The New Neighbor

The moving truck blocked my driveway at seven in the morning, which meant I couldn't get my car out, which meant I was already annoyed before I'd had coffee. I stood at my kitchen window with my mug, watching two guys in matching blue shirts wrestle a couch off the back ramp. They dropped it twice. Nobody seemed concerned.

I'd lived on Marigold Street my whole life. Twenty-nine years in the same house, the same creaky floors, the same neighbor on my left, Mrs. Patterson, who'd been widowed since before I was born and who kept a garden that put the local nursery to shame. She was seventy-eight and could still haul a bag of mulch across her yard without breaking a sweat. I respected that.

The house on my right had been empty for eight months. The previous owners, the Dhaliwals, had moved to Arizona for his job and left behind a lawn that went brown by September. I'd watched it die from my bedroom window, that slow yellow creep from the edges inward, and felt something close to grief. Not for them. For the yard. I'm not sentimental about people. I am deeply sentimental about grass.

So when the truck pulled up and the blue-shirted guys started unloading, I felt a small, embarrassing flicker of hope.

I finished my coffee and went to work.

I work from home. Graphic design, mostly branding for small businesses that can't afford a real agency. It pays the mortgage and keeps me in the house I grew up in, which is either comforting or pathetic depending on the day. My mother had wanted me to move somewhere with more opportunity. More life, she'd said. I'd nodded and stayed. The truth is I don't like new places. I like knowing which floorboard squeaks and which neighbor will lend you an egg and which one will pretend they didn't hear you knock.

By noon the truck was gone. By two, a car pulled into the driveway next door. A silver sedan, clean, unremarkable. A man got out.

I was on my laptop at the dining table, which faces the front window. I didn't mean to look. But he stepped out of the car and stretched, arms overhead, and his t-shirt rode up just enough to show a strip of stomach. Lean. Tanned. He dropped his arms and turned to grab something from the back seat, and that's when I got the full picture.

Brunette hair, cut short but not too short. A jaw that could cut glass. And when he glanced up at the house, scanning it like he was already planning where to put the grill, I saw his eyes. Blue. Not the washed-out kind. The kind that make you stop mid-sentence.

I looked back at my screen. I had a logo to finish for a bakery in Vermont. I did not have time to stare at my new neighbor like a teenager.

But I did anyway. Just for a second.

He carried boxes inside for the next hour. Shirt on, unfortunately. I told myself I was just curious about who was moving in. That's normal. That's what neighbors do. They observe. They welcome. They bring casseroles, which I've never done because I can't cook and because I don't like most people enough to feed them.

Around five, I closed my laptop and went to the kitchen to figure out dinner. I was standing at the stove, stirring pasta, when movement outside the window caught my eye. The kitchen window faces the side yard, which means I can see directly into the neighbor's side yard if I angle my head just right.

I angled my head.

He was in the backyard. Shirtless. Holding a hose, spraying down what looked like a grill that had seen better days. Water ran down his chest in rivulets, catching the late afternoon light. He had that thing some men have, where they don't look like they work out but their body just does what it's supposed to. Broad shoulders. Flat stomach. Arms that looked like they could lift you without asking.

I turned back to the stove. My pasta was sticking to the bottom of the pot.

"Great," I said out loud. To nobody.

I scraped it loose and ate it anyway, standing at the counter, trying not to look out the window again. I failed twice. The second time, he was gone. The hose lay coiled in the grass like a sleeping snake.

I've been single for three years. By choice. That's what I tell people, and it's true, mostly. I got tired of the performance. The first dates, the small talk, the slow reveal of disappointment. I'm not easy to be with. I know that. I like my space. I like my routine. I like sleeping in the middle of the bed and not answering to anyone about why I'm still awake at two in the morning, watching bad TV and eating cereal.

But I also have a problem. A hunger. I don't talk about it. I've never told anyone, not even my closest friend, because what would I say? That I think about sex constantly? That it sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, thrumming all day, every day, no matter what I'm doing? That I've had more one-night stands than I can count, not because I'm lonely but because I need it, the way some people need cigarettes or church?

I've gotten good at managing it. Long showers. A drawer in my nightstand that I keep stocked. Distraction. Work. The kind of discipline that looks like virtue from the outside.

But standing in my kitchen, watching a shirtless stranger hose down a grill, I felt that hunger shift. Sharpen. Like a dog hearing a whistle from three blocks away.

I went to bed early. I didn't sleep.

The knock came at nine. I was in the living room, reading, or pretending to. The sound made me jump, which annoyed me. I don't jump. I'm not the jumpy type.

I opened the door.

She was shorter than me, blonde, with a smile that came on fast and bright, like a light switch. Pretty in a way that felt practiced. "Hi!" she said. "I'm Ella. We just moved in next door."

"Giana," I said. "Welcome."

"Thank you! I hope we're not being too loud. Tyler's been banging around all day, he's so excited about the grill, it's ridiculous." She laughed, a quick, tinkling sound. "Oh, this is my husband, Tyler."

She stepped aside, and there he was.

Up close, the eyes were worse. Better. The kind of blue that doesn't seem real, that makes you want to check the light. He was wearing a gray t-shirt now, but I'd already seen what was under it, and my brain supplied the image without permission.

"Hi," he said.

His voice was low. Calm. And he looked at me like he'd been waiting to look at me, like the whole day, the whole move, the whole life that brought him to this street had been leading to this moment on my front porch.

I felt it. That's the thing. I felt it in my stomach, in my throat, in the backs of my knees. A pull so strong it was almost physical. And I saw it in his face, too. Something flickering behind those blue eyes. Recognition. Want. The same hunger I'd been managing my whole adult life, mirrored back at me from a stranger's face.

Ella was still talking. Something about a housewarming party, maybe. I wasn't listening. I was looking at her husband, and he was looking at me, and the air between us felt charged, wrong, impossible.

"Nice to meet you," I said.

I closed the door. My hand was shaking. Just a little. Just enough to notice.