mice poo virus germ
grossness in that wall, right?”
For some reason, this caught Isaac off guard and he snorted a small laugh.
“I’m a customer service call center rep. The kind you call and yell at when your
bill is wrong.”
“I never yell.”
I looked at him then, actually looked – we were so close that it was easy to do, to
pin my eyes to his, to let myself look again at his strange eyes, at his dark
eyebrows, at the slightly skewed nose that looked like it had been maybe broken
a time or two, years ago.
The thumping rhythm above us was still slow, a constant steady beat now.
Round 2 was apparently going to be more leisurely, a slow dance of sex rather
than a galloping race.
I was overcome by the urge to take Isaac’s uninjured hand and press it to my
chest, to pull the buttons open on my shirt and slide his hand inside, over my
breast, to arch myself into his hand, to encourage him to squeeze and stroke. My
breath hitched, and I bit my lip.
“Mia,” he said.
I laughed.
He pointed upwards.
“John Green, Sherry Jacob, 6B. No pets. Multiple noise complaints. But none
from 5B.”
I laughed again.
I saw him drop his eyes to my lips, and then lower to the place where my shirt
opens at the collar, the buttons undone to below my collarbone. He pressed his
lips together.
And I leaned in and kissed him suddenly, like the peck you give a boy you like
on the school bus the second before you jump up and get off – a brief bravery
without a plan.
His hand came up in a rush to the back of my neck, pulling me in closer, and the
peck turned into a kiss: if Isaac spent most of his time silent it certainly hadn’t
left him at a disadvantage. His tongue slipped between my lips, whispering over
my teeth, touching my tongue, and my brain went into a sort of slow-motion
freeze: I noticed the brush of his stubble on my cheek, the press of his lips on
mine, the way his mouth tasted – a mix of minty gum and orange, as though he’d
drank a Fanta on the way up here. It shouldn’t have been so hot, but it was – this
taste of him, the smell and flavor – and it made me whimper in my throat.
Not that I didn’t want his hand fisted in my hair – I did, badly, and I wanted him
to take and to be brazen and to be desperate and hungry. But being certain I was
ok – not just ok in general, but ok to continue, was powerful and erotic.
“More,” I asked.
He didn’t hesitate then. More kisses, more tongue slipping over mine, then lips
moving over my face, to my neck, pulling my ear lobe into his mouth. More of
his hands, one in my hair at the back of my head, one moving down to press the
small of my back so that my body was pulled forward into his. More of his
breathing, now deeper and faster, his own groans in his throat. More of the shape
of him, the firmness of his body against mine – legs pressing into legs, chest
pressing into breasts. And his erection, hard as anything, rigid and warm against
my tummy.
“Bed,” I said.
Like a magic trick, the bed upstairs moved again, a sudden scrape against the
floor as though again the couple in 6B were turning themselves over, going this
way and that, finding the right spot to carry on. I backed out of the bathroom,
not breaking the connection with Isaac, until I felt the back of my legs bump
against the bed and I let myself half-sit-half-fall backwards.
As he sucked and licked, I felt his legs moving, one lifting then coming down
again on the inside of my leg, pushing me open on one side, then the same with
the other leg, so that eventually he was kneeling between my open thighs.
I felt his fingers tugging at the panties, pulling them aside, and then touching me
there again too, and I knew I was swollen, vibrating, slick and wet.
“Please,” I gasped, my hands tugging at his waistband and belt. “I just… need…
now… please.”
He seemed to understand what I meant: the urgency, the not wanting to wait,
needing. He pulled his belt open, hitched the hips down far enough then reached
forward again to pull my panties further aside. He leaned over me, his mouth
close to my ear, and whispered: “Next time, I’m taking these off, all of this, ok?”
and something in the tone of the voice made it sound like a promise and an
appeal and a prayer, a way to say: I need this right now, too, but I will need
more again after.
I nodded, frantic, knowing he could feel my nodding against his face, my hair
silky smooth between our cheeks.
“Isaac…” I said.
He shuddered, a great rushing gasp of breath, and I felt him push into me then,
slowly, carefully, and my feet hooked onto his legs, urging him forward.
“Isaac,” I repeated.
We lay in silence a moment, as I felt him still pulsing inside me, and the sudden
oddness of what we had done – this stranger and I, in my bed, in my dark
apartment – was about to overwhelm me when we heard a tap tap tap on the
ceiling above.
The sudden change of direction was jarring, and I pulled slightly at my shirt to
cover my breasts as he got up off of me.
“Because after they’re fixed, we’re going to do that again, with the lights on,
slowly, so I can see you better.”
I smiled.
“All right.”
“All right.”
“Isaac,” I said.
He smiled, a beautiful big smile, and I wondered how many other broken things
I might be able to find in my apartment. I smiled back, pulled my shirt closed,
and stood up.
CM
Written by
Carson March