Finn checks his watch. 11:05 AM. He's always painfully early to things. That's why he never goes to parties. He also, you know, never gets invited to them.
Before him stands a red-bricked building, about five stories tall. The first floor is a bookstore with a little yellow door; above the door is a white-washed wooden sign that reads The Sacred Texts.
The other four stories look like any other apartment building in this city; a neat line of windows on each floor, a fire escape zig-zagging across the front. He notices a yellow flower pot on the windowsill, but it doesn't have anything in it.
He approaches the yellow door, which he now realizes has white stars painted all over it, and opens it.
Finn steps inside, the store bell chiming. The smell of dusty paper immediately wafts into his nose. The main room of the shop is small and low-ceiling, and books are...everywhere. Crammed in every possible place on the numerous bookshelves, stacked on the floor until they reach the ceiling-there's an old flowery grandma's house-looking couch in the middle of the room, but the only things sitting on it are (you guessed it!) books. He looks hard, trying to find any visible wall space, but he doesn't find any. Only books. Books, books, books. There's a wonderful sort of insanity about it.
He steps further into the store, the floor creaking under the mismatched rugs beneath his feet.
There's soft music playing-it's faint, but he recognizes it as some Bob Dylan song. He vaguely remembers hearing it someplace else before, but he can't remember where.
A soft, female voice hums along with it.
He was so enraptured by the abundance of books that he didn't notice the woman in the corner behind the cash register; she's probably around Finn's age-dark skin, coily black hair, large brown eyes. She's dressed like a certifiable hippie, a yellow shawl draped over her shoulders, several beaded necklaces, rings on every finger. But she pulls it off.
She looks up from her copy of Howards End and jumps a little. "Oh, hi. Didn't see you come in." Her voice is distinctly British, and she has a gap in her teeth.
Finn panics just a little. Okay, so she's pretty. She's got that bohemian thing going on but in a non-annoying I-won't-try-to-sell-you-essential-oils type of way. And she's British.
He can't have a roommate that he's attracted to again. He already had a roommate that he was attracted to, and it didn't turn out so well.
"Can I help you with anything?" the woman raises her eyebrows.
Did he not respond? Shit. "No." That was a super unintentionally aggressive no.
She frowns at him. "Okay."
"I mean...yeah, actually. Is your name Rey, by chance?" He shoves his hands in his pockets.
The woman shakes her head. "No. Jannah. Are you Finn…" she looks down at a piece of paper on the counter. "...Tewone?" She pronounces his last name like Too-woan-ay. "Is that how you say it?"
"Close enough. It's Tewone, like the numbers two-one."
"Weird." She goes back to reading her book.
He walks closer to the counter. "Do you know if she's here?" Rey had left him on Read.
She nods, not looking up. "She'll be down in a-"
Another woman emerges from the back room.
"There she is," Jannah says drily, still focused on her book. "Rey, this is the male stranger that wants to live in your flat. It's pronounced Two-one, by the way."
The second woman's pale with bright eyes, her brown hair chopped into a short bob. She's also dressed eclectically: the jeans she's wearing look about three times too big, as well as her gray sweater, which reads "KISS ME, I'M BRITISH" with little kissy lips and UK flags surrounding it.
Her mouth turns into a toothy, awkward smile as she holds out her hand. "Nice to meet you, Finn."
He shakes it, surprised by how strong her grip is. "Nice to meet you, too-again, sorry about being so early. Habit of mine."
She lets go and smooths her hands over her sweater. "I'll forgive you, as long as you forgive me for this atrocious outfit. Laundry day."
Jannah reads the shirt and snorts. "Glad to see you're making use out of my Christmas present."
"Shut up."
She mock-sheepishly raises her book in front of her face.
"Anyway," Rey says, focusing back on Finn. "The flat's on the third floor, if you want to see it."
"I'd love to."
"Sure, strange man whom I met over the internet," Jannah says mockingly, making her voice high-pitched and ditzy. "I'll invite you to my flat, where I live alone, and where there's absolutely no witnesses…"
Finn panics again, looks at Rey. "I have recommendations, if you need them. And you can do a background check, or a drug test, or whatever. I haven't committed a single crime in my life. Besides that one time I forgot to return a library book, but that's only because I lost it, or else I totally would've returned it-oh, and I drank beer once when I was sixteen because I was trying to impress this guy, but it was disgusting. It tasted like someone burped in a can-"
"You talk a lot for an innocent man, Finn," Jannah says, squinting. "If that's even your real name."
"Please ignore her," Rey says. "She watches a lot of true crime. Follow me."
Rey hums the song that was playing in the shop as she climbs up the last flight of stairs, Finn following her.
"'Tangled up in Blue'," he says suddenly.
"Mm?"
"That's the Bob Dylan song that was playing, right?"
"You know it?"
"Yeah. My ex, Rose...she used to play it in her sets."
"Wait-" Rey stops at the top of the stairs, turns around. "Rose Tico?"
He presses his lips together, nods. "That's her."
"Oh my god, I love her," she blurts.
He clears his throat, eyes darting to the floor.
A wave of guilt washes over Rey. Maybe don't fangirl over someone's ex right in front of them, she thinks to herself. "That was very, very emotionally insensitive of me." She turns around, starts walking up the stairs.
"You're okay," Finn says. "She's pretty damn good at what she does, so she has a lot of fans. I'm used to it." There's a stretch of awkward silence, then he asks, "How long have you lived in the States?" This is clearly his attempt at a subject change.
"Since I was thirteen. I lived in Nevada for five years, came here when I was eighteen."
"Which one's better?"
"Nevada and New York or the US and the UK?"
"The US and the UK. Anything's better than Nevada."
"I'd be mad at you if you weren't right," she says. "I get asked that question a lot. Both countries have their strengths and weaknesses, really. America has better weather, better restaurants-though don't tell anyone British that I said that. But my god, Americans are obnoxious. And have this weird obsession with pizza. The UK has better chocolate, much better Shakespeare...don't get me started on how Americans do Shakespeare."
"I kind of want to."
"They try too hard." She reaches the top of the stairs and walks toward her red apartment door, digging for her key in her pocket. "Shakespeare's Shakespeare. The words speak for themselves."
"'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.'" His voice is suddenly rhythmic, losing all of its awkwardness.
She smiles, finishes: "'It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'"
"Depressing as hell," Finn says.
"It's MacBeth!"
"He could still throw in a joke or two."
She finds her key and sticks it into the door, laughing softly. He's a little bit odd, but Rey likes him.
"Are you a writer or just a reader?" he asks.
"I write some things. Here and there. Nothing like Shakespeare," she yanks the key out, "or Bob Dylan."
He wrinkles up his face. "They're both overrated."
"Oh, don't be one of those people." She throws the door open and steps to the side. "Here. You first."
Her phone buzzes, and she pulls it out of her pocket. A text from Jannah is on the lock screen:
murdered yet?
She types back furiously:
He's really nice, you freak.
Jannah replies:
all serial killers are nice...at first
He steps inside the flat, and Rey closes the door. She slides her phone back in her pocket, ignoring Jannah's last message.
Finn shrugs off his jean jacket, draping it over his arm. He's broad shouldered and short, with deep brown skin, thin but expressive eyes, and short black hair in twists at the top of his scalp. He looks a little older than Rey, but not by much.
"Nice place," he says.
"Do you want anything to drink? Coffee? Tea? I'll make us some tea. Feel free to look around." She sets her key on the counter and strides over to her tiny yellow kitchen, suddenly feeling insecure.
Her flat isn't much. It's basically one of those tiny homes that she's seen on TV, except instead of it being tiny for wanting to "live simply" or whatever bullshit reason they always go on about, it's because she's a twenty-one year old single girl that single-handedly owns a used book shop and can't afford anything else.
At the not-so-far end of this room is the sitting area, which consists of two old blue armchairs, a small television with crappy picture, and a bench in front of two sunny windows. She has mismatched paintings, photos, and dried flowers scattered across the white walls. Finn wanders into that part of the room, and she notices that he's looking at the empty yellow flower pot in the window.
"I keep forgetting to put something in it," she says, filling her kettle with water. She sets it on the stove and turns on the burner. "I figure if you need someplace for a desk, we could move that bench. There's plenty of sun."
His eyes wander to the small loft above the kitchen.
"Your room is up there," Rey says, a little shyly, although she made it clear that it was barely a bedroom in the ad. "Wait, look. I set something up."
Rey rushes over to the loft ladder and climbs up it, gesturing for Finn to come along.
The loft bedroom is approximately four and a half feet tall (she measured). She's rigged up some paper lanterns to line the ceiling as the only source of light.
She hoists herself onto the loft floor and crawls across the gated edge.
Finn remains standing at the top of the ladder. She can tell from the way his eyes are darting all over that he's figuring out where he would hypothetically put his stuff.
"Look-" she pulls open a creaky separation screen, putting a divider between her and Finn "-privacy."
Silence from the other end.
"Is this a dumb idea? This is a dumb idea…"
"No, it's not. It's perfect," he says. "But I have to go."
She opens the screen again.
His face looks troubled, his mind somewhere else entirely.
"Is everything alright?"
"Yeah, it is. I just need to go...do something." He clambers down the ladder. "It was nice meeting you. Great place. But I really, really need to go do something."
"Let me know if you…"
The door slams shut.
"...Rude." Rey sighs. She looks down at her sweater in disdain and pulls it off, throwing it off of the loft's edge. She lies down in her sports bra on the loft floor, looking up at the paper lanterns. "Bad day," she mutters to herself.
The kettle whistles.
If life is 'a tale told by an idiot," like Shakespeare so pretentiously said, then Finn's the idiot. An idiot that has a lot of things to fix.
The realization came when he was looking at that little loft bedroom. You'll have to buy a new bed, he thought to himself.
That sounds like a stupid thought to send you chasing after your ex-girlfriend, but it made him thinking of sleeping alone in a place that he's not used to. It made him think of starting over.
Finn doesn't like starting over. Throughout his life he's had to deal with an endless amount of new beginnings, of new beds and new places, and at a certain point you get sick of it.
Rose feels like the end of starting over. She's steady, safe. She's one of the few steady, safe things that he's had in his twenty-four years of living. And he's not going to mess that up by continuing to keep her at arm's length. He'll get over his fear of letting people in for her. He'll do anything for her.
He turns on seventy-seventh and picks up his pace, spotting Rose's (and formerly his) concrete apartment building. Her window's open. She's home.
Finn makes it to the crosswalk, but his feet freeze at the edge of the curb. His brain tells them to move, but they stay firmly planted.
Something catches his eye. It's a flower shop to the right of the apartment building that he's seen a countless amount of times, but he's never really paid attention to it. He's never even gone into it. Flowers of different shades of pink and yellow are on display along the white-washed storefront, swaying slightly in the fall breeze.
He watches the flowers move for a moment, almost in a meditative state. Will he do anything for Rose, or will he do anything for the safety of Rose?
He remembers Beebee's words: "Sometimes you have to start over. And it's not always a bad thing."
Most of his starting overs have been unbeneficial and completely, utterly shitty. But there's been a few that have been good, however painful they were. This could be one of those good ones.
His chest feels tight, but he knows what to do. He crosses the street, forces himself past Rose's apartment building, and goes into the flower shop.
Rey hoists her grocery totes up her arms and opens the door to her book shop, stepping inside. That stupid song still stuck in her head. She hasn't been able to shake the sadness that she's felt ever since Finn left so abruptly.
She doesn't have a lot of friends. She has Jannah, and she has that nice little old lady at the bodega, and she guesses that Poe is a sort of frenemy, and she used to have Ben...but that's about it.
It's been like that ever since her parents died, ever since she moved to the States. Rey's become self-sufficient out of necessity, and that self-sufficiency has developed into a sort of stubborn loneliness.
She doesn't let people in unless she wholly trusts them, and there was something trustworthy about Finn. He was easy to talk to, too. She wouldn't mind him as a roommate, even if he thinks Shakespeare is overrated and Jannah thinks he's a serial killer.
Jannah steps down from the book ladder at the sight of Rey. "The vintage Brontë collection came in," she says. "Don't know where you want me to put it. And that one flighty bloke came in, dropped something off."
"Finn?"
"Yeah. On the counter."
She walks over to the counter, sets her groceries on the floor.
Tiny white flowers poke out of a plastic cup of soil, sitting under the dusty Tiffany lamp.
"Why the hell did he get you flowers?" Jannah says. "I tell you, something's off about that guy."
There's a little note taped to the cup. She rips it off and reads his spiky, messy handwriting:
Here's some apology flowers for running out on you. Please put it in that pot that you keep forgetting to fill. The more I think about what I'm doing, the cornier it is, but I already spent ten bucks on these things. I'd keep them for myself, but I've never been able to keep a plant alive for more than a week. I'm a horrible plant parent. I'm also running out of space on this post-it note.
- Finn :)
She grins and pulls out her phone. She opens his contact and types:
I demand that you be my roommate.
About thirty seconds later, he texts back:
Do I get a choice in the matter?
Rey responds:
Nope.