Archive of Our Own

Brennan Keir, 34, talked to Marianne Meadows, the woman-next-door, exactly five times before he realized he was in love with her. (If he weren’t in deep denial, or pretended he was more in control of his life than the rest of the world, he would have admitted that twice was enough.) This is how it went.

Brennan Keir, known as “Bog”, just Bog, to anyone who dared to say his name out loud, was sure life was just a line of events meant to make his existence miserable long before a hyperactive pixie girl and her strangely suitable but still uncomfortably short boyfriend moved in next door.

Perhaps it started with his 30^th birthday, and his mother, in her fine Irishwoman manner, covering all the surfaces in his long-suffered (through flooding from burst pipes, and slightly sooty kitchen ceiling from his early attempts to cook for himself, and a few holes in the couch lining before he got a habit of smoking by the fire escape window) bachelor pad with handmade pink tea cozies and not very subtle demands for grandchildren (which came with a wide array of photographed single women he should have been interested in but wasn’t). She also got him a bloody cat, because women liked cats. It was supposed to show his caring and sensitive side. All it did was add ruined furniture, clawed arms and additional expenses to the list of things he didn’t need but had.

Perhaps it began with an uncomfortable silence in his early twenties, which came after two letters that formed one word which followed the bravest thing he ever said out loud to the girl called Eleanor Russell, who had blue eyes and pink lips and a round soft face that he loved, but who had somehow, when he looked away, for just a second, stop loving him in return and he didn’t know why. She wasn’t Russell anymore. She had three kids. Bog had a butcher’s shop and his mother and his aunt and a cat he called Imp because of its round solid black eyes and a habit to hit its head against things. He vowed celibacy (vowed was a bit of a harsh word for that, he made a decision and followed through with it and so far, it was one of the few things that went on swimmingly).

Or maybe it was with his father’s pale old face, and his voice, that sounded like the old crackling radio in their shop (it sang Sinatra as the day turned orange with the setting sun, and his mother’s hair shimmered like fire when they danced, laughing at an occasional stumble, because his father was tall an’ lanky and his mother was short and stocky, but as time went by, that happened rarely until Sinatra stopped singing all together) that told him that he had to be a good son, and he had to take care of his ol’ mum, cause he was a man, and a man knew his way around a knife, and a man was not afraid of blood, and a man got a dog when he could afford to keep one. When Bog was twelve, he wondered if the same applied to fathers, and that they just didn’t have enough money to keep him either, even if the doctors kept telling his mother the other way around.

All in all, Bog came to realize, the universe simply didn’t like him, and so he wasn’t allowed to have nice things. It was fine. He was content to have what he managed to keep in the first thirty years of his life. He learned to let things go. He learned that nothing was free. He made himself a regiment he could keep, wrapped it around himself like a safety blanket, bought enough cat food to last a century and put another lock on the door.

He was fine.

He was not fine.

“What the hell is this?” Bog asked the manic blonde with huge blue eyes and thing in her hands that gave out a smell that made his mouth salivate. He wasn’t even hungry.

The girl had the air of a girl scout and the appearance of Julia Child, if the later was somewhere in her almost-twenties and pretty.

“Hi, I’m Dawn,” repeated the assailant, so excited, she was practically vibrating on his doorstep. In her hands was a wooden cutting board with the most cliché red’n’white checkered dishtowel on top of it. “I baked you a pie.”

She lifted the cloth with an elegance of a home economics teacher and showed him the edge of what could have possibly been a dish from the Baking Monthly front cover.

Bog lived long enough to question anything that came for free. “Why?” He asked with hands suddenly full of pie that was still hot.

Dawn worked her name to a full degree because she beamed at him with most convincing freshness and sincerity.

“We are your new neighbors!” And the other person, who made that sentence into a plural, waved a hand at him from behind her back. He seemed less cheerful and more terrified. Where Dawn was short, to Bog at least, the boyfriend was even shorter. He was dark-skinned, handfuls of freckles thrown into his face, and also doe-eyed – was that a thing with children these days, to look at the world with eyes wide open, innocence bordering on mental deficiency, and on the other note, when did he start to see them as children, especially if they were old enough to rent an apartment from his mother. Who is their right mind bakes a pie for their new neighbor this day and age anyway?

“You know this is not a fuc- flipping suburbia?” he asked them and immediately regretted it, because the blonde’s lip quivered.

“I thought it would be nice,” she said. “It’s just apple, with a sprinkle of cinnamon. I hope you like it.” Her eyelashes battered.

Apple with sprinkle of fucking cinnamon. Just.

If there was ever a time when Bog was lost for words (and that would be just the beginning, there would be so many after that, but there always had to be the first, doesn’t it?) - that was it. There were no words to describe this situation. What words could he possibly have said? And what should he have said?

Dawn’s boyfriend had a look in his eye of a man who wished for a simpler life, like not being in front of his angry neighbor at nine in the morning with a freshly baked pie, but (judging by the warmth and tenderness he exhausted when he looked at her) had to make amends because he also wanted to have nice things, like a ray of sunshine packed in one girl-shaped form.

And in a way, Bog understood him.

He remembered his mother’s expectant eyebrows and his father’s exasperated brogue, and aunt Plum’s horrendous cookies. His mother’s nagging voice said that when all is lost you could at least pretend to be polite so he collected himself (or at least straightened up) and muttered:

“T-thank you.”

Something rubbed against his leg.

As a sign of things to come, what happened next should have been quite prolific, if Bog was not busy trying to recon what was a proper neighborly response to being gifted with a pie, so the boyfriend’s whispering oh boy was not enough of a warning when Dawn the Skinny Flower Child almost did a low tackle on him.

It was not a tackle, he found out after not at all pathetically jumping back into the safety of his apartment.

Dawn was squishing his cat to her chest, and the cat was screaming for mercy.

“Oh. My. God. You have a kitty,” she reverently stated the obvious while her eyes broke the rules of nature and got even bigger.

“Dawn loves cats,” the boyfriend decided to speak out for the first time since Bog opened the door. It didn’t sound like a good thing. Imp agreed. Dawn rubbed her face against its fur. Unlike everyone around her, she seemed extremely happy.

“Sunshine,” the still nameless boyfriend rubbed her shoulder. “You’ll have to let it go. We need to go to work soon.”

Dawn nodded lightly with almost palpable regret, but if was enough, it told Bog a whole life story of a child who reverently wanted to have a pet and was never allowed to, no matter how long the child promised to look after it, feed it, go on the walks and so on.

Sometimes Bog remembered another of his mother’s many advices to think about things before saying them. He tried, but only when he remembered to have patience and that he did rarely.

He looked at the girl and his cat, which already gave up on life, and it was one of Bog’s plethora of personal vices, the temporary stupidity (and the fact that this pretty girl made him a pie and it was the nicest thing anyone has done for him in God knows how long), that made him say the next thing that came to his mind, instead of, as an option, shoving his foot into his own mouth.

“You can have it-“ The boyfriend, genuinely petrified, shook his head so hard it looked like he was having a seizure, and Bog tried to stop the train wreck of a situation he himself started. “-for tomorrow, if you want.”

“YES,” the answer and the fire in Dawn’s eyes burned so quick that it gave Bog fear for his cat’s wellbeing, but it was a tad too late to turn the ship that sailed. “Can I? Are you sure?”

Behind her back, the boyfriend made the “why are you doing this” gesture and facepalmed.

“Have to pay you back for the pie, don’t I?”

Next thing he knew his cat hit the floor and was running for cover, and pair of thin arms wrapped around his waist, face rubbing against his chest.

Bog made sounds. His hands raised the pie above his head, but the rest of his body shut down. He was sure he stopped breathing for a few seconds, because he was terrified of the fact that if he moved the tinsy-winsy girly creature would stop hugging him with the most grateful thankyouthankyouthankyou.

“Uhh,” he pleaded for help. “It’s nothing?”

“Dawn, we have about thirty minutes left to get ready, and it will take about seven to walk to the train station, which would make it-“

“Late. Dad’s gonna kill me,” she pushed away, suddenly. Bog stubbed out a whimper from a lack of human contact. “It was so nice to meet you…”

“Bog.”

“Boggy.”

“Bog.”

“Sure,” her smile shone like a sunrise, but bossy hands fixed his wrinkled shirt. “But Sunny and I, we gotta scoot, so see you later.” She grabbed her boyfriend’s – Sunny’s – hand, and pulled him down the corridor. Bog leaned out of the doorframe to see her push her better half inside the apartment next door, and wave at him in a child-like open-palmed way. “Bye, Boggy!”

“BOG,” he shouted, retreating and closing the door, just to press his forehead against its smooth surface with a groan. The offending food still in his hands smelled of some other world, inhabited by cute girls, who baked in the morning, and hugged random strangers. He didn’t know if he liked it. (He didn’t belong to that world - that was for sure.) He needed time to figure it out.

Bog set the pie on the kitchen counter and went about his day of calling the suppliers and paying for the shop’s rent and the utilities and fixing the boiler that kept on breaking. Small things.

He forgot all about cat-obsessed girls in a couple of hours, and it was for the best, since his new neighbors kept surprisingly quiet, except for an occasional sound of a running shower and closing doors, but that was expected with their stupid thin walls. Once he could bet he heard female singing (not unpleasant), but it could have been the TV, and it ended as fast as it started.

In the evening the pasty challenged him again, but his stomach was empty – surprise, he forgot to eat, again - and he surrendered.

The crust did the crust thing, and the apples did the apple thing and he spend some time examining it, and then, deciding that it couldn’t be any worse if the pretty fairy and her Hispanic boyfriend – Dawn and Sunny, what kind of fucking coincidence was that - chose to poison him with a cyanide-laced apple pie, he switched on his TV, plopped himself on the sofa and took a bite.

Ten minutes later he had to call his mother, because he had to tell someone, anyone, that he has been emotionally compromised by baked goods. It was good and extremely sweet. He waxed to her for what he could have considered to be a relatively long period of time about a pie as great as the second coming of Christ, before she cut his off with a harsh “Pie is desert. Did you eat anything else?” and grumbled into the line when he answered with tight-lipped silence.

“You could marry her,” suggested his mother matter-of-factly.

“I think she is too young for me. And also has a boyfriend.”

“Bah, like that ever stopped someone. The boyfriend, I mean. And no, she is not too young. She works in some fancy restaurant in Lower Manhattan.” There was a movement on the other end of the line, mixed with another female voice of the same annoying category as his mother’s. “Plum says we can make her boyfriend disappear. I don’t think she knows what it means.” Another pause. “You do know what it means? Where did you get that from? I don’t think she’ll want to marry him after that. Bog, I think Plum suggests we kill her boyfriend.”

That was his cue.

“Goodbye, Mother and Aunt Plum,” he ended the conversation and shoved the rest of the pie into his mouth.

Behind the wall reigned silence. Bog eyed the cutting board and the towel on his lap. He carefully licked his sugary hand, and picked the stray crumbs one by one, sighing them a sad farewell, and stuck the finger into his mouth. The stupid cat, that spend the whole day sleeping off the trauma of being loved, jumped on the sofa and rubbed its face against his shoulder.

“Sorry,” Bog told it, his palm long and narrow on the slick and short hide. “But you got to take one for the team tomorrow.”

Imp stared in its usual unreadable way, and then hit him on the face with a paw full of claws.

The morning greeted him with another instance of his cat, unaccepting of its fate, being an asshole, because he did the thing there it climbed out of the window to walk the fire-escape ladder to get to the upper floors where if would steal the neighbors food and run back, but would get stuck on the part where getting from the fire escape to his window would require some sort of finesse which this particular cat did not possess under dire circumstances. Long story short, he had to climb out of the window to get it.

Bog leaned out of the window, and let the cool air of midsummer morning wash over his damp t-shirt. He just finished his morning routine, and he was sore and sweaty and badly needed a shower, but his cat was a moron so what could he do.

It wasn’t even that big of a distance, for Bog and his long legs – no more than one, granted rather wide, step. If his cat wasn’t stupid, he would have stretched his arm and the pet just had to make a tiniest jump. But no, the animal looked at him and called in distress.

“I hate you so much,” he told it, and popped back in to pull off his t-shirt, since it became more of a moist clingy nuisance then something wearable. “I’m going to give you away to a nice blonde,” he sat on the windowsill and threw his legs over the edge. His feet found the perch on the building surface, a parapet line half-brick wide, that ran all the way about the house. It was just enough of a support to throw his leg on the barred surface of the fire-escape landing. The rest was a simple trick of shifting weight from one leg to another, pushing and swinging himself over the railing. The cat meowed approvingly. He picked it up under its belly and stared in what he considered to be evil soulless eyes. “She is going to take ye and love ye. To death.”

There was a knock on the window. He kneeled and turned his head.

The rays of sun bounced from the dirty glass, most of them disappearing into nowhere, but the ones that got through grabbed onto anything they could in a small Spartan room with cheap furniture, a pile of something glittering on the floor by the door, and a girl with plump dark lips, the most supreme glamrock hair, and slightly smudged dark blue eye shadow with specks of gold in it that decorated a pair of caramel eyes, squirming at him with extreme prejudice.

They examined each other for a moment, her waving her hand in angry confusion, him –

it had to be said that the voluntary celibacy Bog inflicted upon himself included all matter of pornography, except for the one his mind could conjure in the privacy of his bathroom, both for the sake of his sanity, and to prove the force of his convictions to his mother, who would have found it anyway when she would break into his apartment to clean it, so to say that his imagination was starved for source material was to say nothing

- in all his shameful horror, having his retinas burned with an image of her long legs, clad in skinniest possible black pants, her flat stomach, and whatever the hell kind of bra that was because it was glittery, and black, and semi-translucent and containing a pair of two absolutely marvelous perky breasts.

Bog wanted to weep.

Her arms were thin yet defined with muscle, as her fingers, elegant with purple manicured nails, flipped the lock and raised the window.

“I’m going to count to five,” her voice was raspy and a wee bit sultry as she leaned outside, frowning at the crisp morning and his unwanted presence in it. Her eyes paused on his naked chest, and Imp, hanging like a limp rag in his arms, and the scars on his face, and she shook her head with a groan. “Fuck, wait. Let me try this again.” She closed her eyes, drew a strained breath of a suffering person, and licked her lips. Bog felt something twitch inside of his gut.

“I’m going to count to five,” she said, opening her eyes. “So you could get the fuck away from my window, or I will be forced to break your shins. I have a bat and I’m going to use it. Here we go: One.”

“Alright, alright,” Bog quickly stood up and threw one of his legs back over the barrier.

“Uh. What are you doing?” The stray gust of wind played with her hair. She looked torn between curiosity and concern (but possibly, her symptoms finally fitting into a coherent picture in his head, just too hangover to care). “I don’t mind you using the door.”

“I’m good. It’s quicker this way,” he aimed his move and stepped back, almost slipping when she gave up a smirk and an impressed hum. Bog threw the cat through the window into his living room, grabbed the frame and pulled himself in, rolling on the floor and stretching on the carpet.

On the other side of the window, the fire escape creaked as a body climbed onto it. “Are you alright there?”

“Just fine,” he called back. Imp jumped onto his chest and stared down at him.

“Good,” she sounded almost relieved. “Is this going to become a usual part of my morning?”

Bog though about her legs and chest and lips. Blood rushed through his veins, southbound to areas of his anatomy that should not have been affected by a pretty – no, Dawn was pretty, and this one was fire and sweat and spite and alcohol and a lot of bad choices personified, and Bog was into that, surprisingly – vixen, but were. “I hope not.”

“Let’s try to keep it that way, shall we?”

He didn’t know what to say to that, and it looked like she didn’t expect him to say anything, judging by the sound of her crawling back into her room.

The silence that followed a closing window fell upon him in a thick fog of understanding that his life suddenly got a bit more difficult. It didn’t last long, since in a minute the pipes wailed with the noise of rushing water, and his upstairs neighbors waking up their army of kids (a bunch of cannonballs bouncing back an forth over his head), and his cat decided it got bored and started to play with his nose.

There was a knock at the door, the same as the day before, and Bog got up, reluctantly, Imp thrown over his shoulder, to open.

Dawn stood there, all flowery and happy and light, and it was almost funny how different (but not really? it was hard to explain) she was to that other one.

“Hi,” she gleamed. “You said I could play with your cat?”

The cat tried to make a getaway but it was too late. Bog dumped him into her expectant grabby hands.

“I’ll pick him up in the evening. He eats everything.”

Watching her squeeze the life out of his pet was strangely satisfying. He was struck by a stray idea, that the day had finally come that he cut himself off women long enough to suddenly find all of them arousing, and he tried to think of Dawn, sweet and blue-eyed, in a manner that would make her sexually appealing, but she kept failing him and giving off a vibe of a gentle child with flowers in her hair. Bog shook his head with a low chuckle.

“You should smile more often,” Dawn told him. “It suits you.”

“You should mind your own business,” he raised his hand, uncertainly, and petted her fluffy hair. It was an almost natural reaction. She was soft and fluffy.

“Na-ah,” she stuck her tongue at him. Dawn ducked from under his touch and sauntered to her flat. “Wouldn’t that be boooring.”

“For one, that would be polite,” but he still smirked.

After all he was not really polite himself.

As predicted, the Fire Escape Woman – that’s what he ended up calling her, rather wordy, but take it or leave it - decided to take residence in his thoughts. After short deliberation and against his primary reaction Bog chose it to be a good thing. It added good humor to his mind, and an occasional healthy image of her fine physique (and even that was amusing because he had a crush – and he was honest enough with himself to admit it – on a woman who was a hangover mess, but it sort of made him wonder, what she was like in the morning when not) did miracles to his mood, even if it lasted only till he reached the doors of his shop to find out that something went wrong, because something always did, be it a broken cold room, or his delivery people fucking up, again, or his mother coming to visit. He didn’t tell her about the girl with reddish-brown hair and a wicked smirk, and she didn’t ask about Dawn – for a moment he though that he was out of the woods, that the matchmaking was bound to stop, but nope, his mother made him an portfolio of semi-attractive women, and he was sure none of them would have threatened him with bodily harm. But it did make him curious.

“Mum, why do you keep this up?” he asked her, about two weeks after the whole incident with the cat, when she brought him lunch and stayed to make sure he actually ate it. “Apart from grandkids, that is?”

She was polishing the counter, something she did automatically from back in the days his father stood at the exact same spot Bog stood now, and grumbled about how things were clean enough already, dammit.

“Now you ask me?” she laughed, the ring of her voice resonating in the back of him mind.

“I just though that I’ve never questioned it. Ain’t that what all mothers do?”

Griselda turned to give him a soft smile that, for a second, turned back time to sunsets and Sinatra.

Stuff and Thang were running errands. The shop slumbered in the afternoon light, car passing by the windows that read “Keir & Son”. His father was a simple mad with simple dreams.

“Honey, I’m old,” she said and fixed her hair. She never had that much white in it before. “And I want to know that when I’m gone where will be someone who won’t give up on you.”

He pretended that the stab he felt at that wasn’t real.

“I’m… I can take care of myself,” he tried to assure both of them, but his mother knew better.

She just waved her hand at him, and pointed at his untouched plate.

“I will believe it when I see it,” she said.

Begrudgingly, Bog almost agreed. Dawn’s pie hanged over him as a silent reminder that where were people who did things for other people in this world, he certainly was not one of them, not unless bribed and blackmailed or both, but Dawn was a sweet kid, and if only she was maybe ten years older he would have considered it. He highly doubted the Fire Escape Woman knew how to bake pies you could sell your soul for.

It was all rather ominous, since he met the Fire Escape Woman the very same evening, and he understood how deeply lost in the land of metaphorical “fucked” he was.

And, of course, it was all Dawn’s fault. Because, as he quickly discovered, Dawn was another woman after his mother he was not able to say “no” to.  So when he opened his door to a now familiar enthusiastic knocking – something classical, he reckoned – he knew what to expect.

“What?” he demanded, as his neighbor stared at him intently, hands clasped together and pressed to her mouth, a thin and determined line of its own.

“Hi. Our landlady told me you know how to fix things,” as far as openings went it was sucky, but he was grateful she used “landlady” instead of “your mother”.

“Maybe,” but he really was not in the mood for it. The sofa looked very welcoming.

“Our sink’s busted,” she added, and he mentally cursed, because he kept telling his mother to change the damn thing long time ago.

He considered his options. The girl in the corridor let out a long pathetic pleeeease.

Bog groaned. “Fine. Let me get the tools.”

Dawn turned up her brightness - “Thanks, Boggy!” -  and continued to do so even as he snarled – Bog -, dug around in the closet for his toolbox, locked his door and walked ten steps down the corridor.

He could swear he heard a sound of something methodically being hit as he approached the door, but it didn’t bother him. Not until Dawn pushed the handle.

The punching bag hanged off the ceiling. He was pretty sure there wasn’t a punching bag in the apartment before the couple moved in, but now there was. Sunny, the ever-present boyfriend, was holding it with both hands, but it wasn’t helping, since the Fire Escape Woman was kicking the crap out of it. Still, he persisted, his whole body pressed against it, counting the hopping kicks her calf landed.

“98… 99… 100!”

His hand found the stopwatch dangling around his neck and pressed the button.

“One twenty. New best.”

The Fire Escape Woman breathed heavily, sweat glittering on her clavicles and heaving chest, droplets of it rolling down her toned abs, and very fit legs.

“Could do,” her voice came out of her mouth in deep pants. “Better.”

She turned around to the opened door, in which he continued to stand, and her eyebrows shot up.

“That’s the Fix-it Guy?”

Dawn pushed him in.

“Marianne, this is Boggy. Boggy – my sister Marianne.”

Bog wanted to say something. Something important. But he was brain dead. Something has killed him, and he was pretty sure it was either the curve of her hips or the shorts that hugged them tenaciously or the purple butterfly on the back of her neck. One of those things.

The Fire Escape Woman, Marianne, wasn’t having none of that either.

“The Cat Guy is the Pull-ups Guy is the Fix-it Guy?”

Dawn shot her a look that said to shut it. She turned to Bog.

“The kitchen is that way-“

But he was already walking, determined to get this done with as fast as possible, and to get the hell out of this apartment which contained women with long thin necks and killer bodies.

Dawn followed him around the island, but there was a clear confusion on her face, and even if he didn’t know her that well, he suspected it wasn’t a good sign.

Behind his back, the bathroom door slammed shut. He tried not to think about Marianne under the stream of shower, naked and wet and flushed. Not when he leaned under the obviously clogged sink, and her sister stuck her face right under there with him, and grinned in a toothiest, mouthiest and not really attractive way.

“You like my sister,” she whispered theatrically and he almost dropped a wrench on his foot.

“Dawn, let me do mah job,” Bog thanked the lack of light under the counter, since his face was probably the color of a fresh tomato. The words slurred, angry and rolling, out of his mouth. “And bring ay bucket, would ye?”

“Sunny, we need a bucket!” She popped her head out, but then ducked right back in. “You do like my sister! You are doing the Highlander speak.”

“It’s a Scorttish accent. Ah don’t know yer sister. Can’t like someone Ah don’t know. Now could yer kindly bugg’r off and let me fix ‘is?” He didn’t mean to snap at her, but the pipes groaned and his imagination was doing horrible horrible things. It included his hand on the back of Marianne’s neck, right on that silly tattoo, her face pressed against the tiles, an amber look thrown from the corner of her eye, water streaming down her back.

The blonde pursed her lips in disappointment, and passed on the bucket, graciously provided by her cohabitant. “Rude.”

She crawled out, and dusted herself.

“I’ma gonna tell her.”

“NO,” he jumped from under the sink, well, wanted to jump from under the sink, but instead jumped up and hit his head on the counter with a loud and very painful THUD.

“But you like her!”

He stood up, for once remembering that he was tall, dark and menacing, and covered in many ugly scars. “Mind your business, Dawn.”

She sighed dispassionately and her little index finger stabbed him in the chest.

“Your mother is right. You are going to die alone, surrounded by many cats.”

“Ye talked to mah moth-“

“Which would not be a bad thing, because I would cuddle all of them.”

Bog shut his eyes and counted till ten. When he opened them Dawn was still there, but she was less demanding and more concerned. Everything felt a bit like a déjà vu.

“Why?” he asked her and for some reason it surprised her.

“Because you are nice?”

“I’m not.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I’m really not.”

“You agreed to fix our sink at ten in the evening on a work day.”

“I-“ Alright, she had a point there. “But why?”

“Because she is my sister and I love her, but I think she needs help and she won’t accept

mine.” Happiness melted off her face. “She has a problem, and I’m worried. You look like you know how to deal with problems.”

He didn’t need this. He didn’t bloody fucking need this.

Bog stared at Dawn, soft and cuddly and sad and sincere. His shoulders went slack.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and before she had a chance to squeak, he raised his hand to her face. “I didn’t say I’ll do it. I said I’ll think about it. Got it?”

She nodded, a single bow of her head as a quiet agreement, and skipped away to her room, pulling Sunny after her, letting Bog deal with the sink and the thoughts of Marianne, the apparently problematic sister.

“So what’s your verdict?”

He looked up from the sink trap he was screwing back on to a pair of fine slightly bruised legs and knees, covered with an edge of a bathrobe. Skipping further, Marianne molten eyes bored into him, expression pleasant but slightly menacing. She wasn’t wearing her make-up and, yes, she was gorgeous, but he wasn’t about to go telling her that.

“Piece of trash,” he honestly replied. “But salvageable.”

He climbed up, and turned on the faucet, checking for the flow and hummed with satisfaction, as the sink let the water disappear into its depth.

“Dawn seems to be fond of you,” she said, when he purposefully was not looking at her. Her hands fisted into the towel on her head as she was trying to dry her hair, and that was the most passive-aggressive toweling he ever not saw. “I don’t have to tell you that if anything were to happen to her, I would come down on those responsible in a blasé of fiery retribution, which may possibly include blood and tears and pleas of mercy?”

He pressed his hips against the counter and prayed not to get an erection. He succeeded.

“Understood.”

During his time under the sink he missed them switching off the illumination in the living room, and the kitchen was the only pool of light in the apartment, safe for the strip of movement under the door of Dawn’s room. Marianne walked into the open space, maneuvering around her punching bag and dumping her towel on the couch, while he went on collecting his things. He didn’t expect to see her leaning on the counter by his side when he wanted to make a quick exit.

“What do I owe you?” Marianne’s hand was on her hip, and her clavicles called to him.

Sexual favors, he thought and then mentally slapped himself before words could reach his mouth.

“Dinner,” he said instead.

She smiled. “Hope lasagna works for you.” Marianne opened the fridge, and after a bit of pondering, pulled out a Tupperware dish. “Best I could do out of the leftovers. Since my favorite cutting board disappeared into oblivion.”

Yes, a cutting board. Forgot about that.

“I’ll give it back,” he muttered, propping himself on a bar stool by the island, watching her pull out a plate, and cut a piece to microwave. “Your sister is a phenomenal baker.”

There was elegance to her, and casualness, and comfort, even if he found her pink bathrobe and her combed back wet hair, water dripping down her neck, distracting. Her laugh, brash and infectious, suited her.

“Oh, and she knows it,” Bog had to admit, the glint in her eyes was cheeky to say the least. “Let me guess, it was an apple pie?”

The microwave binged behind her back.

“Personal weapon of mass destruction?”

“You know it.”

“Sweet kid,” he said, as a plate with food he didn’t really want was presented before him. “And maybe just a little bit batshit insane.”

Her hand landed on his shoulder, and for a second, as he froze in his spot, Bog wondered if he has said a bit too much. Instead, Marianne smiled at him with cheer amusement, and he forgot how to breathe. “That… is quite terrifyingly correct. But she might surprise you. Enjoy.”

She left him sitting alone in her kitchen, as she disappeared in the room with the fire escape ladder – Bog had no idea why he didn’t connect the two: Dawn, the next-door neighbor, and Marianne, the woman who lived in the room with a fire escape, which was a part of the next-door apartment – and he stared at a generous piece of food in his plate, wondering what to do with it.

Eating was a sore subject. It’s been only a few years since he started to do so normally, because his body told him he would die if he didn’t. Even if it was years since the illness ate away at his father, stomach first, every though of food caused a wave of nausea to run over him, so he grew up tall, because his genes dictated so, but remained skinny all through his teens and twenties. A normal person would have fretted and shied away, but Bog came from a line of very angry dark-haired Scotsmen, and some quite annoying stubborn Irishmen as well, so he persevered, through stupid actions and stupid decision, some costing him scars, and broken limbs, and his mother’s wrath. Eating was the one he fought the longest, until it turned from something he would enjoy, to a mechanical act, akin to brushing teeth and washing hair, and he planned for it to remain such. It didn’t bother him. He was fine. (He was in a business of selling people food. The irony was not lost on him.)

He dug a fork into a mass of pasta and meat and thick sauce, and wondered if it would be rude if he asked to have it to go. Imp would clean up a plate in a minute, since its gut was an endless pit of despair.

He separated a piece, eyed it with dread, and signed, sticking the fork into his mouth.

The universe imploded.

Marianne came back five minutes later, dressed in a baggy washed-up fuchsia t-shirt and even baggier graphite-gray sleep-pants and managing to look somehow even more attractive. She paused, seemingly confused over him staring into empty space, barely-touched plate before him.

Bog, in his defense, was reevaluating his life choices.

“Are you alright there?” Her elbows propped on the counter. He guessed her voice was meant to tease, the repetition of her words an open reminder of their previous run-in, except he didn’t have to jump from a balcony five-story-high. He just had to find a way to explain to her that she (almost) single-handedly reinvented the concept of taste in his mouth, and that was much worse.

She cringed. “Sunny found it eatable, but then again, he dates Dawn, and had a hungry childhood-“

“It’s divine,” another forkful found its way into him mouth. “Personal weapon of mass destruction?”

Marianne blanched. Her fingers drummed before her. She pushed away, walked to the fridge, and pulled on the handle, white lamp of the interior contouring her body. “Not really. Comfort food is not my thing.” She dug around for a moment with a sound of glass bottles hitting one another. “Wanna beer?”

Not her thing. Bloody hell. “No, I have to be up for work tomorrow,” but he watched her pop the cap and take a swing, nose wrinkling slightly.

“So do I,” Marianne huffed, whipping her mouth with the back of her hand and staring at the bottle with offence. “Wow, that’s disgusting. Good thing Sunny knows his wine, cause beer he does not.”

Bog tried to chew, thoughtfully, but it seemed like his digestive system was born anew, and he was starving. He hasn’t felt like that since he was fifteen and suddenly hit the growth spurt. Marianne took a seat near him, quietly amused about him wolfing down her cookery, while he though that he was wrong – she was like home-made lasagna, and flowery shampoo, and yellow kitchen light, warm and serene and maybe, with a sad look in her eye, as she sipped her beer, just a bit broken, like the sink.

“So, is this what you do?” Bog waved to the punching bag with his fork, trying to find some way, any way, to stay like this just a bit longer. “Impressive.”

He shook her head, fringe falling over her face, and possibly pinkish cheeks, but he couldn’t tell with this light, in a messy drying wave. “More of a necessity turned into a hobby.”

“Necessity?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have Dawn’s metabolism,” she took another sip. “And since the amount of things I need to taste during the day would boggle your mind, I found kickboxing to be just the thing to keep me in shape.”

Another thing he got wrong: she was not easy-going. She radiated tenacity, thick, solid, well constructed and calculated. It hung around her like in an aura of almost hostility. But the phantom warmth of her hand lingered on his shoulder, and he scraped the bottom of the plate, trying to hide his smile, as she shot him a curious sideways glance.

“Fancy yourself a fighter?”

“Back in the day. But in a more traditional bottle-to-the-face kind of way.”

Marianne gave him a small laugh. “Then you will have to fight me. At least once.”

“Ah don’t fight girls,” he joked back, or tried to, and barely kept himself vertical when she almost kicked the stool from under him.

“Neither do I,” she smiled, but it was hard and cold and razor-sharp. “Unless they are into it.”

Alright, he had to leave. Now. Otherwise he should not have to be held responsible.

He eyed his empty plate and the sink. She got the hint.

“Don’t mind it. I’ll wash up.”

Marianne stood up and shuffled towards the door. He walked after her. The bottle in her hand stayed with her every step. She racked her fingers through her hair (he wanted to twist the wet lock by her temple between his fingers).

She pulled the door open and looked at her feet.

“Good night, Mister…”

He walked pass. She barely reached his armpit.

“Bog.”

“Still, Mister-“

The expression on her face was expectant. Maybe it was the feeling of content warming up his cold heart, but he gave.

“Keir. Brennan Keir.”

She hummed. “Why Bog then?”

He could have explained to her that his ancestry had a long a complicated history, and when an Irish woman and a Scottish man decided to have a child, where was a chance the relatives on either side of the union would come up with the way to make this child suffer. Instead he bowed his head. “It’s a long story.”

She accepted that as an answer, bowing to him return.

“Good night, Mister Keir.”

Another step, and the door behind his back almost closed, but he pushed back against it.

“One question,” Bog turned back towards the door, and grinned, hoping not to come off as too cheeky (and maybe at least slightly pleasant). “The Pull-Ups Guy?”

The kitchen light drew a halo around Marianne’s head. The corners of her mouth curled.

“It’s an inside joke,” she huffed, but her eyes shone, hooded, as she swan the door to close. “Good night, Bog.”

His own apartment met him with Imp’s impatient yelps, because the damn thing was hungry again, but even as he growled at it, it came out half-hearted. Lasagna rested in a bundle of warm weight inside of him, and lulled him to sleep. He crashed onto his bed, barely managing to pull off his t-shirt, and pressed his face into the pillow, letting sleep, deep and relaxing and mind-numbing, wash over him.

The first time Bog dreamt of Marianne, she wrapped her arms around him, and he burrowed his nose into her old fuchsia t-shirt, while his palms glade up her sides, counting her ribs. She kissed his forehead with the warmth of the sun, giving him the sense of endless calm, and the world was a giant bed, where he wished to stay forever, her leg thrown over his hips.

Marianne had a bike. Bog found out by accident, when he leaned out of the window one morning, trying to figure out who needed to die over the ruckus in the back yard, and finding the older sister kicking the metaphorical life out of it. It was obvious she was running late, since she walked around it in circles, and tried to kick-start it a couple of times. He wanted to call to her, truly, he knew her pain - Bog had a bike once (didn’t end well; his nose was never quite the same again) – but her bike pants were amazing, and she looked determined enough to win over her vehicle by herself. She did, in the end, and 20 minutes later, and cursed loudly, fitting her helmet over her mess of hair, and driving away, tires wailing in her urgent speed.

Marianne was many things. Some of them semi-expected – high heels, really high heels, how was it possible to walk on those, and an occasional back-combing with too much hair spray, and fifty shades of lipstick, varying from nude to blood red to rose to the deepest of purple, and the way she bit her lips while staring into the depth of the universe, waiting for universe to stare back, but it never did and she shook off her thoughts, like a puppy shaking water off its fur, head bend, fringe falling over her face -, and some he didn’t see coming at all: light colorful summer dresses, pink and blue and yellow (never green, she strangely had exactly zero green things), and flat sandals, her legs pale with blooming bruises, so fragile until he imagined her jump-kneeing him in the face, a wide array of facial expressions, switching faster than he could snap his fingers (she was not a happiest girl, not by a long shot, and she pent up her annoyance, but sometimes it splashed over her rough edges and he enjoyed it immensely), a lot of craft beer, and sometimes, when the day was bad, in the evening her fingers were covered in Band-Aids with Sunday morning cartoons. Then she smoked on the fire escape those days, they looked uncanny wrapping around a cigarette pressed to her mouth. On those days he wanted to join her, but something kept stopping him. Perhaps her clear need for privacy.

The younger sister didn’t respect his privacy at all.

Dawn, the gentle happy-go-lucky kid, hunted him down in the elevator with a look of a woman who had a plan. He was not prepared. He just wanted to know if they got his mail by any chance.

“I was just wondering-“ he started when she almost shoved him into the elevator.

It was a good morning - he managed to fit a toast inside his stomach. His mother would have been so proud.

Dawn was not impressed.

“FYI, Marianne is single.”

The elevator was never big, but Bog was cornered. It was good to know (he knew next to nothing about Marianne, so any FYI was good), but not when her tiny sister looked like… well, his mother on her finer matchmaking days. And maybe some less than nice people back in the years when he made a lot of bad decisions.

“Wow, yes,” it was a reflex, but he checked for his keys. “I guess I walked right into that. Would you-”

He pointed to the button panel. Dawn pressed for the first floor without looking. Took her a couple of tries. “Also she is hot but I don’t think I need to tell you that.”

“No, you really don’t.”

That morning Marianne wore a t-shirt that fell off one of her shoulders. Bog had to admit, he had thoughts about kissing the slope of it, pale and long, to her ears, and to bury his face into her hair, and wondered what little sounds she would make, if he touched the oval of her jawline and the straight of her throat, and maybe found the drum of her heartbeat and left a love-bite-bruise on it to make her curse breathlessly. She absolutely would.

Dawn tried to change her tactics from bullying to sugaring. She was obvious and also oblivious to how easy to read she was.

“She likes your singing voice.”

“When-“

“In the shower.”

The walls. He kept forgetting about the walls. “Jesus.”

Dawn had her little fists on her almost non-existent hips. “You promised you would think about it.“

“Let me stop you right there,” he raised both of his hands and boxed her shoulders. “Yes, I promised. Still thinking. Now,” their places switched in a maneuver of dancing proportions. “I just need to know if you got my mail. I’m waiting for a very important letter and I want to know if you got it. Your sister is a very attractive lady-“

“Lady?”

“Alright, maybe lady is not a word I would use. Woman. She is a very attractive woman.”

“Yes, and?”

And he would like to touch her inappropriately in so many places and ask her to cook him food he would even try to eat, and listen to her argue with the TV, and look at her face as she slept and drank beer. But those were things that he wanted (not needed). Bog rarely got what he wanted.

“But I think that the most she needs in her life is a friend,” Bog let go of the girl and turned to the doors. “And, maybe, somebody to beat the crap out of. I’m very concerned for your boyfriend.”

There she was, hugging him again. He didn’t even fight it this time. That battle was lost before it started.

“Oh, Boggy-“

“BOG.”

“Please. A girl always knows.”

He patted her talented hand on his stomach with a fond smile (that he didn’t let her see).

“And what is it that you know, Dawn?”

“I’m going to disregard that patronizing tone,” her voice was muddied by her face in his jacket. “In favor of telling you that you very much want to get naked with my sister and do wonderful dirty things to her.”

His heart stopped for half a second. And whatever she would say, his voice did not go up a couple of tones.

“First, what makes you say that? And also, I’m deeply disturbed that you know about things people do to each other when naked.”

“Boggy, I am a grown woman in a healthy stable relationship.” The woman in an adult relationship unglues herself from his back. “And how do I know? Female intuition. And shower.”

She couldn’t. He was really careful about those sorts of things.

The elevator door opened, and he walked really fast out of it. He was an adult and he did adult things that included not running out of elevators and away from small very perceptive girls, who kept giving the look of perceptive superiority.

“You are bluffing. So shame on you.”

Dawn remained in the elevator and wagged her finger at him, hands crossed on her chest. In that particular moment he hated her.

The doors closed. He stood before them with words like “no”, “you are wrong” and “Dawn, stop” at ready but he let all of them dissolve into nothing, and walked off to work.

Maybe she was right. Maybe.

Maybe he was just a moron, he thought a day later. Lord, who was he kidding?

The doors almost closed when an elegant hand with thin fingers clad in smallest bike gloves he’d ever seen squeezed between them. He urgently stuck his foot out to keep the door from closing. The hand was followed by an arm in a girly leather jacket, and a head of succulent dark redwood, and another arm, holding a motorcycle helmet, and another hand, pressing a cellphone to her ear, because it was Marianne, who nodded at him, or at Dawn’s squeaky monologue in the speaker. She made a one-eighty, heels of her boots knocking, and as he stretched his arm behind her to press the button for the doors to close (she smelled like good food, and it was weird and uncanny, and he never thought a woman who smelled of salad dressing could be arousing), his neighbor suddenly raised her head, her eyes staring at him (or before her, or over his shoulder, but thee were wide and caramel and he gulped), and opened her perfect little mouth (bright and juicy, with plump lips and perfect white teeth and tongue quick and pointy and Bog could actually go on forever about it if he wanted to).

“Mother Fucker,” said the woman he, a man rapidly approaching middle age and accumulating the necessary level of spite for such an endeavor, had actual wet dreams about.

Bog forgot to press the floor button. He leaned over her – it wasn’t difficult, she was miniature, and the narrow set of her shoulders held the most endearing but misleading fragility and – and made sure her eyes saw him before mouthing: “Excuse Me?”

She stared back at him for half a breath with her brown eyes, a crease forming between her eyebrows, before her mouth contorted into an apologetic grimace while she mimicked at her phone.

“Dawn,” she said, her eyes wondering absentmindedly up his face and then down his neck and his chest and resting on the logo of his work t-shirt and before her Bog suddenly felt like a teenager, quirky, unbalanced, damaged. Generally inadequate. And, maybe, that he should start dressing better. “Could you please tell Dad that if that asshole appears anywhere near my station on my kitchen in my restaurant, no matter how magnificent his protein is, I am going to personally fillet fucking minion him? There is going to be a body and we all know I don’t know anyone who is good with both a cleaver and a shovel.”

She noticed Bog’s question mark of a posture. “Are you any good with a cleaver and a shovel, preferably simultaneously?” She asked this most innocent of questions, all nonchalant (and teasing? taunting?), but her voice ran sharp.

“Ye’ll be surprised,” he answered almost automatically (and too quickly) and it clicked with her, somehow, as not strange, because she chuckled, and it was warm and soft and very effeminate.

“Oh, turns out we do. But still: if Dad hires him, I quit,” she pulled away her phone with an intent to end the conversation, but swiftly brought it back. “And what’s the dessert of the day? Croque-en-bouche? Can you bring the leftovers? I might need to bribe my possible accomplice.”

The tips of her fingers touched against his chest, their soft tickle making his heart pound and his knees weak. Marianne pressed a button to end the call. Her smile was sexy and lopsided.

“Sup.”

“You are covering the button panel,” he told her, and basked in a delight of her urgent scattering (but grunted at a tugging disappointment in the absence of her touch).

“Been busy lately?” She let him find their floor with his fingers, facing the closed doors, rackety box coming to life around them. One day it was going to stop somewhere between the floors and, if he remembered correctly, the operator’s call button stopped working about a century ago, so those were going to be a few very uneventful hours for a sod, lucky enough to get stuck in it.

“Could say so,” he replied, taking his place behind her back.

There was a thin strip of skin between the hairline on the nape of her neck and the collar of her jacket, the edges of her tattoo peaking with a flirty promise.

“You know, I still owe you that beating,” she rocked back and forth, toes to the heels to the toes, and maybe he was standing just a bit too close.

“I remember someone saying it was supposed to be a fight.”

“Fight, beating – same thing.”

He couldn’t help but feel bewildered; because that was teasing, and the grin his face made, one did not simply made it go away. His glee bubbled. “Oh, looks like someone is overly confident.”

Marianne raised her chin, her head turned slightly. The edges of her fringe brushed against her cheekbone. She tucked it behind her ear. Her ears, he noticed, were small and ornate, and pierced four times along the inner curve with small gleaming black studs. Her fingers remained to play with the collar of her jacket.

“Oh, looks like someone underestimates their predicament.”

“You think?”  He made a tiny step to her. If he wanted, he could have pulled his hands out of the safety of his pockets and glided his fingers up the sides of her slack arms (he wanted to, badly). Instead, Bog loomed over her, the yellow light of the shitty elevator lamp sufficient for him to cast a shadow over her, and he hoped it was enough for a halo of amber around his head. “Back in the day,” he stretched his neck a bit (which should have augmented the effect of him being tall, and made the edge of one particularly nasty scar show its ugly face over the rim of his t-shirt), scrawling at her in a lazy challenge (and amusement). “They called me Bog King. And respected me as such.”

Marianne’s body did a half-turn. The look in her eyes was unreadable, but her hand went to her chest (fingers resting on the point of her v-neck and there were her bloody clavicles again – Bog swore to the Lord he was not a dog, but he felt like one when he looked at her and her delicate bone structure), eyelids lowering in one long flutter of eyelashes, and her eyebrows arched.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Your Highness. Aren’t you quite a, ah, ferocious man-beast.”

This was so stupid. He was so stupid.

Bog rubbed his face.

“Sorry, just,” he felt like an idiot. “Sorry.”

That seemed to astound her for some reason. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again, and her hands turned her helmet, over and over.

“Don’t. I was rude.” She grumbled. “Sometimes I forget I’m not at work, and that I have to toggle down on my “bossy bitch” dial. Sorry.”

Her hands were restless. His felt the same way. He eyed her bike helmet. Bog has seen her ride the thing, and his old broken bones whined. One should not drive that fast or that reckless (he knew, he used to do exactly the same thing).

“Is there anything you are afraid off?” he blurred.

Marianne lips pursed. Her eyes trailed and stopped on the star of his peaking scar.

She licked her lips, a beginning of a sentence on her tongue, when her phone started to sing.

Marianne gave it a quick glance. The screen said Roland. Bog didn’t want to ask who Roland was, and why he felt great about Marianne’s fleeting cringe of disgust and her “haha no” as she dropped the call. Another thing bothered him though.

“I know this song. You are not old enough to know this song.”

Phone muted, she hid it in the pocket of her jacket. “I’m not old enough to remember the 90s?”

“I’m pretty sure those were the early 90s. I think I was drunk through most of the late ones.”

“Here comes the Summer son, he burns my skin,” she sang suddenly, and it was Sharleen Spireti all over again, with her hair in places, and a sincere, dopey and slightly shy smile and that unique tank top fashion that would haunt their generation. (He had a crush; it was embarrassing.) That indeed was the drunk part of his almost twenties. Marianne’s voice was the best thing he even heard in an elevator (and maybe beyond) – it was raw, and powerful and gripped him in its talons, claws ripping into his heart. “Sounds pretty late 90s to me.”

The elevator opened, and she stepped out, still singing, as if to herself. “And to answer your previous question,” she held her hand against the door, pensively, licking her lips (candy red). Then she swiftly smashed her palm against the floor panel and jumped back as the doors started to close between them.

“That’s for me to know.” She winked at him.

The elevator went on rising, probably, and Bog still stood in it, Marianne’s singing voice (not unpleasant at all) ringing in his ears. He tried to remember when was the last time he was this… this… he tried to find a word for it and his vocabulary failed him. All that came to mind was holy shit.

Holy shit, she was insane. Absolutely lovely and crazy. It was wonderful.

And here what wasn’t wonderful.

Since the arrival of the next-door sisters (but he had to tell himself he can’t blame them, since he spanned his own disaster), he lost his concentration, and everything started to go to shit. One of his suppliers decided not renew their contract, the other was behaving like a bitch, and the usual customer flow was going to hell – it seemed like it was the holiday time already, so everyone skipped town, except for him, who had to figure out what the hell he was going to do to make ends meet. Whatever the leeway fund he had left would not be enough is another month of this went on.

His mail not arriving properly was just the icing on the cake. The bank didn’t give away information and he could only guess about how much money in savings they had left. (Alright, maybe he did have an idea, but he wanted to know, for sure, so that he could readjust his business plan.) He had to pay people because people got iffy then not paid to. And Bog hated dealing with iffy people. (They awakened urges in him, urges to do bodily harm.) That’s what he had Stuff and Thang for. They were good at that, especially Stuff - they were good at little else, but them working the counter gave Bog time to think, and Bog needed to think. Not only about his father’s business that he somehow still haven’t failed, but came close to a couple of times (back when his mother insisted on him getting an education – that was the worst, because she was not a business person, AT ALL), but also about the fact that he was going insane, honestly considering asking out his neighbor, who he knew little about, but wanted to know all about, but didn’t want to ask, because maybe he was reading it wrong and humming songs he sang in the shower while they rode the elevator in the morning was her way of mocking him.

Bog didn’t know and it drove him up the wall.

“Boss? Do you need help?”

“NO,” he didn’t. He was fine. He was just fucking fine (no matter what Marianne, heat rolling off her skin, mouth bright and slightly open and wanton, tight muscle everywhere, did in his dreams).

“Boss, you are cutting up that cow like it murdered your whole family.”

The cow in question, a carcass brought in this morning, was not cooperating. It looked like a hacked mess. But he could still save it. Some parts of this cow he already sold, and he had to make sure they were in good state.

Bog’s breath came in warm thick clouds. The wall of the cold room, shelves of chilled meet and things that did not talk back at him or seduce him with their shapely forms, all orderly and organized, calmed him. The wooden stump, old enough to remember his father and trustworthy like his mother’s five o-clock snacks you could set your watch by, stood before him, and he leaned on it, hanging his cleaver on the hoop on his belt.

If his mother were here, she would have told him to put on his stupid fleece. But she wasn’t, so he enjoyed the shiver that ran up his bare arms up his short t-shirt sleeves.

“I’m fine,” he eyed his handiwork again.

“Boss, if you are worried about the cash flow, we could wait-“

Thang understood the glare Bog shot him in exactly the right way, and hurried out of the cold room. Except none of them would ever learn how to properly close the doors (and that is why the damn cold room kept breaking, the engine overclocking, but no, this was too bloody difficult to pay attention to what you were doing – once, just fucking once, that’s all he was asking for), so Thang’s next phrase was not meant for him, but for Stuff, who did restocking.

“You said he would be glad,” they’ve been working together for almost ten years now, and he still sounded upset whenever she set him up. “But he got mad.”

“Because you worded it wrong,” the woman’s calm dismissal of everything, including her own faults, was a treasure for all of them.

“But that’s how you said I should ask!”

“And you are an idiot if you keep quoting me,” a bull smack confirmed that she wacked him on the backside of his head. “And that’s not the only reason he is mad.”

The pig head stared at him from the shelf. Bog bared his teeth at it.

“It isn’t?” Thang, trusting and amicable and mouthy, repeated after her. Bog looked to the ceiling, exasperated. He did have a soft spot for Thang, because he felt that if he didn’t take care of this little man with huge puppy eyes, he would get knifed somewhere in a dark alley and if would be all Bog’s fault.

“Griselda says there is a girl.”

Sometimes, sometimes he wanted to murder his mother as well. The judge and the jury would probably go easy on him.

“Oh,” Thang sounded confused. “But that’s a good thing, right?”

“If she weren’t married.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Jesus Tap-dancing Christ.

“Or maybe,” he walked out of the cold room, boor slamming shut behind him. “You should listen less to my mother, and, oh, I don’t know, do your bloody jobs.”

He threw his apron on the counter, dumped the cleaver on top, and then pulled his jacket of the hook by a staff door.

“Are you coming back, BK?” They were doing their pleasant “customer” faces. Usually he would have snorted at them, but today was not their day.

“Don’t forget to check the freezer door when you lock up,” with that he walked out and looked at the sky, a carpet of clouds thrown from one rooftop to another. The air smelled like exhaust fumes and dust, and there was supposed to rain in the evening.

“It’s your fault,” Stuff’s gruff rumble came through the glass of the window.

Arguably, he could go back in, and maybe look at his books. His father used to do that in the evenings, his back bend over huge lined pages, glasses sitting on the tip of his long and thin nose that Bog inherited (among other things), but managed to break at one point, which made a bit less impressive.

Or he could go home and lie on his sofa for an hour, while Imp would sit on his chest, and try to figure out what to do to keep his business afloat.

He dug the pavement with a tip of his shoe.

The Italian pizza place across the street smelled of tomato sauce and cheese, and the ghostly taste of Marianne’s lasagna made him salivate. Home it was then.

It was a short walk, and a long elevator ride, and he was ready, already pulling his keys out, when he almost tripped over the woman he was now obsessed about, crouched in the middle of the corridor over a large duffle bag, and throwing things out. There were a bunch of shirts, and solid black pants, and something white and buttoned. She stood up, raised the bag over her head and shook it. The bag jingled.

“Need help?”

Marianne noticed him even later than he noticed her. Her make-up reached a new level of aggressive.

“I’m good,” but she kicked the bag with a toe of her boot. The bag seemed mocking as it hit the doorframe. “Can’t find my f-ing keys.”

He scooted sideways past her and her piles of clothes, and thought that, perhaps, he should leave her alone. She was a big girl. She could handle this.

Marianne dragged her bag on the floor and flopped down before it, once again digging in. She kept telling herself something, but all he could hear was a low hiss, as air rushed through her clutched teeth.

He felt like he was inviting disaster, but bad choices were his credo, so he let out a slow calm breath through his nose, and turned on his heels.

“I can help.” With that he made one long and decisive step, took the bag from under her nose, disregarding her yelps, turned in over and shook, once, twice, bottles and pens and bits of paper falling out before her. Finally, the keys gave up, and landed square on her lap.

Marianne grabbed them, and crawled on her knees to the door, unlocking it with a maniacal satisfaction.

“Thanks,” she popped herself back up and looked around at her mess. “Never do that again.”

“You’re welcome,” he trusted the thing back into her hands, and turned on his way home.

Behind him, Marianne, eyeing her things, started to collect them in stacks with her feet and stuffing them back where they belonged. Her voice, in humming monotone of disappointed noised, accompanied him all the way to the door of his man-cave. He got as far as twisting the key in the lock before he got distracted by a loud slap that turned out to be Marianne hitting herself on the forehead.

“Shit, I completely forgot.” She kicked the repacked bag into the apartment door. “We have your mail.”

Bog crossed the distance between their homes in a record speed. “It was a week!”

“Well, excuse me, I’m not the one picking it up,” she marched into her flat and he followed suit, lock clicking closed. “Dawn does, and then she throws it on the coffee table and forgets all about it until someone – see under “I” – wonders about the utilities that have not been paid.”

She bended over the sofa back – Jesus, woman, do NOT do that – and grabbed a stack of letters, thrusting them behind her. All of them were opened.

“Uh,” he shuffled through them quickly, and sure, here was the bank statement, and… well. It was not as bad as he thought. It was bearable. He would survive. “Why are they opened?”

“Because,” she regarded him unnerved. “Dawn picks them up and forgets them. I open them without looking who they are addressed to.” She popped herself on the back of the couch, arms crossed over her chest, her helmed bouncing on her knee. “If you are worried about privacy, don’t worry. Haven’t read them.”

Yeah, that didn’t help his mood at all. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I supposed to feel grateful about that?”

“Dude, I gave you your mail back.”

“As would any other normal human being who lived in a community of other human beings, and not in some upper east side penthouse.”

The other letters were nothing of interest: utilities, the letter about some street food festival, his mother’s subscriptions. Marianne was strangely quiet.

He tore his eyes away from his mail, to give her a long face and a raised eyebrow.

“I’m sorry, did that hit the nerve, Princess?” Bog didn’t know why he was so mean, but it felt great, and the poison just couldn’t stop spilling out of him mouth.

She pushed off the sofa, and shoved him. Her fringe felt over her eyes, but through it, they shone, dark and malicious.

“YOU KNOW WHAT?” Marianne was shouted. She was flushed and hunched, and if Bog weren’t so on the roll, he would have been afraid (a little bit). But he was pissed off (not at her, mostly at himself, that he was pissed off, and that he let it affect him).

“WHAT.”

“YOU WANNA FIGHT?” She was tugging off her jacket, and it fell on the floor in a puddle of leather. Her helmet went the other way, and she pulled her hair off her face. “OKAY, LET’S FIGHT.”

Next moment her fist slammed into his face. His jaw cracked. His head swan.

It hurt like an absolute bitch. The angle was just right, and if she hit just a smudge harder, he would have made her take him to the hospital, and possibly spoon-feed him through a straw with mushy soup-like porridges.

Marianne hissed at his side, and he cupped his face, rubbing it – it was still going to bruise, his mother would be worried, he couldn’t tell her know he let a woman he fancied fix his mug, she would take it the wrong way -, and turning her way. 

Oh fuck.

Marianne was sucking on her lightly bleeding knuckles. All of them were pink and irritated, but the two above her index and middle fingers were raw, and her tongue darted out to lick her wounds, annoyance and the remainder of her anger marring her face. When she wasn’t licking it, she waved it back and forth, swearing, lips curling, barring her teeth with small sharp fangs. She muttered something about digging her own grave.

Marianne punched him hard enough to hurt her hand.

Bog felt like she covered him in gasoline and set him on fire.

He whined. Her head rose in bewilderment.

“So, uh, is your other hook just as good?” he rubbed his face some more, gulping the taste of copper out of his mouth. She stared at the corner of it.

She probably split his lip as well. He licked at it. Indeed she had.

Marianne still stared. She wore an expression of slight horror at her own actions, but in the tips of her fingers tingled satisfaction, and he could almost touch the feeling of release that bridged over both of them, from her hand to his face.

Warmth pooled in the bottom of his gut. Her tongue darted out to pick the edge on her lower lip. He mirrored her, and tasted blood. Her knuckles were still bleeding.

The though of his blood on her hands rose in the back of him mind. It didn’t… horrify him. Out of all the people to ever punch him in the face she seemed the most worthy.

In two steps she was before him, her pain forgotten, as she raised her hand to his face, her fingers pressed against the sting of his mouth.

“Crap.” She swore in her usual offhanded manner. He wanted to kiss the explicit out of her.

Someone knocked on the door. Her hand pulled away.

Marianne brushed pass him to get to the door and open it in one wide pull.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he was fair-haired and white-toothed and perfectly handsome. Bog hated everything about him and that Marianne, his dominant, brash, strong-willed Marianne, who had the nastiest right hook, stood mortified like a deer in the headlight in the open door of her apartment. “Have to tell ya, if I knew any better, I would have thought you were hiding from me.”

“Roland,” she blinked away her stupor, spit out a curse, newly awakened anger making her almost sizzle. “What the fuck?”

“Language, darling,” he popped himself against the doorframe and his eyes skimmed over her curves. “But I do have to say, you let yourself go a bit, didn’t you?”

Bog dug his fingernails into his palms. The blond didn’t even notice he was there.

“Doesn’t matter,” Roland cleared his throat, fingers fanned over his heart, and when he opened his mouth, what came out was a baritone. “Here I am, on my knees again-“

Marianne crashed her fist across his face. It came back marred with blood – Bog had no idea, if it was Roland’s, Marianne’s or his. Next her knee came across his stomach in a quick precise hopping kick, and she slammed the door shut.

She turned, shaking slightly, face pale and determined. “He might actually break the door.”

Roland groaned – “Marianne, this is not how you take somebody back!” - but continued, his fist banged against the door, voice insistent, piercing through the wood and paint and Marianne’s tense straight back.

“Help me get out of here,” she demanded, as Bog fought an urge to wrap his arms possessively around her.

Instead, he looked to the fire escape, the edge of the landing looking into her living room.

“Get a knife,” he reached the window in a few confident strides, pulling it up, and looking outside for the signs of any friends the new person in his life might have brought along. And there they were, loitering by her bike they it belonged to them.

“When I said that I’d cut him, I didn’t really mean it,” Marianne popped by, mean blade in her hand, and noticed the awaiting committee. “So going down is out of question.”

“Who said we were going down?”

Bog climbed on the fire escape, careful not to make too much noise, and threw his leg over the railing. She crawled out after him, and immediately grabbed his arm.

“No. We are not doing that.”

“Do you have any other options?”

She looked around quickly.

“The roof?”

“Yes, that won’t occur to them at all.”

He pulled the knife out of her fingers. Marianne pursed her lips. Bog wanted to kiss her.

“Less sass – more escaping.” She leaned to look behind him. “Your window is locked.”

“Watch and learn.”

He threw his leg sideways, toes finding the familiar half-brick perch. Carefully, he slid the edge of the knife along the crack between the window panel and the frame, until it touched the locking mechanism. He stilled, balancing between the landing and the parapet, aimed the point straight at the lock, and with one swift precise hit of the heel of his palm on the handle, the lock gave with a quiet crack.

“Excellent,” she murmured over his shoulder. “And how are you going to open it, smart guy?”

Bog smirked at her panicked skepticism. His fingers hooked against the ridges of the window, as he slowly pulled it up, using the knife as a lever. He needed just a crack wide enough to fit his hand, the rest he could pull up easily.

Imp perked at them through the opening, mug sharp and curious.

Bog dumped the knife inside his living room and pushed back to hang on the fire escape.

“Your turn, Tough Girl.”

Marianne’s eyes were huge and chocolate. The wind picked up and her hair was flying everywhere.

“I changed my mind.”

The sound of something heavy hitting against the door made them both snap their heads.

“It’s this or him. And he looks rather determined.”

“God knows,” Marianne muttered, looking down through the bared floor of the landing. “I’ve been blind.”

He took her hand. “Trust me.” Their eyes met. She gulped.

“Alright. What do I do?”

That’s my girl a good girl the spirit.

“Simple,” he placed her hand on his shoulder, and felt her tense up again all the way to the soles of her feet. “First, you relax.”

“Easy to say.”

The front door on her apartment cracked. Marianne stopped fidgeting.

“’Kay, I’m calm. Now that?”

“Wrap your arms around my neck.”

“Is it necessary?”

“I recon the door will take about two more hits. Your opinion?”

Marianne’s arms were sudden. They came around his shoulders, her fingers digging into his back. Her breath, small, hot, tickled behind his ear.

“What now?”

Bog had to think. Marianne’s small breasts pressed against his chest. Thinking came difficult.

“Now, uh… now don’t look down, and when Ah tell you to let go, do it.”

She nodded.

The fire-escape groaned, and shed rust. Bog cursed fair-haired assholes, and wrapped his arm around her hips. Marianne stilled, and then turned her head to look at him incredulously.

“Excuse-“

He lunged her in the air, swinging her legs over the railing. Just like a cat, he though.

Her hips sat on the railing. They pressed against his.

Nope, nothing like the cat, he corrected himself.

“I might need you to wrap your legs around my waist. I wouldn’t ask, but for your safety-”

Her knees found their way around his, and up his thighs, and against his sides. She pulled him closer. “Not a word,” her face burned his neck. “Or I’ll punch you. Again.” The crack of her door in the living room, accompanied by Roland’s yell, grew pleading. “One more hit, I think?”

His arm around her waist tightened. “Hold on.”

He pushed away. His hand, not occupied by a handful of Marianne, grabbed the frame on his window. His foot found its ground. She meeped, softly, into his shoulder.

Another push and her back was lined with the dark hole of his living room. He switched from one side on the frame to another and placed her on his windowsill.

The air was escaping her lungs in a slow calculating rhythm. Bog let his arm glide the horizon of her body before quietly commanding into her pierced ear.

“Fall.”

Marianne leaned back, head turning to find her landing position. Her arms streamed down his arms and chest, one grabbing on to the frame to let her back curve.

The door in the next-door apartment gave up. “Marianne!” called the voice on the man they were so successfully almost escaping.

Marianne’s eyes took over her face. “It’s all very nice,” she told Bog, and scrunched the front of his t-shirt. “My turn.”

And then she literally fell into his apartment, and pulled him in with her. They landed in a heap on the carpet of his living room, his arms wrapped around her protectively. His shoulder took their weight and pulled, sore. Marianne’s hand slammed over his mouth, and that was how they spend the next few minutes while the intruder next door climbed out on the fire escape, shouted at his cronies and ran off. Underneath, her bike crashed on the ground and the triplets made scarce.

Bog stared at his ceiling. Marianne’s head rested on his aching shoulder. Her hair tickled.

“I’m going to murder them if my paintjob is ruined.” She pulled her hand from his lips. “Sorry about that.”

She stayed pressed to his side. His hand was on her waist. He turned his head and met her hairline. Marianne had a high forehead. It was clear, with a small birthmark over her right eyebrow. “Is this going to become a usual part of my life?”

Marianne curled. In his arms, she didn’t feel like someone who just kneed a man in the stomach.

“I hope not,” he caught her eyes, and childlike embarrassment in them (there was also a very adult guilt, but she hid it well).

Bog stretched (his shoulder hated him).

“Too bad,” he sat up and Marianne unrolled from him to lie on her back, her hair – an auburn halo around her face. “You are the only person I get to jump a building for.”

The sunlight hit her face and disappeared behind another cloud. Marianne covered her mouth with her hand, and her cheeks were just a hint of blush. He didn’t know, maybe it was the excitement of a jump, maybe the adrenalin of the escape. What Bog knew, is that when her hand pulled away, the gratitude was real and it stabbed him in the heart.

Marianne was sunlight. She was a breathless gasp five floors over the ground, and a galloping heartbeat. Marianne was a tail of a runaway comet that was slipping between his fingers. She was a punch to the face – and he kept asking: again, again.

“What do I owe you?” she sat up, as he contemplated by her side. She blew hair off her face.

At least that answer he knew. “Food.”

Marianne pressed her forehead to his shoulder. “You are so easy to please.” Her whole body rocked with silent laughter.

“I’m a simple man with simple needs.” Imp decided that it was a great time to check it they were still alive, and climbed on his knees. It opened its mouth with a silent demand for attention. Bog scratched it behind the ear. Marianne joined in.

“Sorry for punching you in the face,” but he knew, she wasn’t. And he didn’t want her to be.

“You did promise me a beating.” It wasn’t funny, but he laughed.

She elbowed his side with disapproval, and pulled herself off the floor, looking around.

“Nice place you have,” her eyes spotted the kitchen and she immediately set her way there.

Her fingers walked along the counters and twisted back and forth the stove gauges. She opened the fridge and examined the insides. Marianne rummaged through his cupboards and he was enjoying it.

“You are so single,” she ducked under her arm while examining the space under his sink. “This kitchen is telling me no woman even cooked here.”

“Are you a kitchen whisperer?” His cat won in its persistence by climbing on his shoulders and falling there in a cat-shaped beanbag, paws forming a collar down his chest.

“Nah,” she pulled out a can of spam, and some eggs, and the carton of milk, sniffing at it skeptically. “I just touch it in all the right places, and it tells me all its secrets. A pan?”

“On your lower left.” he racked his hands through his hair. “You are cooking now?”

She dug around.

“Why not? I think with Roland around I have an hour to spare.”

“Fair enough.” Bog shuffled around the living room to the cat’s bowl. It was half empty. Imp rolled its eyes like it haven’t eaten for the past three days.

Water was turned on and off. The conqueror of his kitchen exclaimed joyfully. “My baby, he didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“You found the cutting board, I guess?” He walked back to the kitchen, and stopped, observing the clutter that his counter turned into. There were a can of spam, eggs and a meager smidgen of butter and half a carton of milk, yes, he remembered buying those. But also dried herbs, and packs of spices, and even some vegetables in cans that he didn’t procure at any time, and it would have worried him if he didn’t remember about his mother and her habit of stocking his pantry.

Marianne turned to face him. She had a knife in her hands and she was sharpening it with a prehistoric sharpening stone she dug up in some drawer.

“For a man, your knives are in a horrendous condition.” She thumbed the edge. “When was the last time you cooked?”

“I-“ he took a step but she stopped him with a stretched arm. “What?”

“I’m confiscating this kitchen,” she pointed to his face. “And in my kitchen a cat exists beneath the counter level or not at all. Apron?”

“Don’t have one,” Bog sat himself at the kitchen table, and pulled Imp onto his lap.

“Oh, well,” Marianne turned the knife in her fingers. It rolled in her grip, like she owned it, and she weighted it in the palm of her hand. Bog sucked in his breath. She grinned. “Good knife. So,” her eyebrows rose and fell, like she was brewing trouble. “Me thinks a quiche.”

Bog never had a quiche. He shrugged. In her hands his good knife did magic.  

Marianne danced in his kitchen. Not really danced, but that’s what it looked like and he couldn’t turn away. It was a performance of cutting, mixing and seasoning, pan sizzling, and she sang in French to herself and her cooking, and talked to it, and argued with it at some point, something about telling milk not to bloody curl, and in the end he wanted to applaud, as she stood a plate before him.

“Thank you, far too kind,” she did a mock curtsy. “Now eat.”

He dug in. It was the weirdest tasting pie he ever had. He loved it.

“Do you even know…” she rubbed her face with her hand. “Granted, you are not far off. Technically, it still is a pie. Except it’s a quiche.”

He didn’t care. His face was in pain. He was happy. She watched him eat. She looked happy as well.

Bog asked for the moment to stop. It didn’t. Marianne looked at the clock, hanging on his wall.

“Well,” she rubbed her arm. Her knuckles stopped bleeding, but were red and swelling. She pretended it didn’t bother her. “I’ll have to tell the landlady that the door is broken.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll notify her, who should pay for property damage.”

The dimples on her cheeks danced. “What’s your secret?” She leaned to him over the table. “You seem to have a whole lot of privileges for just another tenant. Dawn would kill to have a cat.”

“I lived here long enough to be exempt,” he dodged. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Her hand fell to his elbow, eyes trailing his face. Her brow furrowed.

Marianne pushed away, her feet – small stripped socks, instead of her boots, forgotten by his front door – gliding on the flooring to the fridge to rummage through the freezer. She pulled a bag of frozen peas – really, mother, frozen peas? – and slipped back to press it to his face.

“I doubt she will be as leeway with me if she finds out I left a fist size dent on your face.”

Not if she learned about a dent Marianne left in his mind. But he won’t let her know that.

He said nothing – anything he would say would give him away – but just kept looking at her, the arches of her brows, the point of her slightly upturned nose, her fringe, curly and slightly dirty, and he liked how it sat as a part of her windswept hair, flying across her forehead to brush over her ears.

He put his hand over hers holding the bag. She pulled away quickly.

“Did I say something?”

“No.” And yet he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Her chest rose and fell. Her fingers curled in tiny fists – and they were tiny, and not angry at all, maybe a bit defensive.

“Alright,” Marianne briskly stood up, and walked to his front door, her funny stick legs rigid and long, even as she tried to fit her feet in her boots. “I… I’ll go check if my apartment is still intact. With a door broken. And things.”

Bog’s head bobbed. “Yeah. Good plan.” It came to him that he should probably walk her out. “Just give me a shout if you need me to put your door back.”

Marianne swayed. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” She opened his door and ducked behind it. But then popped to give him a quick salute. “Uh, thanks again for the save.”

“No problem. Just… feel free to hide over here whenever.”

“Yeah,” she looked at his floorboards as if the fiery pit opened before her feet. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 

Marianne disappeared and the door slammed shut after her. Bog gently set the plate with a half-finished quiche aside and let his head fall on the table with a groan.

He needed help. He needed to know what he was getting into, or tried not to get into, but at this point, who was he trying to fool, she had to just call and he would come running. Not that he was going to ask for said help. He just needed it.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help, Bog?”

“Plum, I swear, if you ask me again, I’ll fall off this ladder on purpose.”

“Oh, but you have such a worried face,” his aunt, with all the glitter in her bluish hair, and the urban chic meets Indian meets Gypsy fortune teller esthetic was driving him off the wall for the past half hour. “So what’s with that girl your mother told me all about? The one with a boyfriend?”

He never regretted any decision more that the decisions he made regarding his aunt. Some people got to learn. Bog didn’t. Every time her promised himself that anything that had to do with aunt Plum was a bad idea, and yet he kept coming back.

“Plum, she is just a girl who lives next door.”

“I remember one other girl who lived next door…”

Bog went down the ladder with a speed and elegance of a professional firefighter. His aunt did not expect to get him in her face that fast.

“Do NOT mention her.”

“That girl who broke her heart? Yes, we will not talk about her and how you’ve not looked at women after that.” She took his hands in hers. Like most women in his family, Plum was short and curvy, and probably quite beautiful when young, but now she was just a kitschy mess off hairspray and glitter. “But I know there is a girl now, and-“ Her tattooed eyebrows went up, as her thumbs pressed on the center of his palms. “It’s not the girl with the boyfriend. I sense a lot of pent-up sexual frustration and… purple?”

She was doing her energy-therapist-talk-to-your-dead-relatives jig. Maybe she was onto something, but he was not going to give a satisfaction of being right.

“Is that all you needed?” He rescued his hands, and nodded to the sign, now glowing steadily over the entrance.

Plum fixed her hair, like that was even possible, and pushed him inside her shop, dark and – what was it that his father used to call it? Ah, yes – ethnic. One had to realize that Sugar Plum (that wasn’t even her real name, it was a moniker she chose for herself, willingly) was as Scottish as his father, which was as Scottish as you got without ever being in Scotland.

Why the fuck a liquor store was ethnic, that was beyond him, or in fact anyone else in the family. But he let it go, he just let it go.

“Let me get you something to drink, child, and you can tell me all about that girl you are so twisted about,” she walked behind the counter, and pulled aside the dangling stings.

He wanted tell her that he wasn’t doing to share his personal life with her, because let’s not remember what happened last time he did. But he did want that drink, so he waited. On the counter laid a magazine, something about fine dining – how that was relevant to his aunt’s interests, was a mystery, but there is was, and he had nothing better to do.

So Bog pulled at it, finger on the glossy corner, and spun it on the transparent glass surface with some weird stuff thrown under it.

“The New York Finest and Youngest”, it said. Bog scoffed. He was pretty sure New York’s finest cook, no, chef, that was how you called it properly, lived next door and had the a large round calluses on the bottom of her index fingers, and small cuts on the pads, and a burnt mark at the heel of the left palm. She sang to her milk and argued with butter.

He licked his fingers and flipped a page. There was a line-up, men and women, clean and proper in their uniforms with chiefs, all young (in their twenties, probably), holding their specialty in their hands on pristine white plates (with a grand sense of superiority) and –

There stood Dawn, shoulder pushed forward and her head turned in a flirty way that made him uncomfortable, as she held her Apple Pie of Doom, with a scoop of melting ice cream, the whole jazz.

By her was Marianne. The thing in her plate was a collection of bits and pieces of random shapes and forms, and yes, it probably was esthetically pleasing and probably tasted like heaven, but not with the face Marianne was making. If someone served him food with a face like that he was sure they were about to poison him, or at least beat him to death with it. Her chef’s uniform was unbuttoned and hang down her shoulders, a casual white v-neck under it, and her hair were combed away from her face, her chief tied tightly over her head. Her lips were dark maroon.

Bog flipped the page, just to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. No, the girls, the Meadow Girls, Dawn and Marianne, were still there. He flipped further and found a whole profile on them. There were more pictures. Marianne in the kitchen, her whole appearance tough and sharp and professional as she ordered men around. Marianne with a look of concentration, as she whisked, and observed a straight line of something pouring down. Her and Dawn and some bearded old man in the middle of their restaurant, Les Champs, that had an air of something Bog would never afford.

The door of the shop opened and closed with a ring of a bell. Bog didn’t even notice it at first. He was staring at Marianne, the woman who crashed into his life with a hangover, and felt, well, not betrayed, since he wasn’t promised anything. But upset, yes. Because apparently there were other people than him who thought that she was incredible. They wrote her praises in witty prose, and she glared at them from the pages of popular magazines. So why would his words, what could he say to her that made any difference? That she didn’t know already?

“Anyone there?”

Bog raised his head to glare at the only present customer, but instead of finding at least the top of a head, the usual picture when you are 6 feet tall, he saw air. He kept lowering his eyes until they stopped on a beanie in a beer aisle.

Now that was a fucking coincidence.

“You. The boyfriend.”

Sunny squeezed the bottle he was holding to his chest and did a little jump. His eyes searched for the person calling him. Bog stalked to him in two long strides.

“The… Guy Next Door?”

Instead of a greeting, Sunny found a magazine article shoved into his face. Bog felt that he was owned some explanation.

“That’s Marianne, “ he said-exclaimed-asked. If case the man didn’t understand, Bog stabbed at the picture with his finger. “And Dawn. That’s Marianne and Dawn.”

“Yes?” Sunny pulled the periodical down to raise an eyebrow at him. Bog was innerved. It was his move. He owned it.

The magazine Marianne continued to glare at him with a maliciousness of a woman who didn’t want to be there, and had better things to do with her life than to pose in front of food with her… relatives? They wrote the man was their father, and he looked like someone who would own a restaurant, thick white moustache and round rotund belly, and Marianne had… his cheekbones. Possibly.

“She is a big deal.”

“What gave it away, them calling her “Majestic Marianne” or that they name her one of the best young chefs of America?” Sunny paused, but cut down on the sarcasm as Bog growled at him. “They only alliterate when they really like you. Or if they think it’s a shtick. It’s the food industry.”

“And yet she is…”

“Not up her ass? Yeah, that’s what we had Roland around for. Don’t have him now, thank God.”

“Why?”

Sunny examined the bottle in his hands and put it back to pick up the next one.

“I’m not sure I should be talking to you about that.”

Ha, but Bog was versatile in blackmail and extortion.

“I’m going to give Dawn my cat again.”

“Please don’t. Dawn loves cats but they DO NOT share that sentiment. Very much so. Last time I spend two hours getting it from under the bed.”

Bog had a feeling many a words were said about the subject. Sunny turned to the light to examine his find, and frowned, putting it back on the shelf and picking the next one. Bog had no idea what the short man was doing, but he knew turmoil when he saw one (not really, but he preferred to think he did). In the end, under pressing silence, Sunny broke.

“Roland wanted to marry Marianne so they would inherit the restaurant together. To Marianne, that restaurant is her life. And so was Roland. No one knows what happened, but two year ago like a week before the wedding Marianne called the whole thing off. She wasn’t the same ever since. On a good side, she became a better chef. But on a bad one, we were pretty sure her liver would fail at some point.”

Wasn’t that… supportive. Bog got more grief when he broke an arm in fifth grade. But then again, he wasn’t Marianne.

“So, that’s Marianne’s problem? Because all I see, apart from the general craziness both sisters possess, is beer. But it’s not quite enough to raise any flags.”

“Well,” Sunny kept turning the bottle between his fingers. “Our flags are already raised. You know, the main reason Marianne moved in with us is not so she could look after Dawn-“

“Yeah, right.” Bog smirked. The Latino’s sigh was so habitual it was obvious no one ever took him for a person capable to look after someone. But all things considered, he was doing quite a good job. Bog petted his shoulder. “So what was it?”

“It was so that we made sure Marianne didn’t drink herself under the table.”

The picture of Marianne, dark lips, smudged make-up, came to mind.

“But she doesn’t drink that much.”

“Now she doesn’t.” Sunny picked up another bottle. It was Plum’s Love Potion (home brew, possible illegal, tasted like lavender lemonade that got drunk). Bog wouldn’t wish it on a dead person. “A year ago she drank about the same. Expect instead of beer it was vodka. Picked up kick-boxing about the same time.”

Oh, Bog wants to say. But it somehow made sense.

For some reason, Sunny laughed. Bog tried to understand what was so funny about your future sister-in-law being an alcoholic. Apparently his face conveyed that.

“It’s just that Dawn already broke our ears about what an amazing couple you two would make, and this is what Dawn does, all the time. And she gets what she wants. Hell, that’s the only reason her dad ever let me date her, and how she got this apartment.”  Bog was ready with his next words, like how that didn’t explain the drinking and how were they fine with it, when Sunny added. “I swear, Marianne is about this close to asking you out just to make her quit.”

Bog didn’t move. Sunny still had his aunt’s concoction in his hands.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but Dawn got it into her head, and she might have gotten a bit overinvested, so maybe you could… possibly… ask Marianne out? None of my business, I know, but please? I need to hear about something else, anything else, when I come home.”

Bog bunched the magazine in his hands, and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.

“Why am I the Pull-Ups Guy?”

Sunny got tomato red. “I’m not telling you that! You can’t make me!”

“Bog, are you there, child?” his aunt was just on time. She handed a tray with a jug of lemonade on it (could have been lemonade, could have been a biological weapon, fifty-fifty). “Who’s your friend?”

Bog felt malicious. He used Sunny as a meat-shield. The man was stupid enough to keep the bottle in his hands.

“Oh, I see you are interested in my Looove Potion!” her voice reached the level of a delighted shrill, as she pushed her load on the counter by a flyer that read: “Buy 3 – Get a palm reading!”

“Uh,” Sunny tried to run off, but Bog clutched his shoulders. “Am I?”

“Oh yes, you are.” Bog pushed him gently in the direction of the counter and his aunt’s welcoming predator embrace, while he made his getaway to the door. All things considered, if Plum got you, you had to step out of her shop with at least something.

But he was too late.

“Bog, do ask that girl out.” Plum’s voice stabbed him in the back of his head. “The one that punched you.”

“Goodbye, aunt Plum,” he pushed the door with his hip, and scrambled out, while the wanna-be medium threw her arm over his neighbor’s shoulders.

The sun was slowly setting. It colored the street red and orange, and the magazine was a heavy warm weight at his back. Her pulled it out, and straightened the page. Marianne was still angry at the world, but it brought a smile to his face. The sun burned her amber. He touched the corner of his mouth, where his split lip was healing nicely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

“Alright, Marianne.”

His feet were moving before he knew it.

It was ten in the evening and Marianne was late. Bog knew, because if someone asked, he was not standing in front of the elevator waiting for her, but he absolutely was. There was a plan in his mind, a rather clear one – he had time to come up with it as he ran home from Plum’s and it included asking her out for a drink, which he knew was a bad idea since most of the time he saw her she already had one, but he was going to ask her for a good drink, and then ask her out for a dinner, a best fucking dinner he could buy, and then walk her to her apartment, and possibly ask for a kiss (her was a gentleman, he was a gentleman, and a gentleman didn’t make out with women on the first date). But that would work if he could catch her on her way home, one simple elevator ride in the late evening.

He was wearing a shirt. And actual ironed shirt. This would work.

He wasn’t at all creepy and old and inappropriate.

She seemed to find his company bearable.

Yes, this was bound to fail gloriously.

The bike engine purred on the far end of the street. Bog’s heart did a summersault.

Marianne stormed into the building’s lobby, helmet in one hand, a pack of beer – of course – in another. Bog fumbled with his phone and called the elevator that in turn hummed like a prehistoric beast, uneasy on its way down. She bumped into him, the point of her elbow pushing against his side.

“Sup,” and his resolve immediately wavered. A tired shadow felt over her eyes, tiniest of wrinkles announcing their presence in the corners. He never noticed. “Look at you, sharp dressed. Going out?”

It took him a jiff to figure that she meant his shirt.

“More like coming in.” He mimicked to her 6-pack. “I see your evening is already planned out.”

“Yep,” it wasn’t the most enthusiastic reply, but her fingers clenched. “Nothing like hauling yourself in a hole, am I right?”

If there was something he could compare her pained grin to, it was the groan of the opening elevator doors. She marched in, and he followed, threading as lightly as he could.

Her eyes flickered almost yellow, wild and alone. Bog pressed the button. In the weeks, he learned to cherish this deathtrap (and the back of Marianne’s head).

She stared before her, shoulders downturned. Bog wanted to give her a hug.

“You clean up nicely,” she said.

“If by “clean up” you mean “put on a clean shirt” then yes, I do so rather well.”

She chuckled. “It’s a miracle you have a clean shirt. I’m wearing my last one. I’ve been having very soul-searching conversations with my laundry basket. It disdains me now.”

This was a bad idea. They were passing the third floor already. Bog mentally kicked himself. For assurance. “Marianne,” he started.

Her head lulled back.

“Yes, love?”

A single white hair in her do drew his attention. It was long and went all the way from her forehead to wiggle at him its albino tail. This girl was not fair. She looked at him like she was upset and tired, and he wanted her like she was on the carpet of his living room, in his bachelor kitchen, bright and loud and beautiful like a falling star. Like fire burned under her feet.

“Marianne, I-“

The light flickered. The elevator, a fragile box of possibly plastic (he had no idea) came to a halt. It was somewhere around the fourth floor, but not yet.

“The hell,” Bog pushed pass her and to knock against the doors. Nothing changed.

Marianne was calling someone. She regarded his attempts to open the doors.

“Hi,” she leaned against the wall. “Are you home? We are stuck in the elevator.”

Someone replied, and she closed her eyes with a wince. “We are my wonderful self and your favorite neighbor the Cat Guy. Bog, yes, him. He is trying to get us out.” She pulled the phone from her face, expression neutral. “Dawn says hi.”

Bog pressed his head to the traitorous mechanism. “Ask her if this is the power shortage.”

Marianne barely had time to bring back her phone. “It’s a power shortage. Welcome to New York.” Dawn was chattering excitedly. Marianne repeated. “The whole block is out. I have no idea why we still have light-“

“Back-up generator,” and he internally patted his back for at least pushing through with that. “But it won’t last long. Tell Dawn to call the landlady. She would know what to do.” He hit the doors the last time. “Bad news – we are stuck. Wouldn’t want to disturb this old thing. Hell knows what it would do.”

Marianne listened to him dispassionately. “Dawn, we are stuck. Call the landlady. Listen to her instructions.” The phone was squeezed into the pocket of her pants. Marianne pulled the helmet from under her arm and threw it on the floor. “Just my fucking luck.”

The beer bottles hit one against the other. Could have been vodka, he thought.

She bowed her head and shook it. The arm with a six-pack rose.

“Want one?” she asked. “I feel like drinking all of them.”

“Then let’s do just that,” he shrugged, and opened the top button on his shirt. Not his plan, but it would make do.

She smiled. Her eyes shone golden.

They sat across from each other on the floor of the elevator that smelled like bleach. His legs were too long to fit the width of the box, so he had them bend, his arms resting on the peaks, as he swirled beer in a bottle. He wasn’t comfortable, but he was great.

“And after all that, he had sex with her on my kitchen! My kitchen! I don’t know what I felt more offended for: my heart, which he broke, or my perfect marble counters! I cleaned them every bloody day…”

“You really liked those counters.”

Marianne was having her second beer. She was semi-sloshed.

Marianne Meadows, the girl with a drinking problem, was a lightweight. It was fucking hilarious, he had to bite the inside of cheek to keep from laughing. Not at her. Mostly at himself and everyone’s ominous premonitions.

Marianne’s cheeks and ears were flushed, and her hands, clutching her beer, were flying around, gesturing wildly, as she told him the tale of Roland, the cheating ex-fiancée, and the kitchen of her dreams. Bog had no idea one could be so attached to a couple of drawers. That was a professional thing, possibly.

“I loved them. They were perfect in every single way. So smooth, such wonderful pattern-“ She sighed heavily and caressed her leg.

Or maybe it wasn’t about drawers at all. He regretted not punching the dumbass in the face before.

“Maybe a bit too much.” He nudged her with his foot.

She kicked him in return. It hurt.

“Laugh all you want. It was my dream kitchen,” she slummed down a bit, feet walking the wall by his shoulder. “I was going to marry that kitchen,” her beer hand rose, in a grand announcement, but something changed, and it fell back on the floor. “And cook for my kids in that kitchen and, and-” her eyes fixed on her toes. He looked at them as well. They wiggled inside her black slipper-things.

He switched his attention back to the owner of the toes who was still fascinated by her feet, except-

Except there were tears pulling in her eyes and she breathed, raggedly, through her mouth. She caught him staring.

“I was such a moron.“

The strangest thing was that her eyes weren’t red. They were wide and white and clear, but the tears streamed down her cheeks in a heavy downpour, and he panicked, slightly. He dug around the pockets of his pants and found just a wrinkled napkin from his shop.

“I’m sorry,” It wasn’t much but he passed it to her with an attempt of a supporting smile. “Please, don’t cry.”

He was already whipping her cheeks with the back of her hand, but accepted it anyway.

“What are you sorry about? You are not the one who cheated on me.”

“I’m sorry because you were in a relationship with someone who lead you on with false promises and made you think that all you wish for was wrong.”

Her mouth was doing a thing where it kept closing and opening, and array of emotion switching like a kaleidoscope, as if she was not sure whether to be angry, to be sad, to be surprised, to be loud or to say nothing at all.

His jaw spasmed. It was an after effect of saying something ridiculously mushy that she was probably to laugh at and call him a wuss.

“Cheers,” he raised his bottle and was about to take a sip when she spoke.

“I hate you, you know that?”

Her face was pale. Pale and calm. But as his lips pulled into a thin line, hers bared her teeth into a scowl.

“I was doing fine. I was fine. And then you drop in, like you are some… some…” Her shoulders did a little dance, up, down, a circle with a right one, a wave with his left arm. “Some guy from an Old Spice commercial, “look at your man, now back at me, with my hot as fuck scars, and my so stupid but so adorable cat, and my wide shoulders”, and what is even that thing that’s growing on your face? Is it a stubble? Is it a beard? We just don’t know!”

Bog gulped. “It’s a beard.” It was a rhetorical question.

“I’m so glad we got that figured out! And you know what? I hate Dawn too, because she is a tiny baby and should not look at men-”

He raised his hand.

“She rents an apartment. With her boyfriend. Dawn notified me that she is, and I’m quoting, “a grown woman in a healthy stable relationship”- ”

“Shut up. It’s her fault my morning starts at seven and consists of a lot of black coffee and your upside-down pull-ups, and what kind of nerd high-fives his cat? And sings Roxette in the shower? And looks porntastic when fixing the sink? And jumps windows like it’s a fucking casual Saturday?”

“My relationship with my cat is personal. Is that why I’m a Pull-Ups Guy?”

She took another swing and pointed at him with her bottle.

“I’m not done. And then you have the gall to look at me with your stupid soul-piercing blue eyes and tell me my lasagna, lasagna, babies know how to make lasagna, pothead college kids make lasagna, you tell me that my lasagna is divine. I’m afraid to know what you are going to tell me if you try my specialties, which I would personally call a-fucking-mazing.” She combed through her hair, head hitting the wall of the elevator. “All Roland ever told me was that I was good enough. And you? I punch you in the face and you look at me like I’m a goddess that rolled on a bike out of Valhalla to kick ass and cook good food, not specifically in that order, and that is, quite frankly, terrifying. And also makes me feel all tingly inside like the butterflies in my gut are having World War 2. And it’s all your fault.”

Her cheeks were flushed, and she sucked on her lower lip. “Now what do you have to say for yourself, you asshole?”

Bog didn’t know whether he should laugh or cry or just pull a metaphorical blanket over his head and pretend he was not there. He was in parts, and they didn’t want to cooperate.

He nursed his bottle for another long minute, in which she twitched and shrunk and drank some more, and hid her face into her knees. Her face bloomed like a flower, color, everywhere, and she wrapped her arms around herself, and in this heart-baring moment of truth, in her soft and unexpected fragility, she was adorable, and lovely.

Screw the plan. He gave up. He surrendered.

“May Ah kiss you?” he asked, and she replied with wide and slightly damp eyes and slack mouth and a half-finished “what the hell” wave of her hand he grew to… love.

Now that was a thought.

“Yet he asks…” Her brows furrowed. “Good. Lord.”

And then there was a temporary failure of reality, because he was still sitting on the floor of the stationary elevator, which wasn’t all that sanitary to think about, but the difference was that she was straddling him, and her pelvis rubbed against his, and her tongue was quick and smart and wet-hot again the roof of his mouth.

She kissed him, deep and hungry, and he responded in a way, one hand in her hair, another on her buttock, a bottle of beer abandoned somewhere hell knew where. She rocked against him, and his very uncomfortably tight pants, and moaned into his mouth. Her hands were everywhere, but felt most prominent cupping his face, and grabbing between his legs, which cleared his mind for a pure minute, where he managed to mutter Marianne.

“Shut up and keep kissing me,” she growled.

The better formed “We dahn’t ‘ave to…” crawled out of his mouth when he caught her hands in his.

“I had a plan,” Marianne panted, forehead pressing to his, and the length of her nose rubbed against his. “I wanted to challenge you for a fight, knock you down and screw your brains out.”

She twisted her wrists, and now his hands were in hers, and she placed them, shamelessly, on the curve of her ass.

“Wha’ tah greight plan,” his lips caressed hers as he took a hint and squeezed, his hips rolling into hers. Marianne, tight like a string, cupped his face, and pulled him into another kiss that made his eyes fall close and roll to the back of his head with a groan. He kept them so, nothing distracting him from her teeth biting his lips, and her teeth nipping along his jawline – your mean face, I love it – to suck on his earlobe, and lick the rim of his ear, and purred don’t’ stop talking.

“Could do,” he nuzzled her neck, “Mo nighean donn.”

“Oh,” her hips buckled. “I can so work with this. But,” and she was pulling away and standing up and he was very confused. “Not on that horrible floor.”

“Ah’m pretty sur’ the’ wash it,” but he stood up and pulled off his jacket, before pinning her against the wall, his knee between her legs in a slow delicious rub.

Oh, but this was going to be difficult. Bending down to kiss her while doing other things required a flexibility he was not sure he possessed. Marianne looked concerned about that as well. So she solved it in a hand-on Marianne way. Her arm went over his shoulders, and she threw her leg over his hip, and then she pulled herself up against him, bracing against the handrail behind her back.

“You are pretty sure,” the tip of her nose touched his. “But have you ever seen them actually do it?”

Just once, just this once Bog regretted his lifetime of sex-depravation. Marianne had everything the he lacked in the flexibility department. She was kissing him again, but it was slow and kindling, and almost suffocating.

“Ah should probably tell ye,” he caressed her hips, trying to keep her up, and to keep his thoughts straight. “It’s been ah very long time.”

Her tenderness hurt. Her knuckles caressed his jawline, and his cheekbone, and her lips broke in a lopsided broken smile. “So?”

She was going to kill him. Stab him with her soft yet callused hands, then shove them into his chest and pull out his heart, raw and beating. He was going to die and it was going to be her fault.

“Ye’r sumthin’, ” he kissed her in return, putting all the care he could pull from the corners of his being right into her lips. Marianne had other plans. She bit on his lower lip, right at the healing split, pulled at it and let it go, and repeating the same with the upper one.

“I haven’t had sex for two years,” her hands fumbled between kissing him and trying to get his shirt off and trying to get her shirt off and touching him everywhere.

“Ye don’t ev’n wan’ t’ kno’,” he shared, trying to sit her on the handrail of the elevator so he could work on her pants, but she was wiggling so much, and slipping off, and grinding against his dick, which he didn’t mind that at all, yet it was all frustratingly counter-productive, since they had a plan which included both of them getting at least semi-naked, and he was not pulling his weight, getting distracted to squeeze her buttocks and to kiss her mind away.

She finally pulled back, she probably needed to breath, or maybe not, since breathing was for the weak, and her fingers in his hair guided him to her neck, and her legs finally wrapped around his waist – her pants were still on, but they would figure that out eventually – so he didn’t have to support her so his hands freed up.

“Well this is going to be fun,” she cackled in his ear, and catching the moment of his aroused confusion, ripped his shirt open, buttons flying everywhere, and pulled it down his shoulders. “I’ll get you a new one.”

“Let me tell ye all ‘bout fun then,” Bog growled into her ear, teeth and lips and tongue nibbling and teasing and tasting her neck, and yes, it was soft and pale, and he wanted to sink his teeth into it as he made her scream, but maybe some other time. Right now the noises she made were forming a song of satisfied mews, so he shifted them, just a small side-step, into the corner of the elevator, letting him playfully thumb her hipbones, peaking over the waistline of her trousers, nonchalantly hooking up the rim of her t-shirt, and pulling it off in one smooth and experienced movement (at least he hoped it came out this way).

She was not wearing a bra. Her nipples, brownish with tight little buds, poked at him.

“I was not kidding about laundry,” she explained, as he quietly thanked the universe. The universe turned out very responsive that evening, but mostly not in the way he wanted.

The overhead light buzzed, low and annoying, then flickered, and suddenly switched off completely, plunging them into a blinding darkness. Both of them went still.

Marianne shuddered.  “Are we going to fall down and die now?”

“I hope not,” but he wasn’t sure. “But if we do, I’m glad it’s going to be like this.”

“With my nipples pressed to your chest?”

If he could discern her face - which was probably grinning, of course she would be grinning like a loon, she was insane, and he was insane, and they were having sex in the elevator, and he loved every moment of it – he would have squinted at her, and her body, trembling with silent laughter.

“Yes. That would be it. That was exactly how Ah was thinking Ah wouldn’t mind to die.”

She pressed closer and clawed at him. In the dark, everything became just a bit more surreal. He could feel her breath against the edge of his jawline, so he gambled, and succeeded, catching her lower lip between his teeth and tugging. She moaned enthusiastically. Bog was immediately almost not pissed off.

“You killed romance,” he scolded her. “You killed it and now it’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she licked the corner of his mouth, as lost in the dark as he was. “Were you about to say something smooth that implied that my nipples were not pressed to your chest?”

His retort would have been on the lines of slapping her ass, but Marianne’s pants started to vibrate, vigorously, and sing another one of Texas classics. Both of them groaned. Marianne went straight for the loudspeaker.

“Hi, this is your friendly blackout watch, and what you have experienced right now was probably the house’s back-up generator dying,” Dawn sounded all too chipper about that. “But don’t fret, the power company said the power will be back in half-hour max. Sunny is lighting candles and it’s all very romantic.”

The light of the screen was tearing to the their eyes, but he still managed to fit her a judgmental arching eyebrow that at least her sister could appreciate the opportunity provided, and that he was not the only sap in town. Marianne rolled her eyes.

“Glad you two are having the time of your lives,” she turned her phone around to illuminate the walls, small piles of their clothes on the floor, and the white monochrome definition of every groove in their bodies, which she examined with invested desire pooling in her eyes.

“Are you two alright there,” Sunny’s voice cut through, and he was worried, as always. “Want us to come sit with you by the elevator?”

“NO,” that sounded more like a collective scream of the universe, rather the duet of their voices.

“We have still have beer, and there is true bonding happening,” Marianne’s free hand caressed the back of his neck and down his spine to a sweet spot between his shoulder blades, where she dug her sharp little nails into his hide. He hissed.

Enough of that.

“Riiight,” Dawn was a non-believer, but that wasn’t his biggest problem. That was to get Marianne out of her pants without detaching her from his hips.

“We are getting along just fine,” Marianne wasn’t planning on giving up either. She bit his chin. He pushed against her a bit harder. She spread her legs just a bit wider. She was pure liquid heat.

The cellphone glint in her eyes was positively evil.

“Dawn, we’d love to talk to you more but,” her free fingers touched his lips. He sucked one into his mouth. She watched him, a silent gasp lost somewhere in her chest. “We are in a middle of resolving one serious problem and it requires our full attention.”

“Are you hurt?”

They were not hurt (not counting his erection which started to get uncomfortable at this point). His tongue twisted around the tip of her index finger. That gave him an idea.

Her fingers popped. Marianne scratched under his chin.

“We are good,” she started, but frowned as he pulled away and settled her feet on the floor. Her eyebrow arched at him demanded explanation. “We are in a middle of an argument.”

Bog pressed a finger to his lips, but her hand was already doing the waving. So demanding. She was charming when angry.

“What are you arguing about?”

He pointed to the phone and waved to her to go on with the elaborate lie that she had going on. Marianne pouted.

“It’s between the two of us,” she saved, but gasped, when Bog fell to his knees and started covering her chest with kissed. They were light and tender, and streamed over her breasts, and the taunt plain of her stomach, that rolled like a wave under his touch.

“Marianne, are you there?”

He looked up at her, as his tongue flicked over her navel, and the light of her phone turned his way blinded him. Marianne watched him with a fiery gaze.

“Dawn, maybe you should spend some quality time with Sunny? While you have a chance?”

Bog tucked his fingers over the waist of her pants and guided them to the button at the front. Her hips urged him to go further.

“Thank you,” Sunny shared her sentiment entirely.

“Ugh, just… Don’t fight? I saw that bruise on Bog’s face.”

Marianne’s pants came undone. He pulled them down, slowly, getting his lips on the new territory. In the dark, he could barely see anything, but Marianne got her fingers in his hair, and she pulled on it, her wishes extremely clear. He let her pants fall on the floor.

“Dawn, I’m hanging up. Have fun.” Her last word flew to the ceiling in soft squeal, because her leg was on his shoulder, and he was biting her inner tight. She probably ended the conversation, because the phone’s light turned off and they were in darkness again. It was better this way. The phone landed on the floor by his knee, but Bog didn’t care.

He was very busy.

For some reason, back in the day, when those things interested him, Bog heard that it, and it implied giving head, was like riding a bicycle – you learned it once, and then you just had to remember the moves. It was not. Or maybe Bog didn’t remember the moves, so he did what he thought he should do, and that was to leave one long breathy lick over her core.

Her hips buckled against him so hard he though she would break his nose. It was a whole world of bodily harm with her, wasn’t it (Lord, he was masochistic after all). He returned to his ministrations, tongue licking back and forth, a powerful swirl around her clitoris, and a gentle, weightless grace of his teeth. Her leg on his shoulder flexed, as she tried to keep herself up (he was trying to do that too, but her bare smooth hips were growing slick, especially on their inner sides where he lapped at her, and he needed all the attention he could give her and her womanly parts), and her hand in his hair kept pulling, until she pulled a bit too hard, and he growled in pain against her lower lips – that was when he heard her, a sharp high-pitched moan that seemed to open a floodgate. 

“You are doing great,” her voice was honey poured onto his ears, velvety, and breathless. “So great.”

Her fingers massaged his scalp, and she rode him, her taste, sweet and tangy, filling his mouth.

“Ahh,” she probably tried to throw her head back, because he heard it hitting the elevator wall. He imagined her fringe clinging to her face. “Bog, you are never shaving this beard off ever again.”

The needy sultry way his name slipped off her lips made his dick twitch. It was untimely as fuck (he was about to let one of her legs go to massage her breast, but she shuddered against him, so he gripped her tighter, and if anything, she’d have his fingerprint bruises on her ass tomorrow, and he would pay actual money to look at them). It didn’t help that she smelled of sex, so much sex they could have been having for so long now, maybe on the carpet in his living room, or on the stupid island in her kitchen, or even that sofa with the coffee table, and he possibly was a dog, because he wanted to take her clothes off with his teeth, and bite the nape of her neck as he pressed her into the nearest fuckable surface.

Her phone blipped on the floor and light up. It sounded like a message, but none of them paid attention to it. What he did pay attention to was Marianne’s body, lit up by the white glow of the screen, hunched over as she looked down at him, like he was a five-story drop down, and her hands were slipping. Her mouth was open, and a soft yes please fell out of it right down his spine with a shiver. The light dimmed and blinked out of existence. They were in the dark again.

He gave her one more lick, and rubbed his face against the soft bump of her tummy, pressing a kiss to the edge of her short dark hair.

“Fall,” he growled into it, his own voice dark and rumbling. He moved his hand to touch her, thick and slippery. “I’ll catch ye.”

She chuckled, but it was just a bit forced, like she was drowning and air just couldn’t get into her lungs. “Will… you?”

“Always,” and he plunged his two long fingers into her, wet and hot and so bloody mind-numbingly tight, curling forward just as they reached the second joint. He bit the inside of her thigh.

Marianne screamed - YES BOG DAMN IT FUCK - her toes curling, the heel of her raised leg rubbing against his back, right between his shoulder blades, and she fell, legs giving up, as her insides squeezed him, one, twice, and on the third one, he pulled out and pushed in again.

She gripped his hair and pulled him up, roughly, her knee falling off his shoulder, but pulling around his waist. Holding her with only his upped body, he had enough time for just a quick breath before she stuck her tongue in his mouth, with what seemed to be an intend of eating him alive. He did not mind, he did not mind at all, because she was hiking her other leg around his waist and her heat, the soft and wet and tight slickness rubbed against him, and her one free hand was fighting with the button of his jeans like her life depended on it.

She won. She won, and her hand was down his pants faster than he could think, faster that he could make an inquiring sound about her wishing to go further, or maybe they could postpone this part for later, but she was doing some sort of a wiggle that simultaneously was tugging his pants down his hips and driving him absolutely insane.

She pulled him out, her slim fingers with wonderful rough patches wrapped around him, and Marianne tugged at him, his base rubbing against her bundle of nerves, and they cooed at each other, her skin damp in her ecstatic after glow and the thick smell of their arousal making it hard to breath, to think, to-

“Condoms,” she spat out.

Con-

His mind blanked. Yes, of course, he had to forget about something.

It’s not like he was about to have sex the greatest woman he ever met. Oh, wait.

“Fuck.”

Bog was pretty sure his fist had to leave a hole in the elevator wall. It didn’t, or all his blood just went to his groin so he couldn’t possibly feel bits of plastic in his arm.

Marianne, sweet and tender and hard in all the right places, grabbed his face in her hands, fingers pressing to his mouth.

“Wait. Shhh.” She kissed him; a lively peck to his upper lip. “Focus. Get me my pants. And please, don’t let my panties touch the floor.”

He nodded. Bog doubted she had condoms in her pants, but it was better than to be sexually frustrated, so he fastened her hands around his shoulders and her legs around his hips, and quickly bended his knees, grabbing her jeans as they laid at their feet, and rose back up again. Marianne hopped against him with a small “umpf”.

Her hands searched in the dark, finding his hands and her clothes.

“M’rianne,” he leaned to her neck, the smell of her sweat filling his nostrils, as she fumbled with her clothes. “It’s fine.”

“No, it ain’t,” she shoved something into his back pocket (and squeezed his ass in the most obscene way, how did she even reach that far). “That’s my underwear. Don’t lose it.”

“That’s your under-“ he started to repeat after her before she exclaimed, victorious, threw her pants over his shoulder, and filled their darkness with the most familiar wrapper rustling. ”Ye’ve got ta be kiddin’ me.”

“I told you,” her fingertips touched his chest, and trailed down, and boy, if he was waiting for her. “I had a plan.”

It was the most familiar feeling, but he wasn’t expecting it, or expecting to come any closer to it than he had in the past ten years of his life, so when Marianne wrapped her fingers around his length again – and she had a grip of a woman who was extremely familiar with manual labor, no pun intended – it was no surprise his hips nudged against her almost angrily.

He was about to apologize, if he remembered how while she stroked him, but she laughed, her breath hot against his Adam’s apple. “Hold your horses, love.”

She rearranged them, rising herself a bit higher, guiding him, there, but not quite, and he could bet she was teasing, maybe pulling this off a bit, when she pressed her chest against his, and kissed his temple. He licked along her jawline.

“Let’s just… start slow,” but she rubbed against him, and it was an extremely conflicting signal. “And we’ll be good.”

Her knees dug into his sides.

“Now, Bog.”

She didn’t have to tell him twice.

The first push was the worst. Bog thought he was about to have a heart-attack, because when he pressed against her core, she whimpered, but as he applied just a smidgen of force, and slipped in her, she just went all the way, and roughly slammed her hips against his, or other way around, because her fingernails were in his buttocks and DEAR LORD.

“THAT was NOT SLOW,” he cleared to her, but mostly made sure he was still alive.

Marianne heaved, he felt her chest rise and fall between them, and she seemed disoriented, nails drawing fiery lines up his back and gripping his neck, and Bog could barely discern her, and her clenched shoulders.

“I changed my mind,” her opened mouth brushed against his, and she cradled him to her chest, “Fuck slow. Fuck it hard and fast.”

Her insides clenched around him.

“Ar’ ye su-“

“Hard and Fast, Bog.”

He could do that. He definitely could do that.

“As ye wish,” he said into her mouth, putting his words onto her tongue.

Then he clenched her slippery hips, bit on the juncture of her shoulder and her neck, and rolled his hips. Hard. Like he imagined in the shower. No, maybe harder. He never imagined her so soft and slick, so deep, and most importantly so bloody LOUD. The grunts ripping out of him were sub-vocal, something almost primeval, as he slammed into her, but Marianne, woman who made him stop thinking about everything cept for his orgasm that was too fucking close for his liking, was moaning bloody MURDER.

Her voice was tall and high-pitched and there were words in there, and YES was very prominent, as well as FUCK, and his name, oh, how she moaned his name, everyone was going to know they fucked in the elevator, that he made her come, that she came apart around him, this magnificent talented gorgeous woman, who was bucking and shaking like a leaf, and in that moment (and all those that followed), he loved her with every fiber of his being. Her mouth covered his, sloppily, and he allowed her tongue to take over, taking in her sounds as they hummed into his chest. So he might come out a bit deaf of one ear, but that was a small price to pay this whole experience. Nothing could make it better.

The light turned on. The elevator buzzed as it came to life.

Bog opened his eyes.

He was so very wrong.

His bite on her neck bloomed before his eyes, right at the bottom of her flushed neck, and a couple of hikkeys rose up its slender column, to her concentrated face, elegant brows furrowed and cheeks flushed and lips bruised. Her eyes caught him, dark and golden, with wide dilated pupils, and she smirked at him (she was naked and sweaty and her breasts bounced a tiny bit as he took her).

“You have… to make me… come… in thirty… seconds… Doable?” she brushed a stray hair stuck to his forehead. He twisted his hips. She closed her eyes briskly as a moan ripped through her.

“Is that… ay chall’nge?” but he spend not time waiting for her answer, pulling away, letting go of her hips and hiking her legs – stiff and powerless simultaneously – over the crooks of his elbows.

Marianne whined – just a moment, woman, just a moment - her upper body leaned against the walls of the elevator. Her hands gripped the handrails. Her tongue curled. “Twenty seconds.”

He didn’t answer. He pushed right back into her.

He never had sex like this.

“GOOD MAN,” her voice flew to the ceiling, turning to a growl as her hand found the nape of his neck and the hair on the back of his head. “More.”

He raised one of her legs even higher.

His hand went to the place where they met.

“Ten,” and her thumbed her round erect bud.

Marianne froze. Her whole body grew stiff, tension running through her in an electric fave, coiling and coiling and twisting until it could no more, and she looked at him, or through him, or over his shoulder,

and something broke with an OH.

It was the shudder, the wave after wave after wave of her clutching him that did it. Or her nails in his neck, or ohmygodloveyesthankyousweetmotheroflordthankyou, but he would have to discern the last part at later date, not when he was coming so hard there were stars in his eyes. His hips moved, skin hitting skin in hard, commanding slaps, and he let go, burring in her and her body, going limp from head to tow.

Bog had no idea how they stayed propped against the wall. It was pure dark magic.

“I won,” he purred, finally, after he remembered what words were. Her clavicles were there. He licked them. He decided it was his price.

She nuzzled into his hair. “Next time I’m on top.”

Next time.

“Anytime.” Her legs fell of his arms, and hang down, as he slipped out of her and they both winced. “Ar’ you alright?”

“I’m great,” Marianne petted his head. “But do ask me again tomorrow.” She pulled on his ear and pecked his smug grin. “Now, there is a question of why the elevator is not moving.”

Bog set her carefully on the floor, holding her while she pulled her underwear from the back pocket of his jeans. “The order cleared. Someone needs to either call it, or to press the floor from the cabin.”

“Oh, so we can dress properly?” She said that and the elevator immediately came into action. “Or not.”

He never saw someone dress that fast. There wasn’t much he could salvage from his shirt, so he pulled his pants up, stuffing the traces of their activity into one of the empty bottles rolling on the floor, but Marianne, in took her about five seconds to slip into her pants and two and half to drop on her t-shirt that he threw in her direction. When the elevator stopped, they were pulling on their jackets, and Marianne was trying to wipe her lipstick off the corner of his mouth. He passed her the dropped phone.

“Dawn send you a message,” he said.

“What was it?”

The elevator doors opened.

“I wrote that Bog’s mother was wondering why he didn’t call her out of an only elevator in New York that had reception, and why, when she called him, he didn’t pick up.”

Marianne’s sister was not amused. Her thin brownish-grey eyebrows were brought together to form a tiniest angry wrinkle.  She had a bottle of Love Potion in her hands.

Bog fished in his jacket for his muted phone. His mother called him fifteen times.

“Living room. Both of you.”

The tiny girl pulled them out of elevator (together with Marianne’s helmet and their bottles) and pushed them all the way down the corridor into her apartment.

Before they knew, they were sitting on their couch, shoes and boots and Marianne’s hand was on his knee. Dawn stared them down, arms folded on her chest. (She was standing on the coffee table, but that was a bit less relevant.)

His lover (he could call her that now, could he?) pressed against his shoulder, her legs thrown one over the other. She had a shiniest smile.

“Alright, mom, scold us.”

“Marianne, your sass is not welcome,” Dawn shook her head, and when she raised it, her whole expression was channeling Bog’s mother. “Boggy, when I asked you to ask my sister out-“

Marianne’s nail dug in his tight. “Okay, the things I learn today-“

Bog’s hand landed over hers. His voice was grave. “She bullied me.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Shh. Quiet,” Dawn waved her bottle about. “When I asked you to do that, what I had in mind was that you would ask her to dinner, preferably at a place where she didn’t have to cook that dinner, and maybe buy her flowers, or go out to see the movies, court her, hand kissing optional, or something, you know, old people like you are supposed to do.”

“I am not old. I’m 34.” He wasn’t old. He wasn’t even feeling old after the elevator endeavor.

“Nope, he isn’t,” he was going to murder to this woman, who rubbed her foot against his calf. “No breaking hips there. I checked.”

Her hand slid up his leg. He pulled it right back where it was.

“Marianne, you are not helping.”

“What I didn’t have in mind,” it was like Dawn wasn’t even noticing her sister’s attempts at making her uncomfortable, “was for you two to have very loud sex in our very disgusting elevator with lights off.”

Ah, that might have explained it.

“It’s not that bad.”

“It smells like sweaty feet, Marianne.”

“Well, now it doesn’t.”

Dawn pinched the bridge of her nose. “You are disgusting. Both of you are disgusting. I’m very disappointed.”

“Dawn, I love you, but as you said, we just had amazing sex in an elevator, and now we would like to move on to a place that has a mattress and a light source that isn’t a cellphone.” She regarded a bottle in Dawn’s hands in quiet horror. “Dawn, what are you drinking? It’s purple.”

“This?” Marianne’s sister hopped off the table, looked at the bottle in her hand like she just noticed it was there. “I have no idea. Sunny bought it. I think it’s my third one. Tastes like lavender cakes mom used to make.”

She passed Marianne her bottle.

“I suggest you don’t do that,” Bog interjected, but it was too late, Marianne already took a swing, and prominently started to the kitchen to spit the contents in the sink.

“That’s exactly like Mom’s lavender cakes. Why would you drink this?”

“Because I like it?” Dawn followed her to get her drink back. “Just like I liked the cakes.”

“How many did he buy?” Bog leaned over the back of the sofa. It didn’t want to let him go. Maybe he was just a bit old. “And where is he, by the way?”

“Sunny bought a case,” the pixie girl’s tone made sure he understood who was to blame. “And he is in our room. Traumatized. He was worried about you.”

Bog stood up.

“I owe him a favor.” It was getting late. “Marianne, I-“

“We all owe him a favor,” the woman in question swerved around the island and her punching bag. She hopped over the sofa, grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him towards her room. “But it’s getting late, and we are going to hit the sac.”

Dawn remained in the kitchen and emptied the rest of the bottle into the sink. “No silly business. We have work tomorrow.”

“None whatsoever,” he stumbled inside and turned as she pressed the door shut with her back.

“Marianne, as much as I would love for you to ride me, I need a bit of time to-“

She shrugged off her jacket and pullet her t-shirt over her head.

“- I still need time to-“

She skimmed her pants down to her ankles and stepped out of them. Her panties had butterflies on them.

He sighed and took of the jacket and the shirt and threw them on the floor.

Marianne took her fuchsia t-shirt from under her pillow.

“I have work tomorrow,” she pulled it over her head. It barely covered her underwear. She stepped to him, her fingers hooking into the hoops of his pants. “Wanna sleep?”

Bog combed his fingers through her hair and kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss of passion, or need, but a one of love, and he followed up with a tip of her nose and the spot between her eyebrows and the top of her head.

“I would love to.”

The first time Brennan Keir slept-slept with Marianne Meadows, they both smelled of sex. But her face was tucked behind his ear, and her leg was thrown over his hips. Their fingers were intertwined.

In the morning, when she tried to turn on her stomach, and did so with a groan of pain, she elbowed him in the liver. It didn’t hurt (it actually did, but he was not going to tell her that, not when she moaned into her pillow and cursed his manly wiles). He kissed her bare shoulder.

Bog wasn’t fine.

He'd never been better.

FIN

P.S.

Marianne’s bed was squeaking. Well, first the window opened and closed, and then there were voices, and now her bed was making threats to break, because it was also banging against the wall, with an occasional heavy grunt that sounded like M’r’anne sweet heav’n M’r’anne, and her sister’s loud high-pitched moans.

It was the third time this week.

Dawn studied the door of her room in deep contemplation.

“Sunny, what do you call it, when you simultaneously love and regret the results of your actions?”

“I don’t think such a word exists.” Sunny’s voice was muffled. His face was planted on the counter by the side of his coffee mug.

“There should be. On one hand, I’m happy that Marianne and Boggy are together, because they look happy, and it’s always nice when people you love are happy – and Boggy is like an older brother everyone was afraid of in high school…”

“But on the other, it’s seven in the morning, and there should be a law against how loud one could be during sex. Marianne is like a sister to me, but, uh, how should I put it -”

“You won’t be able to look at her normally ever again?”

“That. Exactly that.”

Something fell. A loud yES oH YESSS FUCK ME crashed through the wall followed by silence.

“Alright, I’m going in,” Dawn sighed with determination, walked across the living room and knocked on the door. “First, good morning. Second, if anyone wants coffee, say Ay. A fresh pot is coming up.”

In the pause that Dawn gave them she could discern low murmurs, until two semi-breathless Ay (one of which, the male one, sounded defeated).

“Boggy, if you want to be excused from family functions, maybe be you should ask Marianne to move the loud sex to your place next time.”

That provoked another bout of low murmuring.

“That’s a dangerous terrain you thread,” called her boyfriend, as lifeless as he was before.

“Well, tough diggity damn,” she replied. She had to get something out of that. A cat, maybe.

P.S.S.

There was a knock at his door. Bog learned that a knock at his door before nine in the morning was never good.

“Let’s pretend we are not home,” he said, and not just because Marianne was naked on the dining table and he was very much into taking off her underwear.

The knocking continued.

“It could be Dawn,” suggested his girlfriend (technically not his girlfriend yet, they sort of talked about it, and her knife and her cutting board were at his place, so that was job half-way done, but they always seemed to get sidetracked). “I think she has a sixth sense about these things.”

The knocking grew into banging, and a voice joined in.

“Bog, open the door, I know you are awake!”

Marianne sat up. “It’s the landlady. Why is our landlady crushing your apartment at seven in the morning?”

Bog stepped away, and helped her to get down. “Let’s find out, shall we? But you have to put a shirt on.”

She nodded and patted to the bedroom. (She had a shelf. She asked for a shelf, and then used the shelf to store some shirts she never wore, while the rest of her clothing littered the floor.) He followed her with his eyes, the sway of her hips and the muscle of her tights making him question if he should completely disregard his mother in favor of having sex, but the other woman in his life continued to knock with demands, and he gave up. Bog twisted the locks, and the rest she did herself, barging in.

“Hello, mother,” he greeted her as she marched into his living room/kitchen and turned to face him.

“Why do I have to find out that you are dating someone from their sister who calls to ask if she can have a cat as well?”

“Good morning to you too,” he replied, and cursed the manipulative little girl who couldn’t let things go. “Did you come here to tell me just that?”

“No,” Griselda, as perceptive as ever, eyed two mugs on the table. “I came to have a look at her, of course.”

“Came to have a look at who?”

Marianne, dressed in another one of his t-shirts, thankfully long enough, walked out of the room. “Hi, I’m Marianne. You might remember me, I live next door…”

His mother gave her onceover. “Griselda. And yes, your sister told me all about you two.”

Marianne fidgeted, already questioning her fashion choice.

“She did now, did she? Might have to screw her head off-“

But his mother was already pulling her towards the middle of the room.

“Well, Bog, she is a skinny thing. A lot like me though. You do have your daddy’s tastes.”

Bog thought about stepping into the corridor and closing the door behind him.

“Wait, you are Bog’s mother? I thought you were the landlady.”

“I’m both.”

Alriiight. He walked over to them, and pulled his mother away from very grateful Marianne.

“Are you done here? We were about to have breakfast.” He sat her at the table (not on the sex side though, that would be just weird). Griselda dragged him mug of coffee to her, took a sip and gave an approving grunt.

“You? Having a breakfast? Who died?”

“Don’t know,” Marianne winked at her, and shuffled around to the kitchen, pulling an apron he got her over her head. “But we are having French Toast.”

“French Toast,” his mother repeated.

“You have to try it,” Bog saved his coffee from her grasp. “It’s great.”

“Bog.” His mother’s face was a hard mask of command and he fought an urge to straighten up before her. “You have to marry this girl.”

Marianne dropped the things she was holding.

“Mom, Jesus,” he set his mug down and hurried to help (his mother sniggered behind his back).

[What he didn’t know was that Marianne Meadows, a woman-next-door, thought for a exactly 5 seconds while picking up a bowl and a whisk she dropped on the kitchen floor that yes, she would like to marry her not-really-boyfriend – who was tall, and snarky, and flustered by his ridiculous mother (not wonder Dawn liked her, she could be their spirit animal any time) – but first, they must finish having sex on the dinner table after she’s gone. And talk about that.

There was also a chance that she would have to propose to him, but she’d figure it out eventually.

Right now, when he was (not really) helping her instead of talking to his mother, she had to admit, he was a strangest person she could have fallen in love with. But she did, so she will damn right make sure that he eats her stupid French toast.]