Chapter 2

Piper's POV

I got back into my apartment, shut the door, and leaned my forehead against it until the wood cooled my face down.

Then my phone started screaming at me.

Not ringing. Screaming. Roni never just called. She sent voice memos back to back with maybe two seconds between them, like she thought if she left a gap I'd find a way to escape.

I swiped the first one on speaker.

"Okay, listen." Her voice came out fast, clipped, like she was briefing troops. "Guys like that, they don't lack women. They're used to being approached, hinted at, offered things. So you don't need to say anything spectacular. You just have to put out a little heat. A little soft, indirect come-on. He'll take the stairs you built for him and walk straight down them."

"How do you know he will?" I said to the phone, and then felt stupid, because it was a recording.

I played the next one.

"Because that's how men are. Especially the good-looking ones. A one-night thing doesn't cost them anything. The man's been doing heavy lifting all day. I promise you, he's going to want some downtime."

I stood in front of my dresser mirror with the phone in one hand and looked at myself.

Hoodie. Two sizes too big, gray, faded to the color of dishwater at the cuffs. Hair up in a knot I hadn't touched since yesterday, a few pieces stuck to my cheek. Glasses sliding down my nose.

"Roni," I said. "I look like... I mean, I'm fine. That's the word. Fine."

The next memo was already playing. "Shut up. I could hear that from here. Your face is fine, you just bury it. And honey, your body. Piper. Your body is the best thing you've got and you don't even know it."

My neck got hot. It crept up into my jaw, my ears.

Because that wasn't new information. Two of my exes had said something like it. One of them, the one who drove the truck with the broken heater, had said it more than once, "Your body is enticing."

"Now go home and change," Roni said. "Right now. Something loose. Off one shoulder. And wear the shorts we bought at that place on Main."

"Now?"

"Now. Opportunity doesn't wait."

I hung up and went at my closet like I was digging for a weapon.

Hangers clattering, shirts going over my shoulder onto the bed, a shoe hitting the wall. Nothing. Nothing. Roni was going to kill me. Then my hand hit the bottom of the pile, and I pulled out a t-shirt I hadn't looked at in six years.

High school. Before I lost the weight. The collar was wide, stretched out from a hundred wash cycles, and the cotton was so thin I could see the light through it when I held it up.

I put it on. I turned to the mirror.

Too big. Way too big — it hung on me, one side sliding down off my shoulder to my upper arm exactly the way Roni wanted, the hem falling past my hips.

I took a picture. Sent it.

The reply came back in nine seconds. "Close. Now take your bra off."

I stared at the screen. "...What?"

"Off. That's what we're going for. The almost. The suggestion. He looks at you once and he knows exactly what you're asking for."

I stood in front of the mirror with my hand on the shoulder strap.

"Is that going to be too see-through?"

"It better be. You're not going to church, Piper. That's the whole point of the shirt."

I pulled my arms back in through the sleeves, unclasped it, and dropped it on the bed.

The cotton went back down over my skin, and I felt every inch of it. The fabric was cool, then warm. I could see the shape of my chest through it in the mirror, the darker places where my nipples pressed against the cloth, and I turned sideways and then turned all the way around and then looked away fast, like I'd caught myself doing something wrong.

This is necessary research. This is necessary research. This is—

"I'm going to die," I said out loud.

I sprayed perfume on my wrists, then behind my ears, twice each, then a third time because my hands didn't know what to do with themselves.

"Okay," Roni's last memo said. "Go help him move."

"That's it? That's the whole plan?"

"There's no plan. Plans get weird. Just go help him move and bump into him a few times while you do it. Elbow. Arm. Let it look like nothing. Trust me, men feel that and it does something to them. Good luck. Text me everything."

I stood at my door with my hand on the knob for a long time.

Should I do this? Maybe this is too rushed.

Something hit the floor out in the hall. A box. Something scraped across the boards.

Now or never.

I opened the door.

He was coming out of 2A with a box held against his chest, and the hallway was so narrow that we ended up almost chest to chest, close enough that I could see the sweat at his temples. He was taller than he'd looked from down the hall. Much taller. Six three, maybe, and the way he was standing made the corridor feel like it had gotten smaller in the last four seconds.

Then he looked at me.

His eyes were gray-green, so pale they were almost not a color. Almost clear. And something in my chest squeezed, once, hard, like a hand closing.

His face didn't move. That was the thing about it. The bones were so good they didn't need expression to hold your attention, and the quiet in it wasn't cold, exactly. It was tired. It was like he was carrying something behind his eyes that was heavier than the box.

"Hi." My voice came out too high. "I'm, um, I'm across the hall. 2B. I saw you moving in and I thought, do you want a hand?"

He shifted the box. His voice was low and rough. "Hi. Declan."

And then his eyes went down.

Just a little. Just far enough. And stopped.

A flush came up his neck and along his jaw, faint, like a shadow moving.

He looked away. Then he looked back at my face and took a breath through his nose, and when he spoke he did it carefully, the way you'd tell a stranger their fly was down.

"Your shirt," he said. "It's — excuse me. You're exposed."

I looked down.

The collar had slid the whole way off my shoulder and down my arm — the shirt had caught on the door handle when I pulled the door open and dragged sideways across my chest — and I hadn't put a bra back on. When I looked down, the whole neckline had swung off to one side, and the edge of my nipple was sitting there in the daylight, completely, obviously out.

Everything went white in my ears.

Oh no. Oh no no no no no.

And my mouth, which has never once in twenty-four years waited for my brain, opened up and let Roni's voice out of it.

"That's the whole point of the shirt."

The hallway was so quiet I could hear a car door shut somewhere out on the street.

He looked up at me. His eyes had changed — not angry, not laughing. Just wide and completely, horribly serious. He shifted the box, looked down the hallway in both directions like he was checking for witnesses, and then asked, very evenly, "Is that your job?"

My stomach did something cold. "...What job?"

He held my eyes. And then he said it plainly, because he was not a man who did things halfway.

"Are you a prostitute?"

I stood there with my mouth open and the neck of my shirt down by my elbow and not one single word coming out of me.

He thinks I'm a prostitute. So my hot neighbor's first impression of me is that I'm a prostitute?