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“Hey, Murray!”
“Well, hello there, gorgeous lady.”
“You don’t normally work on Tuesdays.”
“Going through a bit of a rough patch. Boss let me pick up some extra hours.”
“By boss…you mean D.H. Hennessey?”
“Yeah…Damien.”
“You know, I just met him. I had no clue that my anti-social, next-door neighbor with the barking dogs was actually the landlord.”
Murray chuckled. “Yeah, he doesn’t really advertise that fact.”
“What’s his deal?”
“You mean how does a young guy like that own this place?”
“Well, yeah, that, but also why is he so mean?”
“His bark is way bigger than his bite.”
“No pun intended there?”
“Right.” He laughed. “Deep down, Damien’s good people. Lets me work extra whenever I need to and real generous at Christmas time…even if he does seem to have a stick up his ass sometimes.”
“A stick? It’s more like a pole.” I snorted.
“Some days, yeah. But hey, he puts meals on my table, so you won’t hear that from me.” Murray winked.
“He’s pretty talented, though,” I said. “I’ll give him that.”
“Smart, too. Believe me. Rumor has it, he graduated from MIT.”
“MIT? Are you kidding?”
“Nope. Can’t judge a book by its cover. Invented something. Sold the rights to the patent apparently then used the money to invest in real estate. Now he just collects the rent and does what he wants…makes art.”
“Wow. That’s…pretty darn impressive.”
“You didn’t hear that from me, though.”
“Got it, Murray.”
“Fancy plans tonight?”
“Nope. Just heading to grab some dinner and bring it back to the apartment.”
“Well, enjoy.”
“I will.”
Twenty minutes later, I returned to my apartment with tostones and arroz blanco con gandules from my favorite restaurant, Casa del Sol.
After scarfing down my food, I sat in my room and meditated for a bit in preparation for my phone therapy session with Dr. Veronica Little: Relationship Trauma Specialist.
At two hundred dollars per one-hour session, Dr. Little wasn’t cheap. It was my mother who suggested I see someone to talk about my feelings. While I wasn’t sure if it was working, I continued to go along with it every Tuesday evening at eight-thirty.
Perhaps, I should have forwarded the bills to Elec.***I had my therapist on speakerphone while I folded laundry in the bedroom.
“You bring that question up a lot, Chelsea. Whether or not Elec truly loved you. I think part of why we can’t seem to move forward from that can be explained by the concept of the unicorn.”
“The unicorn? What is that?”
“A unicorn is something that is mythically beautiful and unattainable, right?”
“Okay…”
“That was what Greta was to Elec. He’d ruled out a possibility of love with her because she was forbidden. He was able to fall in love with you in the meantime. That love was quite genuine. However, when the unicorn suddenly becomes attainable, that changes everything. The power of the unicorn is extremely potent.”
“So, what you’re saying is that Elec really did love me but only when he basically thought that being with Greta was an impossibility. She was his unicorn. I wasn’t a unicorn.”
“That’s exactly right…you were not his unicorn.”
“I wasn’t his unicorn,” I repeated in a whisper. “Can I just—”
“I’m sorry, Chelsea. Our time is up for today. We’ll explore this issue a little more next Tuesday.
“Okay. Thanks, Dr. Little.”
Blowing out a long breath, I plopped onto my bed and tried to make sense of what she’d just said.
Unicorn. Hmm.
My body stilled at the sound of laughing.
At first I thought I was imagining it.
It was coming from behind my headboard.
I jumped up.
“Unicorn. What the fuck!” he said in his deep voice before cackling some more.
Damien.
He’d been listening to my therapy session!
My stomach dropped.
How could he hear all that through the wall?
“You’ve been eavesdropping on me?” I asked.
“No. You’ve been interrupting my work.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s a hole in the wall. I can’t help but hear your hot mess phone conversations when I’m working.”
“A…hole in the wall? You’ve known about this hole?”
“Yes. I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. Must have been there before I bought the building. Probably used to be a glory hole or some shit.”
“You’ve been listening to me…through a glory hole?”
“No. You’ve been subjecting me to asinine conversations with people who are ripping you off…through a glory hole.”
“You are such a…”
“A-hole?”CHAPTER FOURYOU BACON ME CRAZYThe following day in work, I couldn’t help but obsess over the fact that Damien had been listening to my private conversations. Was that even legal?
The night before, I’d stopped our communication through the wall pretty quickly after his revelation, retreating to the living room and polishing off a bottle of Zinfandel with a side of cookie dough.
Thankfully, I was too busy at the youth center today to let it totally consume me, since it was the evening of the center’s annual breakfast-for-dinner function. Once a year, the staff cooked a giant breakfast in the industrial-sized kitchen for all of the kids. My responsibility was frying pounds of bacon.
On the walk home, literally reeking of bacon grease, I resumed my obsessing over the hole in the wall. I’d noticed that the opening was actually right behind my bed. My only saving grace was that if my room was adjacent to his office, maybe he wasn’t typically in there as much at night as he would have been if it were another room. Maybe he hadn’t heard all of my sessions. Or maybe I was just kidding myself.
