The Roommate's Mistake

The buzzer by the side door reads O'SHEA in faded black marker on a strip of painter's tape. Three doors down, a bakery is burning the croissants again. Leo has a duffel bag and nowhere better to be. The apartment two flights up looks like someone shook a house and everything inside fell where it landed. A guitar leans against a stack of pizza boxes. A power drill sits next to a coffee mug with something growing in it. Wires trail from an amp and vanish under a couch missing two cushions. Jamie O'Shea comes out wiping his hands on a rag that was probably a towel once, varnish on his cheekbone and a scar above his right eyebrow, and goes straight to the part their mutual friend told him. *She also said you're running from something.* Leo is running from something. His ex kept the apartment. His ex kept the cat too. Jamie is not doing much better. A commission for a custom dining set fell through after he had already bought the wood, and a photograph of his ex is still stuck to the fridge door. So they conduct the interview with two beers in a kitchen where the cabinets don't match, and Leo finishes his and takes the room. He does not mention that his novel, about a lighthouse keeper in the 1890s who begins seeing his dead wife in the light, has been stalled at chapter four, or how many times he has rewritten the same scene. Jamie does not mention the cardboard box he found under his workbench, the one he taped back shut badly after opening it. Then there is a stray cat at the back door with a chipped tooth, a brother with a key and a habit of killing succulents, a friend dangling a senior design job in Brooklyn, and an ex in Portland who is not finished with any of this. This is a slow-burn contemporary romance between two men learning how to keep things: a cat, a workshop, a grandmother's rocking chair, a room that stops being a room somebody rents. The romance is closed-door.