Chapter 8
“Does she know?” Marcus asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to do something about it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Because she was my roommate. Because we had a lease. Because she barely seemed to like me. And because I had seen bad roommate situations turn into unlivable disasters.
I said none of that out loud.
“It’s complicated.”
Marcus picked his controller back up. “You know what’s actually complicated? This final boss. You and your roommate? That’s just you being afraid of a normal human conversation.”
I told him to mind his business. He reminded me I’d brought her up four times unprompted.
We dropped it.
But on the walk home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.
Not the part about the conversation.
The part about her laugh.
That was the problem with cataloging. Once it started, it kept running in the background like a program I had forgotten to close.
When I got home at 9:45, Chloe was on the couch with her laptop, still in work clothes, shoes kicked off, hair coming loose around her face.
She had the posture of someone who had absolutely intended to be productive and was now losing that fight.
She glanced up when I came in.
“There’s leftover soup on the stove.”
I stopped halfway through taking off my jacket. “What?”
“I made too much. You can have the rest.”
I went into the kitchen and lifted the lid.
Tomato soup. Homemade. The kind where someone had actually strained the skins and seeds out properly.
“You made this from scratch?”
“I’ve been watching videos.”
I thought about the grease fire. The detergent disaster. The exploded bookshelf.
“Since when?”
“Since I almost burned the building down.”
There was a beat.
“Don’t make it weird,” she said.
I got a bowl and sat at the kitchen counter.
It was good.
Not just acceptable. Actually good. Properly seasoned. Smooth texture. Not watery. Not overcooked.
“It’s good,” I said.
“I know,” she said, still facing her laptop.
I washed the bowl and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep right away. Marcus’s voice kept replaying in my head.
That’s just you being afraid of a normal human conversation.
The next piece of unexpected intelligence came from a woman named Dana.
She showed up at our apartment on a Wednesday evening carrying a bottle of wine and the energy of someone who had been preparing for an inspection.
Chloe let her in.
Dana walked through the apartment like she was conducting a security sweep, touching things and making little sounds of judgment.
“This is the roommate?” she asked, looking at me.
“That’s him,” Chloe said.
Dana smiled in a way that suggested she had already formed several opinions and was saving them for later.
I made a polite attempt to retreat to my room.
“Sit down,” Dana said. “I want to ask you things.”
I looked at Chloe.
She gave me a helpless shrug that said she had been trying to redirect this force of nature for years and had long since given up.
So I sat.
Dana started asking questions. What I did for work. How long I’d lived there before Chloe moved in. Whether I considered myself tidy. What I actually thought of Chloe as a roommate.
I gave her a careful diplomatic answer.
Dana narrowed her eyes.
“She cleaned your room without asking. She threw your stuff out. Did she apologize?”
I thought about the external hard drive landing in my lap.
“Technically… kind of.”
Dana turned to Chloe. “That counts as an apology from her.”
“Dana,” Chloe said flatly.
“He should know the manual.”