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Chapter One
The dryer was full of clothes.
Goddammit.
Esther Abbott blew her bangs off her forehead and glared at the offending clothes with her hands on her hips. She hated touching other people’s clothes. Laundry was an unpleasant enough task without having to manhandle a stranger’s grungy socks and intimate underthings. But it was either that or wait for the offender to retrieve his own laundry. As much as she disliked touching other people’s stuff, she valued her own time and convenience more.
She plunged her hands into the dryer, grimacing. Ugh. It wasn’t even warm, which meant it had been in there for a while. At least it was dry laundry. It would be even grosser if it was wet clothes that had been left in the washing machine all day.
Esther knew exactly who the guilty party was. The abundance of plaid shirts was a dead giveaway. There was only one person in the building who wore this much flannel.
Jonathan Brinkerhoff.
The guy in apartment six, right next door to her. The guy with the annoying wind chimes on his balcony that kept her awake whenever it was windy. (Spoiler alert: Los Angeles was always windy.) The guy who liked to sit on said balcony and smoke, sending noxious clouds of cigarette toxins drifting into her apartment whenever she left her balcony door open. The guy who couldn’t park his stupid Lexus between the lines of his assigned space next to Esther’s, which made parking her Prius a feat of heroic dexterity.
Everything about Jonathan annoyed her, from the stupid knit beanies he always wore to his vintage-framed glasses and dumb scraggly beard. But she particularly hated the way he left his clothes in the laundry machines for hours at a time, as if he were the only one in the world who might need to use them. As if he didn’t live in an apartment building with eighteen units all sharing the same two machines.
One of the other, nicer neighbors—like Mrs. Boorstein, the fifty-something accountant in twelve—might have folded Jonathan’s clothes for him and left them in neat piles on the table. But Esther wasn’t nice. Not to people who didn’t deserve it. She had no patience for incompetence or selfishness. People who broke the laundry room social contract shouldn’t get free laundry folding as a reward for their bad behavior. The dude should consider himself lucky she was only dumping his clothes on top of the dirty machine instead of straight onto the floor. And how much did she hate that she now knew what brand of underwear he wore? A lot. She hated it a lot.
“Oh, hey, those are mine,” Jonathan said, walking in right as Esther was hugging an armful of his boxer briefs to her chest.
Of course.
She felt a flush of embarrassment, which made her even more irritated. It was his fault she had his underwear in her hands. If you left your laundry lying around for hours, you deserved to have strangers pawing through your underdrawers. Those were the rules of the laundry room. Everyone knew that.
“Lemme just grab those,” Jonathan said, advancing on her.
Esther dropped his briefs on the dryer and stepped out of the way so he could retrieve the rest of his clothes.
“I got caught up writing and totally forgot all about these,” he explained, dropping a sock on the floor as he scooped his clothes out of the dryer. He hadn’t brought a basket with him, so he had to pile everything awkwardly in his arms. What was wrong with him? How could one person be so bad at everything? “I’ve been working on a screenplay, and when I’m in the zone I lose all track of time.”
Esther’s molars ground together. She already knew he was a screenwriter, because he’d worked it into the conversation every single time she’d talked to him. It wasn’t as if they even talked that much. They’d had maybe a half dozen conversations, and this was the third time he’d mentioned he was a screenwriter.
Esther was an aerospace engineer—literally a rocket scientist—but you didn’t hear her bringing it up at every opportunity with every random person she happened to interact with. Even though being a rocket scientist was way cooler than being a screenwriter. Los Angeles was crawling with screenwriters. You couldn’t spit out a wad of gum without hitting two of them.
He wasn’t even a real screenwriter. He was in the graduate screenwriting program at UCLA—a fact he’d mentioned twice before—so he was just a student. If he’d ever sold a script or had anything produced, he for sure would have brought it up in conversation by now. Probably several times.
“All yours,” he announced, like he was being magnanimous by not parking his laundry in the machine the rest of the day. He collected his clothes from the top of the dryer, dropping another sock in the process, and started for the door.
“You dropped some stuff,” Esther said.
He stopped and spun around, looking helplessly from the precarious bundle of clothes in his arms to the socks on the floor. “Do you think you could, uh…?”
She stooped to grab his socks off the floor—more ugh—and balanced them on top of the laundry he was holding.
“Thanks,” he said. “You know you shouldn’t use fabric softener.”
“What?”
He indicated her bottle of fabric softener with his chin. “The waxy buildup that stuff leaves behind affects the fabric’s natural ability to absorb moisture. I use a chemical-free laundry powder that’s biodegradable and doesn’t leave a residue.”
Unbelievable. The guy who didn’t even know basic laundry room etiquette was lecturing her about her fabric softener.
She gave him a thin-lipped smile. “You know everything’s a chemical right? Even water. There’s no such thing as chemical free.”
His forehead creased, making his eyebrows draw together. “I meant bad chemicals. Like the stuff they put in commercial cleaning products.”
“Okay.” At this rate, Esther’s molars were going to wear down to the size of Tic Tacs. “Thanks for the tip.”
