The garbage wrangled into one bag, I grabbed the flowers again and left the apartment. As I was locking it back up, I noticed a door down the hall open. The very door I’d been waiting to open for what felt like forever.
Number sixty-five. Mrs. Lopez’s unit.
Stalling with the lock, I waited until a figure floated into the doorway before turning. Let’s see what the woman my roommate had been “helping out” looked like.
The garbage bag fell out of my hand when I saw her, my jaw falling too.
Mrs. Lopez. She wasn’t anything like I’d pictured her. Not one bit.
For starters, she was old enough to have been my grandma, if not my great-grandma. She was barely topping five feet and had her silver-white hair combed back from her face. She wasn’t wearing a crimson, form-fitting gown and kitten heels like I’d conjured up in my mind—she was wearing a house dress in a pastel floral print, and navy corduroy slippers that looked like they’d seen better days.
Wait. Maybe this wasn’t the Mrs. Lopez. Maybe this was her mother or great auntie or . . . since she was shuffling a bag of garbage outside too, a housekeeper.
“Mrs. Lopez?” My thoughts manifested verbally.
Her attention turned my way, an easy smile forming when she saw me. “You’re Soren’s roommate, right?”
I nodded as she teetered down the hall toward me. “That’s right. I’m—”
“Hayden,” she said, a glint of recognition sparking in her eye. “Hayden Hayes. He talks about you all of the time.”
Moving away from the door, I headed toward her to take her bag of garbage. It was half the size she was. “He does?”
“Won’t shut up about you most of the time he’s over helping me out.”
She thanked me with a smile as I took the garbage, while I wrestled with feeling like the biggest jerk in the whole entire world. I’d been assuming he’d been hooking up with the sexpot neighbor next door, when really, he’d been helping an old woman out around her apartment.
I needed my head examined. By a team of specialists.
“Soren’s a good guy,” I stated, still reeling from the revelation.
Mrs. Lopez’s head shook. “Soren’s the best type of human being there is, honey. I’ve been around a long time, seen a lot more—people like him are hard to come by.”
I found myself leaning into the hall wall with her, feeling a surge of clarity come over me. The haze of hesitation, the fog of uncertainty, evaporated. Everything felt so clear now. So glaringly obvious.
“It’s nice to meet you.” I smiled at the Mrs. Lopez before moving toward the stairs with both garbage bags in hand. “Finally.”
“Nice to finally meet you too,” she replied with a wave, shuffling back to her apartment.
The whole journey down those six flights, my head wouldn’t stop shaking. Not just because of Mrs. Lopez, but because of everything else. What was I so afraid of? Why had I been so afraid?
Yes, Soren was a man, but that was the only quality that matched my dad. Soren went home for family dinners, even when his schedule was so busy sleep came low on the priority list. He helped out old ladies. God, he helped me out. All. The. Time.
That wasn’t a person who ran away. That wasn’t a man who bailed when the mood struck.
I was so buried under the barrage of revelations, I hardly noticed the cab pull up to the curb beside me as I was heading back into the building after dropping the garbage in the dumpster.
“Please tell me you aren’t just coming back from the dumpster, tucked in the back of the building, alone, and it’s practically dark.” Soren’s head popped out of the back of the cab, giving me a look I was familiar with.
My body instantly responded—my stomach swirling, my heart racing, my mouth turning up. “It’s barely dark.” I headed for the cab. “And someone had to take the garbage out before it started radiating toxic gases.”
He scooted over to let me slide in. “I was planning on doing that tonight after we got back.”
“Now you don’t have to worry about it.” As I slid in beside him, I realized what we were in. “I thought we were taking the subway?”
Soren and I took the subway everywhere. Even though my cash flow had improved dramatically since moving to the city, we still kept to the underground for our preferred means of transportation. I was especially surprised he’d chosen a cab for tonight’s journey since his family lived outside of the city.
He motioned at his ankle. “I broke myself at practice earlier. Figured it would be a good idea to keep as much weight off of it as possible until the swelling goes down.”
My eyes bulged when I saw his ankle. It wasn’t just swollen; it looked like someone had blown up a small balloon inside it. He was still in his practice uniform, but had slid the pant leg up to his knee and had his red sock bunched down below his ankle. When I lightly brushed my fingers across his ankle, Soren shifted in his seat. It was already starting to bruise.
“What did you do?”
“End of practice. We were all leaving the field and I stepped on a damn stray ball lying on the ground.”
My face pulled up as I leaned down to give it a closer look. “Damn stray balls.”
The corner of his mouth pulled. “They can really ruin a person’s day.”
“What did your coaches say? Are you sure you can still go to dinner tonight? Shouldn’t you rest it or elevate it or something like that?”
His eyes lifted. “Please. If I called to say I couldn’t make it to dinner because I rolled my ankle, my brothers would never let that go. Ever. They’d still be going on to my grandsons about the time their grandpa hurt his ankle and instead of shaking it off and getting on with things, he cried and cancelled dinner.” He motioned at his ankle like he’d barely hurt it. “And I didn’t tell my coaches. I don’t need them getting overzealous and benching me this weekend.”
“You didn’t tell your coaches?” I blinked at him as I dug some hand sanitizer from my purse to put on.
“It’s fine. It’ll be good by tomorrow. There was no reason to get everyone worked up over nothing.”
“Soren, your ankle looks like it swallowed a cantaloupe. This isn’t nothing.” Leaning back into the seat, I settled the flowers beside me and patted my lap.
When he took a moment to think about it, I gently lifted his leg and rested his ankle in my lap. At least it was elevated now. We’d just have to wait for the ice until we got to his parents’ place.
“Sprained?” I guessed as I took another look.
“Twisted,” he stated, shifting so his back was pressed into the door.
“It looks like it hurts.”
Soren’s foot nestled a little deeper into my lap. “It’s feeling better now.” A goofy grin stretched across his face as his eyes went from his foot in my lap to my eyes.