Mikasa
I have a bone to pick with Hollywood.
According to the movies, moving from the suburbs into the city is supposed to be a marvelous affair. You amble down the street, soaking in the sights and sounds of your neighborhood to-be. Kids play hopscotch along the paved sidewalks, and the owner of a nearby bodega pokes his head out, welcoming you to town with a hearty chuckle. Overhead, pigeons flutter in greeting as you make your way towards your building. You knock on the door to your apartment, and your landlord welcomes you inside, hands you your set of keys, and tells you to give them a shout if you need anything.
And you spin around your new place, flopping back onto your mattress, soaking in the thrill of starting a new life in a new city. The walls are empty, devoid of character, but your mind churns with possibilities—a poster here, a tapestry over there. There's a fire escape, and you lean along the railing, eager for nightfall to arrive and showcase cityscape in all its splendor. The day marks a new chapter. Your mid-twenties await.
Sorry, Hollywood, but that's all a load of BS.
I thought I did my last Walk of Shame during my senior spring of college, yet here I am, on a Friday morning, tottering down the streets of lower Manhattan with smudged lipstick, blinking flecks of mascara out of my eyes. I'm already running late to my appointment with my landlord, but I desperately need to head back to my AirBnB to change out of this short skirt and crop top, not to mention shower, check out of my room, and send a deeply apologetic text for being such a trainwreck—all while maintaining some amount of dignity.
My phone's dead, so I'm navigating old-school, squinting at an MTA map, trying to make sense of the colorful tangle of subway lines. My first go-around, I board the southbound train instead of the northbound train. I scamper out, skittering through the tunnels until I'm on the right platform—but then I accidentally board an express train, and I watch, with horror, as we hurtle past my stop. About thirty blocks past my original destination, I stagger up the steps, realizing that I'm too hungover to deal with public transportation, so I wave my arms in the streets, hoping to flag down a cab. But it's rush hour, and I'm competing with a dozen other passengers to-be, who aggressively elbow me aside when a taxi chugs up the road.
Within half an hour, I'm in and out of my AirBnB, hair still wet from the shower, dragging my enormous suitcase behind me.
I could've steered clear of this entire debacle had I just stayed in last night with a bottle of wine. I would've dozed off to a movie, probably asleep by midnight. And come the morning, I'd have woken up to an 8AM alarm, feeling ready to take on my first day as a New Yorker.
But then Sasha, my college roommate, rang me up around 11PM, wanting to celebrate my arrival over martinis.
A Manhattan native, she appointed herself to be my exclusive guide to the city, declaring it her personal mission to quench every last trace of suburbia out of me. This involved a lot of shoo-ing me around. Like an impatient border collie, she hurried me as I withdrew cash from an ATM, as we hustled towards her favorite bar, as I agonized over what drink to order. "At this rate, you're gonna get eaten alive," she chastised me. "Liven up the pace, will you?!"
We caught each other up on the goings-about in our lives. Sasha's bouncing between professions, still clueless about what she wants to do with her life. She gave me a vague description of her day job—"I work in sales"—but went on and on in effusive detail about her open-mic night gigs. She alternates between singing in an indie rock band and performing stand-up comedy. My attendance at these functions is now mandatory.
I told her about my freelancing—which is basically a fancy term for freshly-minted English majors who spend too many hours each day scouring Glassdoor and LinkedIn for newsroom jobs. I quickly pivoted to talking about my upcoming master's program in creative writing, which is supposed to kick off in the coming week, and we both bemoaned the struggles of being starving artists in a city cursed with insane rent.
"We really should've thought about pursuing degrees in engineering, huh?" I remarked, draining my martini.
"Things will work themselves out," Sasha proclaimed, waving her empty glass.
"I hope you're right because honestly, I'm betting all my chips on blind optimism right now," I mumbled, trying hard to ignore the fact my tab just increased by 200% when the bartender refilled my drink.
"If it cheers you up," Sasha said, clapping me on the back. "Someone's been sneaking looks at you all night. Your two o'clock."
The bar curved in an L-shape, and sure enough, at the perpendicular end sat a tall guy in a dark green flannel shirt. His brown hair was tied back in a disheveled bun, and several strands had slipped loose, hanging free over his angular face. We almost made eye contact as he sipped from his drink—a Guinness—before his gaze flitted away. Seated beside him, another tall guy with a blonde beard and glasses was explaining something to him with expressive hand motions, but my observer didn't seem to be paying him much attention, looking, if anything, bored.
"He's cute," Sasha commented, nudging me. "Can I please wing-woman you?!"
"I've got an early morning," I sighed, plucking the olives out of my martini. Actual drinks at an actual bar—another milestone of adulthood. Long-gone are the happier, more innocent days of haphazardly splashing soft drinks and Smirnoff into a plastic red cup at a dimly-lit pregame.
But if there's one thing that hasn't changed from college, it's the song-and-dance that forewarns a drunken hook-up. It always begins with eye contact—well, more accurately, lack thereof. You watch them from afar, and when their eyes land on you, you look away at the very last second. Ball's in their court; the roles are reversed. Back and forth this goes, until someone relents, and next thing you know, your gazes are lingering on one another. Someone cracks a smile. Your gazes drift apart, but not long after, they snap back together like magnets. If you're in the company of a supportive friend, she might do you a solid and sidle up to his pals, pulling them away so that you've got a clear shot. (Sasha asked to borrow the bearded guy's phone to call an Uber home. She wailed about the allegedly awful WiFi connection in the bar, so they went outside in search of better cell service.) And then the braver person makes the first move.
The thing is, this whole charade is easier at college parties. Chances are, you're on a dance floor, and the logical next step is to grind on each other, which then snowballs into making out against a wall, and before you know it, you're horizontal on a dorm room bed.
In the adult world, however, this progression happens via conversation.
"Hey, I'm Eren," he said, sliding into the seat Sasha abandoned. "What's your name?"
"Mikasa," I answered. I was stunned by how he cut to the chase, bypassing the haplessly-constructed pick-up lines and the ridiculous out-of-the-box queries that tend to sour these types of encounters.
He extended a hand, and we shook. "Can I get you a drink?" he asked, nodding at my martini. "You're half-empty."
"As a budding optimist, I'd say it's half-full," I joked. Sworn to loathing cliches unconditionally, my inner English major cringed when I said this, but I forced out a laugh and trudged on. "So I'm good—but I'd be down to split some fries or something."
"Even better. Yo, Connie!" he caught the attention of the bartender amid the clamor and mouthed the word fries!, gesturing towards the two of us. The bartender shot a thumb's up into the air and winked back. Eren turned to fix his eyes on me again. I was hoping we'd move past my sorry attempt at humor, but he seemed amused—not by the joke itself but by my word choice. "I've never heard of the term, 'budding optimism,'" he remarked. "Does that mean you were a pessimist before but then decided to jump ship and give optimism a spin instead?"
"More or less," I said. "Pessimism gets you nowhere when you wanna work in a dying industry."
"What industry would that be?"
"Journalism. Or the 'fake news,' as some would say," I sighed, stirring my drink with a toothpick.
He winced. "Ouch, yeah. Good luck. Hasn't, like, half of the country declared war on you guys?"
"You wouldn't be in that half, would you?"
"I still get the print edition of the New York Times delivered, if that answers your question."
"My faith in humanity has been restored. What do you do?"
"For the time being? Drowning in debt, if I'm being honest. I still have two years of med school left, then several years of residency—which makes jack shit, by the way—and then the paychecks start rolling in, assuming I don't land myself any malpractice suits in the meantime."
"I'll keep my fingers crossed for you."
"Same here. Cheers to financial instability," he said, tapping his beer against my martini glass. "Why do I feel like this is some kinda rite-of-passage into adulthood? I wish we could just fast-forward to the good parts. You know, like having the time to go on walks after dinner, just for the hell of it. But nowadays, walking always has to serve a purpose. Getting places, exercise, keeping your dog from going stir-crazy—I can't remember the last time I just went for a stroll."
Some guys try to turn sentimentality into an ace up their sleeves. In my experience, it was usually fellow English majors and writers who banked on this trick, casting lines made of wistful, introspective imagery. Sasha called these guys "softboys." But there was something strangely earnest with Eren, a candor that was surprisingly refreshing.
Before I could respond, he suddenly tensed up beside me. I glanced in the direction where he was looking, and his sandy-haired companion was wading through the crowd, returning from helping Sasha with her fake Uber troubles. "Hey, this might be a super weird question," Eren said, "but can I pretend to hit on you so that my stupid brother can leave me alone?"
"Um, I thought you were hitting on me?" I replied, crossing my arms, perplexed.
"Yeah, I was, but can I hit on you in a really obnoxious way that makes Zeke feel awkward? And when he gets the hell outta here, we can pick up where we left off—as in me actually flirting with you, all smooth-like?"
"So you're using me as a way to get out of talking to your brother, wow," I muttered, reaching for my bag. I stand corrected: Eren is the spitting image of a softboy. "How convenient for you."
"Come on, don't leave. Our fries haven't even come out yet," Eren pleaded. "I'll cover them—plus your whole bill."
As a freelance writer who hunts between couch cushions for spare change, I couldn't turn down this offer, especially since Sasha left without paying for her drink. "Okay, fine," I said gruffly. "What do you want me to do?"
"Er, we could lean in closer and talk like how we were doing before?" he suggested, his eyes flickering toward the direction of his brother. "And can you look like you're more into me? Your face kinda screams bloody murder right now."
"Honestly, you blew it. I don't get why you just had to slip in that detail about pretending to hit on me. If you kept up things up without hitting the pause button like that, you plan just might've worked—"
"Zeke's getting closer," Eren hissed, suddenly clamping a hand over mine. "All this bickering does not make for a convincing performance!"
"What do you want me to do? Start making out with you?" I grumbled, rolling my eyes.
"Actually, that's a really good idea."
"I was kidding—oh, you're dead serious."
"Yeah. If you're gonna do it, hurry. Please."
"So, you want me to kiss you? Like, right now?"
"Yes and yes."
His eyes burned into mine, and I swallowed nervously as I reached a hand towards his face, cupping the angle of his jaw. In the corner of my vision, I could spot Zeke about five paces away from us, and without a second thought, I pressed my lips against Eren's. His fingers found themselves in my hair, and he kissed me back. Objectively speaking, he had stellar technique. He didn't overdo it with the tongue, a fatal flaw for many guys, and he struck a good balance between gentle and intense. But at the same time, I couldn't help but wonder if this whole ordeal was orchestrated hours in advance. Could Zeke be merely playing a brother who gave out unsolicited advice, which in turn compelled Eren to suggest this plot, which served as a means of showing off his admittedly decent kissing skills, ultimately cajoling me into sleeping with him? Unbelievable.
"Seriously?" Zeke said, throwing up his hands. "We were in the middle of a conversation, for fuck's sake!"
Eren broke off our make-out sesh, twisting around in his barstool to face his brother. "Um, I'm a bit busy here," he growled. "You're kinda being a real cockblock, right now."
"Douchebag," Zeke muttered, turning on his heel. He glanced over his shoulder irritably. "We'll continue our discussion later. Expect a call tomorrow."
"I hope my phone isn't on 'do not disturb' mode. It tends to do that," Eren called after him.
Zeke shot up a middle finger.
Eren gave me a fist-bump once Zeke had disappeared out the front door. "Gotta say," he said, flashing me a smile, "that was some top-notch acting. Ten outta ten… Mikasa, was it?"
"What the hell was that?" I demanded, flustered. "Why do I feel like I was set up in some kinda… I don't even have words to describe what just happened?!"
"I'm sorry about that," Eren said, his victorious air quickly deflating. He seemed to crumple under my glare. "It's kinda a long story, but basically, my brother Zeke's been itching to get me on-board with this plan to get our dad into a nursing home, but I've told him, time and again, that those places are absolute hellholes, but Zeke just doesn't listen. I've been trying to swerve him on this, but Zeke wanted to go out for drinks and corner me into a conversation about this, and, well, here I am. I just really needed to get out of this talk with him."
Words normally come easily to me; after all, my whole career hinges on stringing them together into sentences and paragraphs. Yet in that moment, I was speechless.
"Listen, let me take the tab," Eren insisted, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "And if you're just kinda done with everything, I totally get it. Forget what I said about picking up where we left off—though I do think you're really pretty, and I genuinely do want to keep talking with you! But like I said, totally cool if you wanna be off the hook."
"It's interesting that you used the phrase 'all smooth-like' to describe your flirting game earlier." Dumbfounded, I started tearing a napkin into shreds. I gave Eren a sidelong glance, and he was seated beside me, hunched, like a dog with its tail between its legs, ears all droopy.
"Can we rewind?" he asked. "I wanna do a Take II, now that Zeke's outta the picture. Please?"
While my rational side urged me to head back to my AirBnB (and request that he also pay the cab fee), I've always harbored a morbid curiosity, and I wondered how he could possibly rebound from this. Worst case scenario, I thought, this would be a good story to tell Sasha. "Sure, dazzle me," I mumbled, finishing the rest of my martini.
He grinned. "Hey, I'm Eren. I'm a raging idiot sometimes, and I'm clearly horrific at talking to girls, but I'd like to think that I'm a good guy at heart. What's your name?"
I reintroduced myself for the second time that night, and replied, shaking my head, "I thought your Take II was supposed to be better than your Take I."
"You're a tough crowd," he lamented. And then he nudged me. "But hey, at least you can strike that 'glass half-full' line from the record this time. It was such a zinger."
"I wish the fries would come out sooner because you can rest assured that I'm walking out with them, plate and all," I responded. But I couldn't stop myself from smiling.
"So what's it like being a 'budding optimist' in a 'dying industry?'" he asked, putting up air quotes.
"Truth be told, I don't entirely know yet," I admitted. "I'm officially moving into New York tomorrow. It still feels kinda unreal that I'm here."
"At least you actually get to experience this 'concrete jungle where dreams are made of' honeymoon period," Eren said, shrugging. "I grew up in Brooklyn, so NYC lost its effect on me the second I came into the world kicking and screaming how ever many years ago." He paused to think for a moment, and then he whistled. "Damn, I've been stuck here for twenty-four years."
"Given your tact, I thought you'd be younger than me," I remarked.
"So you're older than me?"
"We're the same age, somehow."
"Huh," he mused. He was about to say something, but our bartender appeared and slid a plate of crispy fries forward. "Thanks, Connie!" Eren called, but Connie had already ran off to take more orders. "Helluva guy," Eren said, offering me the plate. "We were college buds."
I swirled a fry in some ketchup. "You didn't leave the city for college?"
"Nah," Eren said. "You know how most American kids pack up a minivan full of dorm shit and drive hours upon hours to get to campus? For me, my mom's car was in the shop during move-in week, but it didn't matter in the end because we just took the fucking R train." He wrinkled his nose. "Though it was a royal pain to haul all those bags up and down the subway station stairs."
Having been surrounded by writerly personalities all through college, I've been conditioned to read between the lines, 24/7. Skepticism has been my default setting. What is he trying to invoke with these backstories? What's the ulterior motive of this anecdote? Why did he select this word over that one? But as Eren and I worked through the fries between us, meandering from tangent to tangent, I found myself taking off my analytical goggles. Every line out of his mouth was almost confessional, confident but untainted by bravado or bluster. He did away with the typical game of steering the conversation towards a clinching line: "I have [x] up in my apartment. Wanna come over and check it out?"
We were talking for the sole purpose of making conversation. He rattled off a list of hidden gems in town—overlooked food trucks, low-lying bistros, must-try cafes tucked within the shadows of an alleyway. He asked me about my favorite movies, and he listened to my unabridged criticism of Tarantino films with interest, encouraging me to elaborate, occasionally daring to contest my opinion. We dove into politics, and he gave me his honest take on the mayor. And at some point, Connie ushered us out so that he could close down for the night, and we took our discussion outside, taking turns to shit on the skewed ethics of McKinsey & Company.
We walked to an intersection, and as we waited for the crosswalk light, he asked if he could kiss me—for real this time. I let him press me up against a lamp post, and about four blocks and several flights of stairs later, he had me pinned against the door of his apartment, kissing my neck with a fervor, slipping his hands under my shirt, squeezing my ass. Stumbling towards his bed, we left a trail of discarded clothes behind us—a shoe carelessly kicked off, his jeans scrunched up on the floor, my bra left dangling on a doorknob. With his head between my legs, he knew exactly how to make me arch my back, and shortly after, I had him gasping, pulling lightly on my hair as I ran my tongue up his length. And when he finally entered me, I realized that, for the first time, I could enjoy sex guilt-free, no longer having to worry about a roommate walking in, unannounced.
But here's the thing: in college, waking up late—in a stranger's bed, may I add—is a minor offense, if it's an offense at all. A missed 9AM lecture that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In adulthood, however, it's another story.
"Some of us have jobs, you know." My landlord is a towering, bald man named Keith Shadis. He seems like one of those people who will still run marathons in their mid-seventies and will probably live well past one hundred years of age. He doesn't budget a muscle when I struggle to yank my enormous suitcase out of the backseat of my Uber, only standing on the curb with his arms crossed, unimpressed.
"I'm sorry I'm late," I mumble, scribbling my signature across a final set of forms. When I hand him back his fountain pen, my arm twitches and the pen tumbles to the ground, rolling across the sidewalk and plummeting into the depths of a storm drain.
Biting back a searing remark, Shadis swipes the forms out of my hand, and I give him my deposit. "Your roommate should have your keys," he says irritably, and without another word, he storms up the street, off to work.
As expected of a ramshackle, low-rent building, there's no elevator, so with both hands, I carry my suitcase up the stairs. The first couple of flights are no big deal, but by the fourth floor, I'm lugging my suitcase up, one step at a time. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. When I make it to my floor, panting to catch my breath, a strange case of déjà vu consumes me as I knock on the door of my apartment.
There's no answer.
I knock again, louder this time.
Still no answer.
I haven't actually met my roommate. As Keith Shadis's former co-worker, my uncle Levi actually helped me arrange this housing setup for a mind-blowingly cheap monthly rate, and I jumped on the offer immediately—which in retrospect, I now realize is ridiculously foolish, since I'll have to live with a stranger. But home was starting to become a pressure cooker, and I was sick and tired of Levi constantly nagging me about my employment prospects. I had to get out, and I figured, at the very least, I could camp out here until a better one-bedroom option opened up on the market.
"Hey!" I yell, kicking at the door with my foot. "Is anybody home?"
"Shit, sorry!" A groggy voice hollers from behind the door, followed by the sound of scuffling. "I'm here!"
The metal locks click, and the door swings open.
"Hi, I'm your roommate…" My voice trails off.
Standing before me, rubbing sleep out of his bleary eyes, is the guy from the bar. His messy brown hair hangs over his shoulders, and his neck is polka-dotted with purple hickeys—all my doing. And it finally registers why this place looks so familiar.
A/N: Heyo, Kar here, on her usual shit. I dabbled in one-shots here and there, but a huge part of me has missed the hell outta coming up with longer storylines, so here we are, Eren and Mikasa in their mid-twenties, with a whole helluva lotta sexual tension brewing between them. Let me know what you thought of the chapter!