Page 27 of Rising Heat

How’s the apartment?

Bex

On a scale of one to felony, how hot is he again?

I stare at all three. All three feel loaded for completely different reasons. A laugh slips out as I drop onto one of the unopened boxes by the counter.

I did this. I actually did it.

Three freelance contracts waiting. A city I’ve spent the last week getting pleasantly lost in. And now my apartment, my boxes, my ficus blinking judgmentally from across the room. Outside, the drizzle sharpens against the glass, the wind rattling the windows like winter’s determined to get the last word.

I smile to myself, reach for the nearest box cutter, and get to work.

CHAPTER FIVE

darcy

I wake up on the air mattress to gray light and spend about four seconds wondering where the hell I am before it all comes back.

Boston. My apartment.

The air mattress lets out a long, dramatic wheeze when I shift, formally noting its objections. I lie there for another minute and just listen.

The rain stopped overnight. Somewhere in the walls the old radiators are clinking, and the apartment is warm in the uneven way that old-buildings are. Still better than the forced air I’ve been breathing for the last three years. A door closes somewhere on the street below. A car starts, idles for a minute, then pulls away.

The city is already awake, waiting for me to catch up.

Actually slept, not the half-alert version where some part of my brain stays on duty all night waiting for the next thing. Just eight straight hours of completely unconsciousness, and I wake up in it with that strange, disorienting feeling that maybe I’ve been here longer than a day.

I sit up and immediately regret putting my feet on the floor. The hardwood is freezing through my socks.

“Rugs,” I inform the room. “Immediately.”

My own voice lands softly and echoes in the half-empty bedroom. I like the sound more than I expect.

Last night I’d hung my coat on the hook by the door without thinking about it. I’d stood there looking at it for a solid ten seconds like I’d never seen a coat hook before.

At Brett’s, I’d stopped doing that somewhere in year two and started draping it over the bedroom chair instead. The chair that wasn’t really mine, in the apartment that wasn’t really ours, in the version of mornings that required me to already know what kind of mood I was walking into before I had gotten out of bed.

I went back to unpacking before I cried about a coat hook, which I consider a personal victory.

The night itself had been…a lot. In the best possible way.

I’d ordered Thai from a place three blocks over and eaten drunken noodles cross-legged on the hardwood with the disposable chopsticks from the takeout bag. Chappell Roan blasted from my phone speaker at a volume that would’ve required a discussion in my old life. Instead of someone turning it down or requesting a song change. I sang along with a mouth full of noodles and at one point accidentally dropped a piece of broccoli into an unopened box labeled OFFICE.

The Sauvignon Blanc I’d picked up for the occasion had been opened by seven. I assembled my new nightstand with one hand and a wine glass in the other, which added roughly forty minutes to the process and resulted in a piece of furniture that’s structurally sound but spiritually compromised.

Then I’d done what any reasonable woman does on the first night of her new life—opened every furniture website I’d been lowkey bookmarking for months and went absolutely feral.

Which is how I ended up waking up to seventeen order confirmations and zero regrets. A rug, a floor lamp, a sideboard I plan on using as a TV stand, and a handful of smaller things chosen for no reason other than the fact that I liked them.

By the time the kettle starts whistling, I’m already halfway through unpacking the kitchen.

Turns out I own an unreasonable number of mugs. I line them up across the counter anyway, because apparently this is who I am now. A woman with a dozen coffee mugs and no couch.

The cast iron pan emerges from a box labeled MISC. KITCHEN? in my own handwriting. I place it on the back burner where it belongs. The dish rack follows. My favorite chipped cereal bowl survives the move. Against all odds, so does the wine glass I wrapped in three separate Trader Joe’s bags and blind optimism.

An hour later, the room has stopped looking like a storage unit and started looking like a kitchen.