Streetlight People

Part Three: A Singer In A Smoky Room

Chapter Five

"And, uh, the couch is over there."

Bella stared around the sparsely furnished apartment. Her mind was blissfully blank, but the creepings of a migraine due to her cry were beginning.

"I'm Bella, by the way," she said, horrified at herself that she had snotted all over the man, wormed her way into his apartment and they didn't even know each other's names.

"Oh." This realization dawned on Edward as well and he scratched the back of his neck idly as he leaned against the countertop in the kitchen. "Mase… en. Masen. Edward Masen."

"Thank you," she said. "For letting me stay. I'll be out of your hair by tomorrow."

Edward nodded then headed towards his bedroom.

He laid on the neatly made bed, listening to his house guest putter around his living room: her muffled footfalls, the zipping and unzipping of things, the rustling of fabric. While it all seemed so familiar, at the same time it was foreign.

He remembered the nights when he was younger, when Derek and Chase and Farley were still living at the home with Chelsea. He had idolized those three. They were the oldest boys staying there, about eleven years older than him. They weren't like the other boys in care – they were polite and quiet with manners and they studied.

"There's so much out there, Mase," Derek had told him one afternoon. Derek had been the first to call him 'Mase' and Edward had since refused to answer to anything else. "There's a whole world out there that we can't even imagine. And I want a taste of it."

"How?" Edward had asked in his little six year old voice. He understood what the older boy was talking about but could not yet truly grasp the concept.

"Chase and Far and me, we study. We do good in school so we can get out and do real stuff, really live," Derek answered, pushing the swing a little harder. Edward loved the feeling of the wind rushing through his hair as he soared. "You'll see, Mase."

Eventually the apartment was quiet. The sound of a video game coming from the apartment upstairs, the honking of car horns and taxi drivers yelling at each other in foreign languages, the rush of the L train – none of it bothered him. He had grown up with similar sounds as his nightly lullaby. If anything, it helped calm him.

Those same sounds, however, were what kept Bella up, staring at the popcorn-stucco ceiling. She had turned the light off in the living room but the streetlamps outside cast a sickly white glow over everything. Dumpster lids shutting with loud clangs, the backfiring of cars down the block(she prayed and prayed to a God she was not sure she believed in that they were cars backfiring), yelling of people on the street: it was all alien to her and she clung tightly to the thin blanket Edward had earlier offered to her.

She felt like crying again.