The Forbidden Fruit

Spit Take

I stayed awake that night for a good couple of hours, staring at the ceiling. I felt like that ceiling was the most damn interesting ceiling I'd ever seen in my life. And of course, still-slightly-hungover me needed something to distract itself.

I groaned and flopped my head to one side to look out the large window of my apartment.

It was pretty dark out, and although the smog of the city usually made the moon look bleary and blotted out all the stars, tonight was strangely clear. A couple stars twinkled in the deep blue sky as the comforting rise and fall of the rumble of cars hummed by my apartment.

Shit.

I groaned again, raising a hand to cover my eyes. I hadn't been to work in forever. Of course, I was the manager of where I worked, so I guess I basically ran the place. I could give myself my own breaks, right?

I was the worst manager ever.

I worked at The Underworld, which sounded a lot darker than it actually was. It was a trendy, more dapper/minimalistic clothing store for younger people on the other side of the park. Its color range consisted mainly of dark maroons, grays, blacks... Literally every dark color, plus some white and vintage items. I got free clothes from there, which was why my closet mainly consisted of the so-called "hipster" items... I was well dressed and affordable.

I turned on my stomach and buried my face in my pillow. I felt like screaming into it like a moody teenager, and although the thought seemed really lame, it was actually pretty tempting. My last day and a half had been majorly fucked. I deserved a good scream.

I turned back to the window, looking out at the stars. For a minute, I spaced out and the stars began to glimmer and melt kind of familiarly into a pair of dark brown eyes...

I turned into my pillow and hollered.

Fuck.

I was fucked.

How was I going to sleep when the thought of her smile and her fucking stupid little gorgeous smirk kept worming its way into my head?

"I'm waiting on those fifty pots of flowers." Her voice sounded like a thousand bells twinkling, even when she was trying to be sarcastic or cold or whatever the fuck she was playing at. I stared at the ceiling again, picturing her face there—her long, wavy brown hair, her freckles... Oh, my God, her freckles.

I knew she was joking when she asked for those pots of flowers. It was just some asswipe of an apology I had thrown out there because I'd felt so bad (I still did). She wouldn't expect me to show up on her doorstep with more roses.

Which was exactly why I decided right then and there to do just that.

........

The next morning I got up and made myself a nice, steaming pot of coffee. With my hair all mussed and with only my boxers and white undershirt on, I grabbed a mug of coffee and stepped out onto the balcony of my apartment.

It was kind of cooler out today, so I wrapped a big gray blanket around myself. I probably looked like some kind of goth cocoon, but who would bother to look up five stories of a building on a Sunday morning? I sure wouldn't.

I sipped my coffee and stared out at the morning mist rolling in from the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the harbor. With a sigh that sent the steam rolling out from the top of my coffee mug, I realized how long it'd been since I jogged across the bridge. I remembered how it felt to be perfectly in shape, running along with the crisp morning air in my lungs and blowing across my hair. I remembered how the harbor smelled and how the men on the docks would unload the new shipments of fresh fish for the farmers' markets. What had happened?