Modern Darling

13

Andrew is outside her door at seven am with a duffel bag worth of belongings. He has to knock for a while before Tabitha finally becomes conscious enough to trudge her feet to the door. When she does, she's met with a gap tooth smile and a coffee shoved into her hand.

"Good Morning Boss." He says taking steps into the apartment. Tabitha is still trying to adjust to the light which shot through the windows with the vengeance of morning. "I'll make myself at home." He tells her and Tabitha is oddly appreciative. She didn't want to have to talk him through the logic of this place. Most of it had been Lilac's handy work anyways.

"Oh and there's something at the door for you." He throws his duffel bag onto the couch and begins to peek at the mugs. He unzips his bag and adds two of his own. Tabitha conceals a smile.

"For me?" Peeling her eyes away from Andy she takes a step out into the hall and hears the crunch of a ziplock bag under her feet. Tabitha leans down to pick the bag up, but gets up too quickly. She can practically feel the alcohol swishing around in her stomach.

for the hangover -Eric

Tabitha finds the messy handwriting on the green post note extremely endearing. She can't help but think that his handwriting is a clue to who he is and what he might look like. The swoopy scrawl of vowels made her heart race. She was aware this was pathetic but when you live a life of simplicity every gesture that makes you feel something different feels monumental.

Tabitha decided had been dealing with a lot lately and she was going to allow herself to have this.

She unpeels the note and sees underneath he has gifted her a bottle of advil. An uncharacteristically kind gesture from one half of the lovebirds that mocked her existence. Although now that she thought about it, it had been a while since she'd heard them. She chose not to get her hopes up about that though.

Instead she reads the serial numbers on the bottle and grins when she sees 2043. She pockets the note and uncaps the Advil, dry swallowing two of them before remembering she's holding a coffee.

When she returns her attention back to her apartment Andrew is in Lilac's room. Lilac's room was bigger than Tabtiha's but not by much. She had left most of her bare furniture here for Andrew, which Tabitha couldn't help but think was convenient considering Andrew's clear lack of belongings. She'll have to tell her next time they speak.

Last summer they had painted the walls of her closet purple after a wine and cheese night they'd gone to at Lilac's Poetry professor's house. Wine drunks, they listened to Mariah Carey and put on overalls and talked about how exciting it would be when they both had boyfriends who could help them paint the top corners of the walls. Now it was Andrew's room and he could reach the corners by himself.

"I like it." Andrew tells her noticing the way she was watching him from the doorway. "Leaps and bounds more than the pull out couch set up I had going on." He laughs to fill the silence.

Tabitha smiles, biting down on her lip and willing the advil to kick in. Too much was happening. She was being majorly overstimulated. Andrew knocks over Lilac's bike and the sound makes her bite down hard.

"My bad." He blushes pushing his hair back up off his forehead. Tabitha looks away.

Lilac had begged her to let her store some things that Mitch's place had no room for when she moved out.

This included:

one bicycle,

her stack of vintage feminism magazines,

the Percy Jackson series,

her three plants named leaf, laugh, and love,

and some mugs.