And I am alone in a silent apartment. Her silent apartment.
It’s been days. Long enough for London to go running to her authority of choice and tell them that I, Adam Bisset, have taken up residence on the hand-me-down couch in her one-bedroom apartment. It’s an option that’s open to her. Then again, it would implicate her, too.
And London Frank can’t afford to be implicated.
If I were a good man, I would disappear right now, before she returns from her shopping. I would disappear and I would lose myself on the opposite side of the planet.
Naturally, disappearing comes with its own set of risks. If I disappear, there will be no one here when they come for her. Someone will always come for London Frank.
How could they not?
I couldn’t help myself. I knew damn well that I shouldn’t come here, and yet I did.
And there is the thing I can hardly admit even in the privacy of my own thoughts.
I don’t want to disappear.
I’ve spent a lifetime in the shadowy spaces between where real people eat and fuck and get married. London lives in the light. If it were possible to be there with her…
London has been gone fifteen minutes when I tire of lying on the couch, staring up at the old plastered ceiling. The bullet that tried for my life didn’t hit anything too important, and I took it out before any major infection set in. It would have been more dramatic to die. Ah, well. Now I have the opportunity to go through her things.
The main room is a kitchen and living room in one. It’s not terrible, for New York City real estate—close but not cramped. The appliances are old but scrubbed clean.
Either she cares a lot about kitchen maintenance or she barely eats here.
The refrigerator speaks to the latter. London has three bottles of strawberry-infused water, half a bag of baby carrots, and a takeout container of unknown origin.
She came home the other night smelling like a coffee shop, so she must eat there—or somewhere else. I can picture her a hundred places in the city, feet wrapped around the rungs of a barstool, neon lights in her hair.
I can’t picture her standing over the stove, stirring a pot of noodles. She does have noodles, two boxes in a slim cupboard above the fridge.
Oh—traveling. She would have been traveling before for her work as an influencer.
But she’s not traveling now. How could she, really? Posting her face all over a public profile would bring the NSA running faster than she could count to ten.
So could my presence here.
It’s a toss-up.
The living room doesn’t offer much in the way of new things to look at. There’s the couch and the crocheted blanket I’ve been sleeping under. A television on an IKEA stand, with a fake potted plant perched nearby. I’ve been in here for days. I know every leaf on that plant.
I pass by the bathroom in the narrow hall separating Holly’s bedroom from the rest of the space. Her medicine cabinet is practically bare. A bottle of Tylenol—that’s it. No prescriptions. I searched the medicine cabinet the last time she went shopping, hoping for something stronger.
Nothing.
The one place I haven’t been is London’s bedroom.
The door’s open when I get there. Open wide. It’s almost flat against the inner wall, so I can lean against the doorframe and look in. I’ve assessed hundreds of rooms over the course of my career. None of them have made my hair stand on end. Not like this.
At first glance there’s nothing out of the ordinary. A full-size mattress with a rumpled white comforter sits close to one wall, with just enough room on the side for a person of London’s size to squeeze past. A slim end table holds up a nondescript lamp. The closet space isn’t anything to write home about—a long closet set into one wall. Shallow. So shallow it can’t hold all of London’s clothes, which are stacked on the floor, bursting at the seams. This is the first hint of her former influencer life.
She has a wardrobe.
But it doesn’t look like it’s recently been in use. The hamper wedged into a corner of the closet only has a few items at the bottom. She hasn’t been changing in and out of various looks for photoshoots. I would be shocked to discover she’s been sneaking out to take photos. It wouldn’t be much of a travel shoot for London.
So there are the clothes.
And then there is the shelf.
It’s one shelf, also IKEA-chic, snugged up in a space below the narrow window at the front of the room. The window looks down over a New York City street as nondescript as anywhere else. That doesn’t mean it’s safe. That doesn’t mean they won’t find us. But that’s old information. What interests me is the contents of the shelf.
The top two squares are filled with records.
Records leaning against each other in a tilted slope toward the left side. On top of the shelf, in a place of prominence, is a blush pink record player. This, at least, looks perfect for an Instagram shoot. Something sent to her by a company that wanted her influence, no doubt. Women like London get this kind of thing all the time. That’s why they go into careers on social media, or at least side jobs there.
I would expect London’s apartment to be full of these kinds of gifts, or bribes, or payments.
It’s not.
Aside from her clothes, the record player is the only obvious sign of her career. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she bought this for herself to go with her record collection.
I didn’t intend to come into the room when I stood up. Only to look. To canvas. The records change my plans. My fingers itch to separate them from each other and read the titles. It’s the same aching itch I have to touch London whenever she’s in the same room, which is nearly always.
A deep breath to steady myself turns into an exercise in restraint. I can smell her. The light floral soapy scent of her shampoo is all over the blanket, and she’s left it tumbled and open, like she just climbed out of it. The bed is a trap. It’s the records that hook me at the center of my chest and tug me across the threshold.
The fact that I hesitated has made all of this more illicit and more irresistible. If I’d just walked in like I own both the bedroom and London Frank, I wouldn’t get to feel this blend of shame and exhilaration.
My feet meet the rug and it gives. The rug, like everything else, is shockingly secondhand. It’s endearing as hell to know that a person like London, beautiful, well-traveled London, furnishes her apartment with comfortable castoffs. I fight off the urge to sink down to my knees and run my palms over the fabric ridges.
The rug ends where the shelf begins.
This is more intimate than rifling through her underwear drawer. Make no mistake—I want to do that, too. So much that if she ever knew, she’d call me a sick bastard and change the locks. I want to look at the records more. Is it an obsession if it makes you want to go through a person’s records more than you want to see their lingerie?
Perhaps.
I test the paperboard sleeves of the records and my heart races like I’ve hooked a finger into the waistband of her panties. It hurts to stand, as cavalier as I’m being about it.
What hurts more is the absence of her in this apartment. I’m six inches from the side of her bed and it’s a joke. A furniture taunt. I could have her in that bed. What I wouldn’t give to have her in that bed, to have my fingertips on her skin instead of on these records—