THE PARADE OF BEAUTY

Thump. Thump. Thump. 

I didn't even flinch anymore. Three days in a row, same time, same rhythm — his footsteps crossing the ceiling, a laugh that wasn't mine, the particular creak of his door opening for whoever was walking down my hallway tonight.

I counted them from my kitchen window. A redhead in heels that could double as weapons. Twenty minutes later, someone in a fur-trimmed coat who looked like she'd stepped out of a perfume ad. I hadn't even finished my instant noodles before number three arrived — dark hair, sunglasses at nine p.m., because apparently that was a normal thing rich men's rotating girlfriends did now.

"You're keeping a list," Jess said through the phone, delighted in a way that made me want to throw my own phone into traffic.

"I'm keeping track. There's a difference."

"There is not."

"Three women, Jess. Three. In one night. He's not dating, he's running a shift schedule."

"Maybe he's just — very popular."

"He's a trust-fund idiot with a broken doorbell and a god complex. He is not popular, he is simply available, there's a difference, and I refuse to live underneath a man's entire harem while I'm two rejection emails away from crying in a Target parking lot."

Something upstairs thudded — heavy, deliberate, right above my head — and a moan climbed through my ceiling loud enough that I actually looked up like I'd see through the drywall if I glared hard enough.

That was it. I hung up on Jess mid-sentence, grabbed the broom from behind my fridge — bought that morning, specifically, spitefully, for this exact purpose — and slammed the handle up into the ceiling three times.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Silence, for one glorious second. Then the noise came back louder. Deliberately louder, like whoever was up there had reached over and cranked a dial just to see what I'd do next.

I slammed the broom again, harder, my arm aching with it, and this time I heard footsteps cross the floor directly above me — unhurried, the same unbothered stroll I remembered from a doorway two weeks ago — and stop right over my kitchen.

Then, muffled through a foot of old plaster, I heard him laugh.

He was enjoying this. I stood there in my kitchen at eleven p.m., broom raised like a spear, breathing hard, and something in me went from irritated to genuinely, structurally furious. Not 【because of the noise. Because he knew exactly what he was doing to me and had decided it was funny.

I banged the ceiling one more time, for spite, and got a response almost instantly — two sharp knocks back, from his side, mocking my rhythm exactly. Bang bang, bang bang. Like we were having a conversation. Like this was a game to him.

It was. That was the worst part.

I marched to my own front door, yanked it open, and nearly collided with someone in the hallway — the redhead from earlier, heels in one hand now, lipstick smudged, laughing into her phone as she passed my door like I was furniture. She didn't even look at me. Just breezed by, floral perfume trailing behind her thick enough to taste, headed for the stairs.

I watched her go. Then I looked up the empty hallway toward 4B, where the door was shut, where the light under it was still on, where somewhere behind it a man I'd spoken to exactly once in my life was apparently running some kind of underground modeling agency out of a four-hundred-square-foot studio.

I didn't decide to go up there. My feet just went. I didn't knock this time. I pounded with my palm, three hits, the same verdict-delivery as two weeks ago, except this time I didn't wait for the lock to turn before I started talking.

"You think this is funny."

The door opened. He was in the same grey hoodie, or an identical one, hair pushed back like he'd just run a hand through it, and there was something in his face — not surprise, not even close — that told me he'd been waiting for exactly this.

"I think," he said, leaning into the frame the way he had last time, like the doorway was built specifically to hold his weight and nothing else's, "that you've bought a broom since we last spoke."

"I have."

"Loud."

"I'm aware."

"Effective?"

"Clearly not, since you just knocked back."

"I was being polite. Returning your call." His mouth curved, slow, and I hated how much I wanted to slap it and how $98”¹

"I would rather," I said, "eat glass."

"Noted." He tilted his head, studying me the way you'd study a puzzle you already knew the answer to and were enjoying watching someone else struggle with. "For what it's worth, the redhead's name is Della. Lovely woman. Excellent taste in men, apparently, since she keeps coming back here."

"I don't care what her name is."

"You watched her leave. From your doorway. In your pajamas. Again." His eyes dropped, deliberately slow, to the flannel pants I hadn't bothered changing out of, and back up. "That's not a woman who doesn't care."

"That's a woman who lives underneath a circus and would like some peace."

"Buy earplugs."

"I bought a broom."

"I noticed." He almost smiled — actually smiled, for half a second, before he caught it and put the smirk back on like armor. "Keep banging it. It's the most interesting thing that's happened to me all week."

Something about the way he said it — not mocking, not quite, something underneath the mockery I couldn't name — made my next breath catch wrong in my throat, and I hated that too, hated that I noticed it, hated that some idiot part of me had climbed four flights of stairs twice now just to stand in this doorway and fight with a man whose full name I still didn't know.

"This building has a landlord," I said, because it was the only weapon I had left. "I could report you."

"You could." He didn't look worried. He looked, if anything, delighted, like I'd finally offered him a real move in whatever game we were playing. "Go ahead. Tell him about the noise complaints. Tell him about the women. I'll deny all of it, and he'll believe me, because rent checks talk louder than broom handles, sweetheart."

"Don't call me sweetheart, you disgusting goat."

"Then stop climbing four flights of stairs to yell at me in your pajamas, and I'll stop having a reason to."

I opened my mouth to answer that — I had an answer, I had one, sharp and ready — and behind him, past his shoulder, through the door he hadn't quite shut all the way this time, I saw it: three monitors, glowing blue in an otherwise dark apartment, lines of code scrolling fast across one screen, a headset hanging off the back of a chair that looked nothing, like the apartment of a man who spent his nights entertaining a rotating cast of women.

His eyes followed mine. And for the first time since I'd met him, Arthur— or whatever his name actually was — looked like he'd been caught.