Emma often finds herself wondering whether it's possible to hate a total stranger. Well — she amends herself as she rifles through her mailbox in the complex's lobby — not a stranger.
Despite never having met or seen him before in her life, she knows exactly two things about Mr. K. Jones — he gets a ton of mail from all over the world and he plays extremely loud music when he wakes up in the morning.
She's been working nights all month to show her boss she can handle a bail skipper as well as her usual desk work, and she's been coming home in the early hours before dawn to catch a little rest before the routine starts again. So when she first startles awake to the sound of a guitar solo, she thinks they must just be on different sleep schedules. That has to be it.
(It's not exactly where she thought she would be in her mid-twenties, but hey, it keeps food in the pantry, clothes on her back and heat in the one-bedroom loft she rents.)
And he's just recently settled in, if the moving truck that sat parked in her spot for two days meant anything, so maybe he just doesn't realize what he's doing to the half-dozen or so tenants on their floor when it happens again. Nobody plays their music that loud without wondering if it's bothering anyone at least once.
It only takes a few days of being serenaded through her walls at seemingly random hours of the morning and two unopened envelopes addressed to him for her to correct herself. She's been too nice to him by giving him the benefit of the doubt for almost a full week while she slips his letters and postcards under his door without giving them a second look.
(She hasn't bothered to wonder who sends him so much by post as she runs from errand to errand, honestly, because even the sight of his apartment number on the mailbox next to hers is starting to give her a headache. Every night she vows to knock on his door in the morning and ask him to turn it down, and every morning she wakes up to the sound of him singing happily over the noise, only sparing the energy to flip the pillow over her head and press her ear into the mattress.)
There was one night in particular, one she remembers vividly, that a passing coastal storm brought a brief power outage to half of town. She'd been at work and upset about the dark computer screen in front of her for all of two minutes before realizing how lucky she was. No electricity meant no loud music blaring through his speakers and into her bedroom.
Emma had left for home in a blur, only regretting the several-blocks-long walk from her preferred parking spot to her apartment building. She'd had the good fortune to bring an umbrella along with her to work this time, though. The reflections of all the tail lights and the headlights glowed and lit her way back home, making her smile more than was probably normal for someone walking in the pouring rain. She smiled even brighter when the door opened for her as she walked up the steps to the lobby doors. Apparently, someone was being nice enough to hold one of them open for her while she shook the rain off her umbrella.
"Thanks," she said gleefully, not even slowing as the bright-eyed man nodded in response. There were only a couple flights of stairs between her and her bed, and she was going to bed early — still late, but she was always more concerned with the number of hours she rested, not when they occurred. Emma kicked her boots off at the door and dove deep into her duvet the second she traded her jeans for her pajamas, falling asleep within minutes. It felt like she'd slept for days when she'd finally woken up with sunlight pouring over her bed. It was her day off, and she was determined to spend it restfully. So far, things seemed like they were off to a good start.
(She'd gotten all but halfway through a lazy, jaw-cracking yawn when he started singing twice as loud as usual to make up for his lack of accompaniment.)
All things considered, she feels perfectly justified with her decision to knock on his door and give him a piece of her mind.
Emma knocks on his door with all the rage she'd kept out of her footsteps as she tiptoed down the hall a moment ago. They aren't the only ones on the floor, she remembers dutifully as she clutches a small stack of his mail in her free hand. The music does sound much quieter out here than it did in her bedroom, she notices, but still faintly audible from the other side of the door. She pounds her fist against the door one more time before giving up, and this time the music stops.
And when a dark-haired, blue-eyed man answers the door in nothing but a towel, smug grin all over his face in response to the look on her face, Emma briefly has to wonder if she hasn't stumbled into the first half-hour of a romantic comedy.
"Um," Emma starts gracefully. She can feel the angry speech she'd prepared slipping from her mind as she focuses on keeping her eyes off his chest.
"May I help you?" He's leaning one hand on the side of the door while the other holds the towel firmly at his hips. Now it's not so much about his chest as it is trying to keep herself from imagining him in the shower.
(At least the music makes a little more sense now, some deranged part of her mind offers helpfully.)
Emma blinks at his question and everything comes back at once.
"First of all, you live in apartment 37. Not 39."
"I'm well aware."
"Your friends aren't. Do you know how many of these stupid envelopes I have to shove through your door every week?"
"That was you? I thought our mail woman had taken a liking to me."
His eyes are sparkling with delight at this turn of events, and she can tell he's more than comfortable with having a conversation in the middle of the hallway while he's practically naked and she's in her pajamas. He acts like they have all the time in the world, like it's a happy coincidence that they've met this way.
"I didn't come here to give you your mail back."
"You didn't? Then what's that in your hand there?" Now his eyes are teasing, and this is definitely cuter in movies than it is in reality, because Emma wants to slam his own door in his face. She shoves his mail at his shoulder, surely soaking bits and pieces of his mail against his skin. He examines the top of one postcard with a knowing smile, pulling it away from the rest and turning it over to inspect the message on the other side.
"Ah, that's Liam," he says, his voice curling around every word and making it clear just how new he is to town. "He hates writing but it's the only form of communication we have while he's out to sea, so he shortens everything he can. Bloody lazy for a Naval captain, if you ask me."
It's another invitation to talk, to get to know each other, to waste her precious free time letting this obnoxious waste of a perfect jawline try and charm her into forgiving him when she hasn't even called him out on his misdeeds. Emma plants her feet and gives him a look hard enough to wipe that grin right off his scruffy face.
"Your music? Too damn loud." Getting it out is half the battle but she says it, managing to put just the right amount of venom and impatience in the abrupt statement. "Some of us work night shifts around here, sometimesdoubles, and it takes a real asshole to belt out classic rock hits every morning while everyone else is still trying to sleep."
He looks a little ashamed of himself as she calls him out on his behavior, but there's absolutely none of the shock or surprise she was expecting to see on his face.
"I hadn't realized —"
"What? That the bull they give you about soundproof walls at the open house isn't a complete crock? There's reason you don't hear anybody coming or going when it's early or late. It's because we're courteous." she says, folding her arms in haughty accusation. "You've lived here long enough to figure that out."
And with that she's gone, her long hair very nearly whipping into his face as she spins and rushes back through her own door. By the time her own bed is back in sight she's too worked up to rest again, despite the tangible silence in the air. She works to forget about it for the rest of her morning by spending the day salvaging half-dead window plants and actually getting dressed, but when she goes to get brunch at her favorite downtown diner his door reminds her of all of it again.
Sleep comes and goes again for a few weeks, along with work, and Emma doesn't hear a thing. She even switches to a more reasonable shift after her boss finally gives her a little recognition in staff meeting, but no sound comes from the apartment next door. The thing about it is, she thought it would make her happier, relieved, better rested than she is. Instead she wonders with each passing day if she was too hard on someone who was clearly making a new start here.
It reminds her of the woman she'd been when she moved in, alone and looking for a place where a Welcome Home mat didn't feel out of place below her door.
Emma wakes up three consecutive mornings in a row feeling worse than she ever did when he was belting out rock hits in the shower, and although she definitely doesn't miss the loud and jarring music, she knows the feeling in her stomach isn't going to go away until she apologizes. The fact that there's a new postcard sitting on her kitchen counter with his name on it only makes it worse.
Plenty of thoughts go through her mind as she stares at the card. For starters, she doesn't actually know his name, besides what's always written on his mail. She really only means to see if his friend — or relative, guessing from the shared surname on the address portion scrawled on the front — has written his name anywhere in the message as she flips it over. She doesn't mean to read the whole thing, but suddenly she's a little distracted at the beautiful, tiny penmanship.
Once she gets through an actual line of it, though, she's forgotten what she was looking for in the first place.
"— not how you're supposed to make a good impression at all. It sounds like she had all the reason in the world to chew your ear off, little brother, especially if you were too busy staring at her to properly apologize. Get your act together, you wanker. It's bad enough it's been a good three weeks since you've seen her —"
Emma slaps the card down onto the counter when she realizes what she's doing, but it's not like she can un-read what his brother has written. He'd wrote about her to his family and he didn't even know her name.
From the sound of it, he feels as badly about it as she'd wanted him to in the first place. She tells herself over and over that was the reason she was knocking on his door instead of sliding it under his door like every other single piece of mail she's returned before. She feels strangely nervous as she raps her knuckles beneath his peephole, hoping that he's more fully clothed this time around.
He is, but it doesn't help much.
"I have your mail again," she says by way of greeting, holding the postcard up and sincerely hoping he can't tell she's read it just by looking at her. She tries not meeting his eyes, but that plan fails miserably when his hand slides off the doorknob to take the card from her.
"I've told him and our mail woman it's 37," he says apologetically, none of the mirth from last time in his eyes. "I swear to you, lass, I hadn't meant for us to meet this way. It was terrible form."
"I didn't mean to be so harsh before," Emma manages, only just stopping herself from apologizing for more. Ithad been his fault, but she'd taken it just this side of too far. "About the music. My work nights are rough and sometimes they bleed over into my mornings — and the walls really are thin."
"I'm still sorry. I'm used to living alone, and before that with a brother who slept like the dead. Old habits seem to die hard, it seems."
He's scratching the back of his neck with his ear and damn it if it isn't twice as charming as all of his previous attempts from weeks ago. Emma offers him a smile, and the one she gets in return brings back a fleeting memory of a helpful stranger on his way to the mailbox who had held the door for her. One who apparently lived right next door and enjoyed singing in the shower.
(Meeting then instead of like this would have certainly been easier.)
"You don't have to keep the music completely off, you know. I didn't mean to make you do that."
"I didn't. I soundproofed the walls," He says simply, as if that kind of thing didn't take time and effort and money. His smile grows a little more bold, back to something resembling that familiar one from their first unfortunate meeting. "Figured I'd try making it up to you even if you never let me apologize."
Emma looks at him for a long moment, trying to remember a time when someone else had done something like that for her. Nothing comes to mind, and after that the words come easy.
"There's a diner down the street from here that serves great hot cocoa with their brunch. You can apologize to me there."
Of all the grins she's seen on him, his answering one is her favorite by far. His hand accidentally-on purpose brushes hers as they're walking back from a half hour-turned-two hour brunch, and her fingers tickle the inside of his palm in reply, and neither of them mention it. She forgets to ask him his name until they're walking back up the stairs, and he doesn't berate her too much. He asks for hers in return, and she promises to tell him over dinner at the end of the week.
(The next time she hears him singing, it's to her.)