Page 37 of Up All Night

“Ha, ha,” he deadpanned.

I chuckled. “If the shoe fits.”

“I’m only grumpy with a certain neighbor,” he insisted.

“I can’t imagine who,” I said, exaggerating my innocence.

“A neighbor who, for some reason, likes to keep me up at night,” he playfully accused.

I turned on my side, smiling at my floor vent like a total weirdo. “I would report them to the superintendent if I were you.”

A booming laugh came through the vents, and my smile spread wider across my face. I never would have thought West and I would be joking about our rocky relationship, but we both seemed to be having fun with it.

“I’ll have to try that one day,” he chuckled. “I have a feeling this neighbor has some magic voodoo over the superintendent, though, so I’m not sure if it will work.”

Not so much magic voodoo, but more like a discounted dance class.

“Or they possibly teach dance to his granddaughter,” I offered.

“Ah, yeah, that’s a good theory.”

I took my finger and outlined the vent, tracing the frame of it. I wanted to ask him if he was starting to warm up to the idea that ‘this neighbor’ wasn’t as bad as he’d originally thought, but I was nervous about how he would take the question. I didn’t want him to think I meant anything more out of it than curiosity, that maybe we could be pleasant neighbors who coexisted civilly. Possibly even be friends one day.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I looked at the clock on my nightstand—it was almost midnight.

I had been tired earlier, but now that I was talking to him, I was more awake than ever.

“Kind of,” I answered, giving him a somewhat honest answer. My body was tired, but my brain wanted to keep this conversation going with West. “Are you tired?” I asked hesitantly. Anticipation flowed through me. Was it possible he could be enjoying talking to me, too?

“Ironically enough, I’m wide awake.” His deep voice flowed through the vents, his warm tone causing goosebumps to cover my skin.

And so we kept talking.

He asked me how I had gotten into dancing, and I told him about how my mom had originally put me in dance classes to help babysit me so she could work, but then I’d fallen in love with it and she’d worked hard to make sure I could always dance.

I asked him what his job was, and he tried to explain it to me, and although I didn’t fully grasp all that he did and how it kept him so busy, the gist was that he invested in companies.

I told him how growing up, I’d moved all over the United States, eventually coming to San Francisco my senior year of high school and loving it so much that I’d stayed here. He told me he’d lived in the same house in Los Altos his entire childhood and saw himself living in the Bay Area the rest of his life. It wasn’t lost on me that he had grown up in one of the most expensive areas in the Bay. We couldn’t have come from more different worlds.

We continued to talk about random things until the last thing I remembered saying to West was that I wasn’t tired before I fell asleep on the floor.

13

Halle

Idragged my body out of bed, shuffling over to my window and pulling back the curtain. Squinting, I held up a hand against the early afternoon sunlight. I would have preferred to not have slept in until noon, but I hadn’t been planning on falling asleep on the floor while talking to West last night.

I’d awoken around four in the morning with a few vent lines in my cheek and then had climbed into my bed. Thankfully today was Sunday, the only day of the week I didn’t work, so I could get some much needed rest.

Walking out of my room like a zombie, I made my way to the bathroom. Hopefully a hot shower would be just what I needed to join the land of the living.

I turned on the shower, and while I waited for the water to warm up, I combed through my hair and undressed.

Stepping into the shower, I let out a scream. “Aaahhhh!”

Cold water hit my skin, and I scrambled to get away from the freezing spray. I checked the handle, but it clearly pointed to the wordHot. Why was it still cold?

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