Page 8 of Forbidden Romeo

Aimee

“Roisin, you dumbass! You locked me out again!” I bang on the apartment door while awkwardly trying to balance the cardboard box on my hip. A strand of messy red hair falls in my eyes, and I blow at it fruitlessly.

Today really isn’t going as well as I’d hoped.

Roisin wrenches the door open a second later, and I immediately offload the box on her.

“Hey!” she whines as I breeze past her into the apartment.Ourapartment.

“I carried that thing three flights of stairs; you can carry it to your room,” I reply, falling onto the only free space on the couch. The rest is occupied with a combination of shoes, Christmas decorations, and a sewing machine I’m pretty sure is broken.

“I thought we were going to leave this behind?” I shout to Roisin when she disappears behind her bedroom door.

“What?”

“The sewing machine,” I reply, picking up the offending object.

Roisin reappears a moment later with her arms folded across her chest. “I’m going to fix it!”

I roll my eyes at her. “Uh-huh. When?”

“When,” she says as she strides over to snatch it away from me, “I have time.”

“It stays in your room,” I counter.

Roisin simply sticks out her tongue and retreats, no doubt going to dump her newly acquired goods in her room, never to be touched again.

I stretch my arms out in front of me, letting the muscles crack and pop in all the right places. “Let’s not move again for a while. I’m so tired.”

“Was that the last box?” Roisin shouts from the other room.

“Yeah. Table won’t get here until next week, though.”

“Looks like we’re eating on the floor then,” she says, walking back into a room with an old blanket that she lays across the ground for us. She steps away from it a moment with a frown. “Hmm… something is missing.”

Playing along, I slide off the couch and onto the floor as she rushes off into the kitchen.

It feels weird to be back in New York after all this time, but the tiny apartment already feels like it’s welcoming us home. There’s something about an unfurnished space that screams “fresh start,” but the hustle of the people below, the sirens a couple blocks away, and the horns of the cabs narrowly avoiding each other reminds me so much of Harlem it can be unnerving.

But this is Brooklyn.

And, in Brooklyn, we can just be two sisters making their way in the world.

I’m brought out of my musings by Roisin, who promptly hands me a glass and pours me some white wine. It’s an old, chipped tumbler, but somehow, the alcohol has never tasted so good.

“Have I told you how much I love you today?”

Roisin laughs as she takes a seat next to me. “You could stand to say it again.”

“Love you to pieces, Roshe,” I say sincerely as we clink our glasses together. “Can you think of anything more quintessentially ‘New York’ than drinking on the floor of your new shabby apartment?”

“Hey, it’s shabby chic!”

I roll my eyes at her as I take another sip. “We’d be paying half this rent if we were back in LA.”

“Well, LA isn’t New York, is it?” she replies with a dreamy glance out the window. “There’s so much we could do here, you know?”

I feel my hand tightening around the tumbler. “I feel like you’ve glamorized it in your head.”

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