Not This Time
8
Live-In
JIM WASN’T PARTICULARLY HAPPY when he picked me up on Labor Day to move to my new apartment. I was ready. My things were packed and it all fit in his truck. The little hideaway apartment was spotless. I’d cleaned everything, including under the sink and behind the toilet. I’d even vacuumed the halls outside the apartment to make sure everything was in as good condition as it was when he brought me here almost four months ago.
We rode in silence to my new apartment and he helped me move in my few boxes and the bed. The apartment still smelled of fresh varnish. It was beautiful. It had probably been built in the ’30s. The building consisted of five connected fourplexes that wrapped around the corner so eight units faced west and twelve faced south. The units on the corner were all two-bedroom apartments. All the rest were one-bedroom. It was move-in weekend for the first fourplex completed. I had the top end unit. A couple was moving into the unit on the other side of the landing and I could tell the lower end unit was occupied. The hall was a mess from everyone tracking stuff in on the new carpet.
“Where are the cleaning supplies and vacuum?” I asked. “I need to get right at that hall and stairway.”
“I’ll have them delivered tomorrow,” Jim said. He turned to me. “Is this going to work?”
“It’s wonderful. What do you mean?”
“You’re pregnant.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to piss off my benefactor, but he was pissing me off.
“It’s a situation that sometimes occurs when you are drugged and raped. When it happens, a woman has decisions she has to make. They don’t always work out the way she planned, but she makes the decision. This woman is going to have a child and care for her for the next eighteen to twenty years. During that time, she’ll clean halls, sell real estate, and get a college degree. Life is not going to stop because I got plugged.”
“I don’t want to make your life harder. I just want to know that you’ll be capable of surviving and doing the work,” he said. “You might have told me about your condition when you convinced me you could do this.”
“It would just have made it harder for me to convince you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said. He pushed his black-framed glasses up on his nose. The thick lenses made his eyes look huge. “You can move back to the other apartment if this proves to be too much. You’ll have five of these halls and stairs to clean at least three times a week. There’s a laundry room to maintain. You need to police the grounds to make sure there is no trash that collects around the building. We have a grounds maintenance crew that comes by to mow the courtyard and trim the bushes, but you need to make sure it stays neat. These apartments rent for $550 a month. You don’t get it free for nothing. It’s work.”
“I’ll let you know if I can’t handle it, but if it comes to that, I’ll get help. I’m a stubborn and determined woman, Jim. But I’m not stupid.”
Lily showed up for dinner with Chinese takeout. It was a good thing. I had a box of milk and some cereal along with a few canned goods. Fortunately, there was an actual IGA just three blocks from the apartment and I’d be able to walk there to get food. If I just needed more milk or a dozen eggs, I could get them at SuperAmerica across the street.
“Wow! It’s so sparkly clean,” Lily said. “And I love the way you’ve decorated. The echoes are charming.” We laughed. The only piece of furniture I had was the mattress in the bedroom that Jim had given me. With nothing in it, the apartment looked huge. And it did sparkle.
“Well, white is the new white,” I laughed. “I think I might need a shower curtain, though.”
“Oh, please get a see-through one,” she said. I got a little flutter in my stomach. Was that the baby?
These restorations had been done with a lot of care. All the woodwork in the apartment had been removed and stripped before being stained and reinstalled. The hardwood floors had been sanded and refinished, even repairing some of the fancy border work where walnut had been inlaid with the oak. The living room was large, being the full eighteen-foot width of the apartment. There was a dark-framed arch with two pillared demi-arches leading to the dining room. The oddest part was the bathroom door being just between the galley kitchen and the dining room with the bedroom door opposite it. The focal point of the dining room was a big old built-in buffet with a mirrored back and leaded glass doors on top.
Out the back door off the kitchen, I had a little deck with stairs down to the courtyard. Well, what would be the courtyard next spring. Right now, it was where the workers who were doing the restoration to the other units parked. Just a muddy field. Jim said it would all be sodded and fenced in the spring. I had to believe him.
One of the coolest features of the apartment was the sunporch. It was a little room about eight by eight off the front of the living room. It had windows on three sides entirely paneled in mahogany, including the ceiling. They’d done just as careful a job restoring the woodwork in this room as they had the rest of the house. As I predicted, Lily fell in love with it.
“I couldn’t live here without paying for it,” she said.
“What does an eight by eight room go for these days?” I laughed.
“Do I get to use the kitchen, too?”
“Only if you buy food. Right at the moment, I have six containers of instant ramen noodles and two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.”
“You do live high, don’t you? Let’s figure it out in babysitting hours and vacuuming.”
“Do you really like it, Lily? Do you want to live here? I mean, I feel selfish hogging the big bedroom for myself when all I have is a mattress on the floor. But I’m going to need room for a crib,” I said.
“Listen. The one thing I can’t do is pretend I don’t want to share that bedroom with you. Even once in a while. But I won’t push you to that. Would I like to live here?” she asked. “Hell, yes. Even with nothing in it, this place is beautiful. I’ve got a few pieces of furniture that I’ve collected that you wouldn’t have to buy. I have a small dining table with four chairs. I have a sofa. I have a queen-size bed. Now, we need to negotiate one thing. I’d like to trade my bed for yours. I’m afraid a queen-size bed won’t fit in my new room. Your mattress looks comfy, though.”
“Better try it out,” I suggested. We went into the bedroom and she sprawled on top of my bed. She looked… inviting. “I think I could get used to this. It’s actually a pretty comfortable mattress.” I stretched out beside her.
“Lily, I don’t know if I want to be your lover. I wouldn’t mind trying it once. God knows, I’ve tried everything else.”
“Really? Tell me about what you’ve done.” She rolled onto her side and faced me, resting her elbow on the bed and her face in her hand. I really wanted to tell her about my former life and how I got here, but I didn’t want to get locked away in an asylum. Do they still have those?
Instead, I told her what happened on prom night and she was so outraged she wanted to drive to Fargo and do some damage to Jesse. I told her what I’d done to destroy his reputation and she rolled onto the floor laughing. She crawled back up into the bed.
“What else did you do?”
“I went kind of crazy. I slept with a different boy every weekend until graduation. The first one and the last one were pretty damned good.” I told her about Carl, the fifteen-year-old.
“A fifteen-year-old virgin? And he was good?”
“He was great. He actually paid attention. I scarcely knew what I was doing, so it was really like the first time for both of us. Aside from the fact that we did it in the backseat of my mother’s car, we were really both exploring and learning about how to please each other.”
“Why didn’t you just stay with him?”
“I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. But he’s fifteen. There’s no way he was ready to be saddled with a kid that wasn’t even his. And I wasn’t either.”
“You couldn’t have known you were pregnant yet.”
“Oh, believe me, I knew. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Jesse fathered this child. I’m not even going to pretend otherwise. I’m just never going to tell the jerk.”
“So, you didn’t find anyone you’d trust like that?”
I told her about Allen and the way he made me feel. She sighed. Then I told her that he’d been with a dozen other seniors who turned eighteen during the year and she was appalled.
“It was tempting. Even knowing that if we were together, he’d continue to try to get every girl who turned eighteen into his bed even if we were married. The thing is, he was a great lover and I’m convinced that I’m really heterosexual simply because I loved doing it with him. If he showed up here today, I’d have sex with him tonight.”
“So, you might be bi. I am.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. I’ve had guys, and even was in a relationship with one for two years after college. I loved having his cock in my pussy, but I was putty in Nancy’s hands when she made love to me. I don’t even hate her for leaving me. I don’t think you can fall out of love like that.”
“Maybe if you fall out of love, it means you were never in love in the first place.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be smoking dope to have this conversation?” We started giggling and then Lily’s lips were right there in front of mine and they touched and I just wanted to lie there in her arms. She pulled back. “Our food’s going to be cold if we don’t eat.” Damn it! Talk about putty in her hands and she leaves me hanging there. I sighed.
“We wouldn’t want cold Kung Pao now, would we?” I said. We rolled off the bed and I pushed myself upright. I was beginning to actually feel the weight of the baby in my tummy when I got up and down off the mattress.
Lily moved in the next weekend. I wasn’t there at the time. I had an open house for one of my listings. I was hauling in more listings than any other agent in the office, but the downside was that those homes had to be shown and the sellers had to see progress on getting their homes sold. I was working with two other agents and we were holding open houses at six properties over the weekend. It was a way for the agent to get potential buyers, even if not for the property they were holding open.
I guess I should explain a little about the real estate industry, just in case you aren’t familiar. There are millions of people who never buy or sell a home in their entire lives. Real estate agents work for the person who is selling the home. No matter what. Unless you go out and contract with an agent for a set amount no matter what you buy, that agent works for the seller. The seller pays the agent a commission based on a percentage of the selling price. If you talk the seller down in price $20,000, your agent loses $300. That’s serious money to a lot of agents.
Don’t get me wrong. Most agents will work to get you the best price they can, simply because one-and-a-half percent of $80,000 ($900) is a lot more than zero percent of $100,000 ($0). And don’t think you can go to the broker and have him work for you. He gets paid out of the same commission. In our market, the standard commission is six percent. Three percent goes to the selling side and three percent to the listing side. On each side of the deal, there is typically an agent and a broker. If the sales agent is not a broker, then he splits his commission with a broker. Brokers mostly manage real estate companies with a lot of agents out selling and listing property. There are a few independent offices who offer the agent all the commission, but the agent has to rent the office space, pay a portion of the secretary’s salary, etc. For most of us, just paying the broker half our commission is worth it. If I was listing and selling $6 million a year, it would be different. But since my total volume for the year would probably be about $700,000, it was lots cheaper to pay half the commission. Just think of it generally as a four-way split with two agents and two brokers. Each gets one-and-a-half percent of the sale price, paid by the seller. Sometimes the listing agent sells the house, but it’s far more common for another agent, likely even outside your own company, to get the selling side of the commission.
All that just to tell you that I was working my tail off for my sellers. I listed their property and I was committed to four open houses per listing. I had six active listings and that meant six open houses each weekend. I couldn’t do it myself.
The sad part is that most open houses are a scam when it comes to actually selling the home. Few people buy a property based on the open house. They make an appointment with their agent and the agent makes an appointment to show them the property. The agent works hard to show them properties that they will be interested in. So why hold an open house? To get buyers—not for the property that is open, but for any property. The agent who holds a house open is going to get fifty percent walk-ins who are not currently working with an agent. If they can hook those people, they can usually find a house to sell them. It just won’t probably be the one that was open. Open houses are to get buyers, not to sell the house that’s open.
That’s why it wasn’t too difficult for me to get agents to hold my listings open. Most agents don’t have the drive to go out and get listings. They sit around waiting for buyers and then try to find a house to match.
The short of all this is that when I got home Saturday afternoon, I had a roommate who was all moved in.
I walked through the door and was stunned.
I’d seen Lily’s furniture in the apartment she’d shared with Nancy. That big three-bedroom apartment looked sparsely furnished. It echoed as much as mine did. But those few pieces of furniture completely filled my little one-bedroom apartment. There was a sofa in the living room with an area rug and a coffee table. Two floor lamps flanked the sofa. A dining table with four chairs was in the dining room. There were plants in the demi-arches and under the side window. There was artwork on the walls. Not much but a couple pictures. And a television. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched television. And I’d have to be careful when I talked about it. What was on twenty-five years ago?
Lily’s room, just inside the front door, had my little single bed and a dresser in it. There was a nightstand and a lamp. It was cozy.
The smell of garlic and onions cooking filled the apartment. It wasn’t the onions, though, that brought tears to my eyes. Suddenly my apartment was a…
“Honey, I’m home!” I called out. Lily came out of the kitchen looking as domestic as a woman in blue jeans and a t-shirt can. She was barefoot and had a bandana tied around her head.
“Is it okay? I didn’t ruin anything did I? I moved the bed. The big bed fits in your bedroom perfectly,” Lily said, not pausing to let me say anything. She dragged me to the bedroom and showed me a room that had a huge bed in it, all made up. It looked darling. “I had to put clothes in your closet. That was something I forgot about. I don’t have a lot of clothes that don’t fit in drawers, but there are a few things. Just tell me if they need to be pushed around. I took the left end, but I’m okay with the right end if it works better for you. Just let me know and I’ll move things.”
I pushed her onto the bed, fell on top of her, and kissed her. I kissed her hard. I kissed her passionately. The response was just as passionate. Then she jumped up.
“I have to stir the onions and garlic. I’m making pasta and sauce. Why don’t you take a nice shower or a hot bath while I finish in the kitchen? Dinner will be ready in half an hour.” She was off. I wondered what I’d let loose in my little apartment.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
