The Next Best Thing

Chapter 5

It could've been worse.

She could've been trying to fund raise or get him to sign a petition. Mitch would've rather been robbed. As annoying as the situation was, he felt a little sorry for Emma. This probably wasn't the day she thought she was going to have. He could sympathize.

At least she'd been honest and fessed up to it, sassing him there in her cropped lambswool sweater, looking like the short stack on the pep squad. But what else could she do? On some level it was nice to think that maybe she hadn't been hating him specifically for the last year; that if she seemed pissy and uptight, like she often did, it was because she was just in over her head with whatever her complicated situation was. As long as the drama stayed on her side of the duct tape, there wasn't any harm in Mitch cutting her some slack. Even if she had called him a "selfish motherfucker" that time for not holding the elevator.

He finally changed into a tee shirt and loose pajama bottoms. He rinsed the shaving gel off of everything in his sink, dried what he wasn't too lazy to dry, and put it all back in the cabinet. His own mirrored door didn't want to stay closed because foam had wedged itself between one set of the magnetic closer. He scraped off what he could see, washed his hands and splashed some water on his face.

It was crazy to him, the thought of there being so little space between the units. Like he'd been living with roommates without knowing it. When he first moved into the apartment, his neighbour was an elderly deaf woman living with her son. They spoke in sign language, so Mitch rarely heard any voices coming from their apartment except maybe when they had company. The couple that moved in next used to fight a lot. Their screaming matches always seemed to escalate in the bathroom and now he knew why. The wall might as well have been a curtain.

He remembered the one fight they had when he thought he might have to call the cops. It ended up in make-up sex so loud that Mitch had to go for a walk. Come to think of it, it probably happened right over the sink, now that he knew where it was.

Mitch had always found them a strikingly mismatched couple, visually speaking anyway. He was pudgy, pale, and unattractive. She was cartoonishly sexy; too much stuff in her face and a body like a blow-up doll. Not that he was the vanity police. Too many years in too much sun had his arms and chest starting to look a little weathered to him, and he didn't love it. He'd also noticed his face feeling more lax, specifically the skin over his jaw when shaved. Would he ever get fillers or consider a face lift? Never in a million years. But when he thought his thick, wavy hair was thinning a few years ago, he refused to go gentle into that bald night and vowed to get hair plugs at any cost. It wound up not being necessary, but he still had the clinic he liked best saved in his contacts.

The point was, he understood the lengths people would go to maintain a personal standard of appearance, he just personally wasn't a fan of extremes, like the current trend for women, especially, to cosmetically distort their already beautiful faces and bodies to fetishsized, fantasy proportions. The current roster of baseball wives all did this and they all looked the same. The wannabe baseball wives trying to get noticed behind third base had the same look too. So did the groupies hanging outside the hotels after games, hoping to get invited to team parties, ever in search of a good time and bragging rights for bagging the right A-Lister. They looked the same. They acted the same, and were treated the same, which was a real shame because Mitch was sure deep down they just wanted to stand out.

Now, that wasn't to say if an MVP with only two arms happened to introduce one of his lady friends to Mitch at a bar, that the seat next to him wouldn't be free, but more often than not, at the end of the night, that's just where he'd leave her after thanking her for the company. He just had a different type, that's all.

He thought again about Emma and when she first moved into the building. There was no denying he thought she was cute. She had soft, pretty features, but with that wise-ass look that always blipped on his radar. Sometimes she looked like a kid in her twenties. Sometimes she looked not so much younger than him that he should be embarrassed to invite her over for beer. He intended to, once upon a time.