The Grumpy Neighbor Wants the Size 22 Girl Upstairs, and the Walls Are Thin novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Eleven Fifty-Two
Molly records a love scene in her closet booth, the broom thumps her floor, and the furious trip downstairs ends with the hottest man she has ever seen holding her hip and not letting go.
The man under my floor banged on his ceiling at 11:52 p.m., right in the middle of a woman's orgasm.
I was in my bedroom closet with a quilt hung over the door and a microphone an inch from my mouth.
I was reading chapter nineteen of a romance novel called The Duke's Last Mistake.
"Oh, God," I read, in the voice I use for duchesses. "Right there. Don't you dare stop."
Thump, thump, thump.
It was the end of a broom handle against his ceiling.
The sound came up through the old iron heat grate in my closet floor.
I stopped.
I took my headphones off and sat there in the dark with my face burning.
That was the ninth thump this week.
I live on the top floor of a skinny brick house in Hampden.
The grate in my closet floor opens straight into the bedroom of the man below me.
Our landlady, Loretta Honeycutt, swears it's decorative.
He swears at it almost every night.
His name is Costa Karras, and I knew three things about him.
He was the size of a refrigerator, and he never smiled at anyone in this house.
He had moved in seven months ago, and he hadn't said a full sentence to me since.
Thump, thump.
"Fine," I said to the grate. "I'm coming."
I should explain that I was in a mood.
That morning I had found a note taped to my door, folded once, on yellow legal paper, in black block capitals.
SOMEONE ELSE WOULD'VE QUIT AFTER THAT PHONE CALL. YOU KEPT GOING.
It was the twenty-fourth one since March.
They were never signed.
They were the kindest things anyone had said to me in years, and I kept every one in a shoebox on my closet shelf.
Whoever he was, he was nicer than the man with the broom.
So I stood up in my oversize sleep shirt, with no bra and bare feet.
My headphones still hung around my neck, and I went down to have it out.
I made it to the second-floor landing.
Somebody had mopped it.
My foot hit the wet boards and went out from under me.
I grabbed for the railing and missed.
A door opened, and a very large hand caught me by the hip.
It stopped me completely, and I'm a size 22.
I stood there with my heart going and my whole left side held in a grip I could feel through the cotton.
Then I looked up.
And up.
Costa Karras had a black buzz cut, heavy black brows and dark brown eyes that were not friendly.
His jaw looked like he'd shaved this morning and the stubble had won.
He wore a damp white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, and he was barefoot.
His left forearm was a shiny ripple of old burn scar from wrist to elbow.
He was six foot four.
My head came up to the middle of his chest.
"Careful," he said.
His voice was low and rough.
"You mopped," I said.
"I mopped."
"At midnight."
"I was up."
"Because of me."
"Because of you," he agreed.
His hand did not move.
It covered most of my hip, his thumb pressed into the soft curve above my thigh.
He was looking at me.
He wasn't looking at my face.
His eyes went down over the shirt, over my breasts without a bra, and over my belly.
They traveled the hem and my bare thighs, then came slowly back.
I have been looked at by plenty of men who pretended not to.
This one did not pretend.
His throat moved.
"You came down here to yell at me," he said.
"You banged on the ceiling."
"You were reading the chapter with the library table."
My mouth fell open.
"You've read it four times since Tuesday," he said. "You stop and go back to the same line. The one about her thighs."
"I'm a professional."
"You're a menace."
He said it like a compliment, flat and angry, and his thumb pressed in once, hard.
"I have a deadline," I said, because my brain had left the building.
"I have a ceiling."
"It's my floor."
"Then keep it down," he said, and he finally let go of my hip.
My skin felt the loss of him.
I went back upstairs on legs I did not trust, and I shut my door and leaned on it.
I could still feel the shape of his hand.
I stripped the quilt off the closet door, crawled into bed, and lay there staring at the ceiling.
The house went quiet.
Then, through the old grate and the floorboards and the dark, I heard his bed creak under his weight.
I heard him breathe out, long and shaking.
And then, low and rough and so clear he might have been in the room, I heard him say it.
"Molly."
A pause.
"Fuck."
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