THREE

Text messages between Mr. Frederick J. Fitzwilliam and Mr. Reginald R. Cleaves

Good evening, Reginald.

Hey Freddie my boy what’s up

Several things are “up.”

First, I wanted to inform you that I have shredded, and disposed of, that hideous welcome mat I found in front of my door yesterday.

I assume you are the one who put it there?

Awww you didn’t like it?

Of course I didn’t like it you buffoon.

But I spent so much time picking out a gift I thought you’d love

I doubt very seriously that that is the case.

But never mind.

The primary reason I am typing to you now on my infuriatingly tiny cellular telephone screen is to inform you that someone replied to the Craigslist advertisement you placed for me.

She will be moving in over the weekend.

Hey thats great

There is only one problem.

My new roommate is not at all what I had been expecting.

In what way

First, she is a woman. Which I knew, of course, when she replied to my advertisement and I saw her name.

I have nothing against women, as you know. I have also come to understand through my review of the newspapers and magazines you have brought me that in the present era it is not unheard of for unmarried men and women to live together.

So: while a bit disconcerting, I am not overly concerned that she is a woman.

My primary concern is that she is a woman who may not be entirely normal.

And you ARE normal?

That is a fair point.

I thought so

I simply worry that this will not work if my new roommate is someone who thinks it appropriate to arrive to an appointment with disheveled hair and ragged, paint-splattered clothing.

I think itll be fine

Also, she smiles rather a lot, which I find somewhat

I don’t know

Distracting.

Distracting huh?

Distracting as in . . . the woman we met that one night in Paris, distracting?

You certainly have a lot of nerve bringing that up.

Sorry

Forget I said anything

Anyway I still think its fine.

No one else has replied to the ad right?

That is correct.

Because of you.

Because of the rent thing?

Yes. Because of the rent thing.

Okay yeah

I made a typo when I filled out the Craigslist form.

Sorry about that. Thats on me.

I am not so sure you are actually sorry. Either way, this cannot be put off any longer. I must have a roommate, and as soon as possible.

The more time passes, the more I realize how completely out of my element I am.

I need help. Badly.

I suppose she will do.

Even if she is odd.

Well think of it this way. If shes really THAT strange, you won’t be tempted to either eat OR fuck her right?

Why do I still speak to you?

I mean I made sure you were fed, right?

And set it up so your bills and HOA dues were paid on time

I also got u a cell phone

You owed me AT LEAST that much, given the circumstances.

You know on second thought it would probably be good for you if you DID fuck your new roommate

God knows its been long enough

I am blocking your number as soon as I work out how that is done.

Frederick wasn’t there to greet me when I moved in. Of course, I hadn’t expected him to be. We’d emailed a few times after I said I’d take the room, and he’d explained his nocturnal schedule was a seven-days-a-week thing. He’d be sleeping in his bedroom—not to be disturbed—when I arrived.

So it wasn’t a surprise when I rolled my suitcase through the front door and found myself alone in my new, weirdly dark, weirdly decorated living room. It was also freezing in there, like it had been when I’d first visited.

I rubbed at my arms, trying to warm them.

Sam was originally supposed to help me move in, but he wasn’t there, either. I suspected his last-minute need to visit an elderly great-aunt I’d never heard of before out in Skokie was his passive-aggressive way of saying he thought my moving in was a mistake.

To my extreme annoyance, he’d done a complete one-eighty on the whole moving into the two-hundred-dollar apartment thing once I told him Frederick was hot.

“Living with someone you think is hot never ends well,” he’d warned the night before. “You either end up sleeping with them—which is a huge mistake, nine times out of ten—or else you drive yourself nuts because you want to sleep with them.”

Sam and Scott had come over the night before to help me pack. There wasn’t much to do; I’d already dropped most big things off at the consignment shop. But I was feeling a little sad over saying goodbye to yet another apartment, and I was glad for the company.

Even if Sam had mostly used the opportunity to talk me out of moving in with Frederick.

“If they’re hot, you either sleep with them or you want to sleep with them, huh?” I stared at him. “You speak from experience?”

“No,” Sam had said quickly, looking over his shoulder to see if his husband was hearing this. I was pretty sure he was—Scott kept smiling to himself and shaking his head as he pretended to check his work email at the kitchen table—but he had a much better poker face than Sam. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

I’d scoffed. “Frederick’s hotness will be a complete nonissue. We have totally opposite schedules. I’ll barely see him.”

“What if his work schedule changes?” Sam had pressed. “What if he suddenly doesn’t have some mysterious job that keeps him out all night long? What if next month he starts working from home?”

“Sam—”

“I just don’t want you getting hurt again, Cassie.” His voice dropped in pitch a little, and his eyes turned soft. My cheeks went hot—knowing he’d been thinking of my long string of stupid decisions when it came to romance. “It’ll be hard to plot throwing him off a building for breaking your heart and ruining your credit if he’s right there, sleeping in the next room.”

“That only happened once,” I countered. “Most of my other bad decisions at least had the decency to leave my credit rating alone. And Frederick is so weird I will never want to sleep with him, even if he is the hottest human being I have ever personally seen.”

Sam still looked skeptical.

“Listen—when I say he’s weird, I mean he’s really weird. I’m pretty sure he collects Precious Moments figurines or something. There’s a closet he says is off-limits and he won’t tell me what’s in it.”

Scott—who was clearly listening by that point—had chuckled. “Yeah, that isn’t a red flag at all.”

“I saw no obvious signs of him being a serial killer on my visit,” I insisted. “And like you said when you told me to email him in the first place—I’m out of options.”

When Sam and Scott left my place that night, I’d almost been glad to see them go. But now I wished Sam were here with me. Now that I was moving in, and was essentially all alone in an unfamiliar apartment, it felt . . . strange. Frederick wanted his apartment to feel like my home, but how could it? The creepy vibe that the too-dark walls and hodgepodge decor gave off was only enhanced by how frigid, and pristine, and completely devoid of any sort of personal effects the room was.

My idea of finally being able to work on my art and watch my garbage television in my new living room seemed ridiculous now. How could I bring either RuPaul or the treasures I found at Chicagoland recycling centers into this spotless room? The apartment felt so cavernous I couldn’t help but wonder if there’d be an echo if I shouted. I opened my mouth to give it a try before remembering that Frederick was likely in his bedroom, sleeping. Waking him up by yelling for no good reason probably wouldn’t be a good way to begin our new roommate relationship.

I rolled my suitcase down the hallway towards the bedrooms, taking special care to give a wide berth to the hall closet Frederick said was forbidden. As I walked by it, I thought I detected a faint fruity smell coming from it, but that may have just been my imagination. Either way, indulging my curiosity by seeing what was inside would also not be a good way to begin our new roommate relationship, since staying out of it was one of Frederick’s only rules.

Frederick’s bedroom door was closed, of course, but there was an envelope taped to the outside of my door, with Miss Cassie Greenberg written on it in flowing cursive.

I took the envelope off the door and saw it had been closed with a blood-red wax seal embossed with the letters FJF. I’d never seen an actual wax seal outside of a movie. Did they even exist anymore?

I slid my finger beneath the seal and, breaking it, carefully opened the envelope. Inside it was a single sheet of stiff white stationery, folded into perfect thirds, bearing another highly stylized FJF monogram at the top of the page.

Dear Miss Greenberg,

Welcome.

I am sorry I am unavailable to greet you in person. If you have arrived at two in the afternoon as you indicated you would in your last email to me, I am in my bedroom, sleeping. I remind you to please allow me to rest undisturbed.

I have left instructions for you regarding various features of the apartment in places where I trust said instructions will be of most use. I believe I have thought of everything, but if I have missed something crucial, please let me know and I will do my best to address your concerns.

As we have discussed, I suspect we will interact infrequently. When I wish to convey information to you and you are not here, I will leave a note for you on the kitchen table. I ask you to kindly communicate with me in this same way. I strongly prefer more “old-fashioned” methods of communication to email and text messaging. I use the latter as infrequently as possible.

I look forward to greeting you properly in a few hours if you are still in the apartment when I rise at sundown.

Yours in good health,

Frederick J. Fitzwilliam

Frederick’s handwriting was easily the prettiest I had ever seen, his cursive gracefully slanting across the page like the lettering in a formal wedding invitation. The last time I’d gotten a handwritten letter was in the sixth grade, when my class did a pen pal exchange with a sixth grade classroom in France. Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that my new roommate wrote letters often enough to justify having monogrammed stationery.

Smiling a little, I stepped into my new bedroom.

There was a second envelope lying on the mattress, beside an intricately carved wooden bowl full of olive-shaped bright orange objects. Were they fruit? They smelled strongly of citrus, but they were unlike any fruit I’d ever seen before.

Bewildered, I slowly opened the second envelope—which had also been closed with an old-fashioned seal—and pulled out the crisply folded, fancy sheet of paper inside.

Dear Miss Greenberg,

I am told it is customary to give housewarming gifts when a person moves into a new home. I don’t know if you even like fruit, but I had these kumquats on hand and thought I would gift them to you.

I hope you enjoy them.

With kind regards,

Frederick

I set down the letter, amazed.

He’d gotten me a move-in gift.

I’d had over a dozen living arrangements since high school. Before now, the closest thing I’d ever gotten to a move-in gift was the communal password to a roommate’s ex-boyfriend’s Hulu account.

I glanced at the bowl again, picking up one of the tiny orange fruits and sniffing it. Up close the citrus smell was strong and unmistakable.

I had never seen fruit like this before and had no idea what a kumquat even was. I loved citrus fruit, though. Somehow, I had a feeling these were organic, too.

I reached for my phone to tell Sam about this. He wasn’t going to believe that my weird new roommate got me a bowl of exotic fruit as a move-in gift. But then, I thought better of it. If Sam was already concerned about me moving in with a hot roommate, he’d be even more concerned if he knew that said hot roommate bought me a gift—as random and fruity as it might be.

No. Even though I always told Sam everything, I needed to keep this detail to myself.

Curious, I bit into the small fruit in my hand. Sunlight burst on my tongue.

Delicious, I thought, popping the rest of it into my mouth.

It was after five by the time I got all my stuff moved over from my old apartment. Everything I owned—my art supplies, my clothes, the half-broken rainbow-colored guitar I’d dragged with me on every move since college even though I barely knew how to play—fit easily inside my new bedroom closet.

When I shut the closet door, you couldn’t even tell anyone had just moved in.

I leaned back against the wall and surveyed the room. I still couldn’t believe this space was mine. It all felt surreal—the four-poster bed that took up a third of the room; the antique dresser and desk set; the mostly bare walls.

I thought back to Frederick saying I could redecorate. Normally I liked to cover my walls with things I’d made. But it was hard to picture most of my pieces in this room. Especially my most recent project, which I called The Eternal Sunshine of Late-Stage Capitalism, made mostly out of a rusted-out carburetor and rainbow-colored confetti.

But the decor in the room sucked. Yes, the furniture was fancy and old, but it was as much a mishmash of style and era as the living room was. A single framed oil painting of a fox-hunting party was all that hung on the walls. It was huge, hung on the wall directly opposite of my bed, and was maybe the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. It featured a dozen long-dead men riding horses in a field, dressed in wigs and red coats. Beagles ran alongside them.

I’d studied in London during my junior year of college, and I remembered learning that this style of painting had been very popular in English inns in the eighteenth century. It arguably matched the decor in the room a lot better than my own projects would. But it was also hideous. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep there knowing what fate awaited those poor historical foxes.

After a few moments’ consideration I decided the seaside landscape project I did the previous summer after my trip up to Saugatuck, on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, would look great in that spot.

While landscapes weren’t my usual thing, I thought I did a decent job with that series. I’d been in a rare mood for watercolors on that trip, and I thought the warm, sandy tones I’d used would go well with the color scheme of the room. As would the seashells and pieces of beach trash I’d glued to the canvas once the paint had dried.

I decided to write Frederick a note before getting any of my pieces from Sam’s storage unit, just to be on the safe side.

Hi Frederick,

I’m all moved in! Tomorrow I’m going to hang up some of my art in my bedroom if that’s okay with you?? The walls in my bedroom are kind of bare, and you said I could redecorate if I wanted to. I have a lot of pieces I’m proud of that I’d like to display in there, but this IS your apartment, so I wanted to be sure it was okay before I brought stuff over from Sam’s. Especially because my art is a lot different in style from the way the rest of the place is decorated.

Also, thank you for the fruit! I’d never had a kumquat before. They were delicious.

Cassie

My handwriting was nowhere near as nice as Frederick’s, and I didn’t have an envelope to put my note in. But there was nothing to be done for it. I set it down in the center of the kitchen table, figuring that if he still wasn’t awake by the time I had to leave for my shift at Gossamer’s, he’d see it there.

I was exhausted from moving and regretted agreeing to take a shift at the coffee shop that night. All I wanted was to relax in my new bedroom and listen to music. But I needed the money and wasn’t really in a position to say no to shifts, no matter how tired I was.

I still had an hour before I needed to leave for work. Plenty of time to eat something. I’d had the foresight to save some of my nonperishables for the move, which was a very good thing. I’d been so busy with moving I’d forgotten lunch—something I rarely did. The fruit was tasty, but it wasn’t a meal.

And now I was starving.

I went into the kitchen and for the first time noticed just how clean it was. The picture Frederick had sent me hadn’t really captured that. The white tile floor didn’t have a speck of dirt on it. Neither did the old-fashioned stove or the pale pink countertops.

I’d assumed Frederick had people clean for him. But this was more than clean.

This kitchen looked like it had never been used.

Would my dinner be the first meal ever prepared in there? Impossible. And yet somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was true. If so, it was pretty pathetic that my spaghetti noodles with a little salt added for flavor would be the one to break the seal.

I knelt down and opened one of the kitchen cupboards at random, looking for a saucepan. It was completely empty, save for bare shelves, the liner that had been placed on them, and a layer of dust.

Frowning, I opened the cupboard next in line. This one was packed with a bizarre assortment of food I’d have to be on the verge of starving to eat—jars of cocktail onions and gefilte fish, boxes of Hamburger Helper and cans of asparagus—but nothing to cook it in.

“Huh,” I muttered. Where were Frederick’s pots and pans? Did he just get takeout every day?

“Miss Greenberg.”

At the sound of Frederick’s voice, I jumped and smacked the top of my head on the underside of an open drawer.

“Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing my head. It was already throbbing. I was pretty sure I’d have an ugly bump there in the morning.

I stood up and . . . there he was. My new roommate, standing right in front of me. He looked like he’d just stepped out from a magazine photo shoot, his hair artfully tousled and falling perfectly over his forehead. He was standing much closer to me than he had when I’d toured his apartment, and he seemed to notice that, too, his eyes widening and nostrils flaring a little as though he were breathing me in. He was dressed even more formally than he’d been the night I’d met him, adding a red silk ascot and black top hat to the charcoal-gray three-piece suit that fit like the gods had made it specifically for him.

It was an odd look, to be sure. But—god help me—it worked. My mouth watered for reasons having nothing to do with hunger.

If he noticed how overwhelmed I was by his appearance, he showed no sign of it. He simply frowned, brow furrowed in concern. He stepped a little closer. He smelled like fabric softener, the citrus fruit he’d put in my bedroom, and something deep and mysterious I had no name for. “Are you quite all right, Miss Greenberg?”

I nodded, flustered and embarrassed. “Yeah.” I rubbed at the spot where my head had met the drawer. A bump was already starting to form. “Where are your pots and pans, though?”

“Pots and pans?” He stared at me, puzzled. As though the words were in a language he didn’t understand. Eventually, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but . . . I don’t follow.”

Now it was my turn to be confused. What about my question was hard to understand?

“I was going to cook myself some spaghetti before I went to work,” I explained. “I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch today, and I’m starving. They have sandwiches and things at Gossamer’s, but the food there is pretty gross and super marked up, and we only get a fifty percent employee discount. Which, if you ask me, is basically wage theft. I already bought this spaghetti, so . . .”

Frederick’s eyes went very wide. He smacked his forehead.

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “You want to cook something!”

He said the words as if he’d just had a profound realization. I stared at him, trying to make sense of his bizarre reaction. “Yes. I want to make my dinner. So—where are your pots and pans?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck.

“They’re . . . um.” He paused, glancing at me, before turning his attention back to the distressingly white tile kitchen floor. And then, his eyes lit up, and he met my gaze again. “Oh! I am having my pots and pans repaired.”

Was that even something you could do with pots and pans? “You’re having them repaired? Really?”

Maybe his had extra features that required regular maintenance. In fairness I didn’t cook much myself and hardly kept up with the latest trends in cookware.

“Yes.” Frederick grinned at me, looking extremely pleased with himself. Goddamnit if his megawatt smile didn’t just light up his entirely too good-looking face. “My pots and pans are at the shop. Being repaired.”

“All of them?”

“Oh. Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously. “All of them.”

“So . . .” I trailed off and looked around the kitchen in confusion. “What are you cooking with until they get back?”

“I . . . don’t cook often,” he admitted, quietly.

“Ah.” I could have kicked myself for dropping off my crappy pots and pans at the consignment shop. Eating out three meals a day might be an option for someone like Frederick, but it wasn’t an option for me. “I guess I’ll run by Target and pick up a few after work tonight.”

“No, Miss Greenberg,” Frederick said. “I told you the apartment would be fully furnished. I gather that your expectations were that the kitchen would have everything you needed to cook your meals.”

“I mean . . . yeah. Sort of.”

“Then I will purchase cooking implements when I am out this evening.” He smiled at me, a little sheepishly. “Please forgive the oversight. It will not happen again.”

I opened my mouth to thank him. But before I could get out the words, Frederick sprang away from me and bolted from the apartment, ostensibly to get me something to cook my meals.