The Novel Apartments Novels & Stories

Chapter 30 April’s POV “Wow, this place is so cool.” Maria said, looking around the apartment mason had helped us move in to. He had wanted me to start living alone but I knew I couldn’t afford it yet, so I had to live with my friends who also needed a place to stay. Mason talked to one of his employees who had a friend with a low cost apartment building. The place had a light brown themed interior. The furniture was brown but the walls and curtains were lighter. The living area and kitchen were fairly small but bigger than those in Waters’ building. I chose the best bedroom which overlooked the city.

"Friday, Miss Chen. Don't make me call the police." He lumbered past me toward the elevator. Mrs. Peterson followed, throwing me a look that was half pity, half satisfaction. The Martinez family quickly shut their door. I stood alone in the lobby, holding the eviction notice with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The stairs to the third floor felt like climbing a mountain. Each step was an effort. By the time I reached apartment 3C, my legs were trembling. Inside, our one-bedroom apartment looked even smaller than usual. The secondhand couch I'd found on the curb three years ago sagged in the middle. Lila's textbooks were still scattered on the coffee table from before she got sick. The kitc

The door to her apartment was open. ​But Julian and Leo weren't there. ​She looked across the hall. The door to Apartment 4B—the home of Christina Wilder—was wide open. A warm, golden light was spilling out. ​Nora crawled to the doorway and looked inside. ​The apartment wasn't a council flat, and it wasn't a manor. It was a Library. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with 180 leather-bound volumes. ​In the center of the room, Christina Wilder was sitting in a wingback chair, reading a book titled 'Chapter 174.'

She had never expected to run into him here. But it was better for her that he acted as coldly as if they were strangers. Perhaps to him, she had been dead for a long time. It was midnight when she finally returned to her rented apartment. Her place was in a dilapidated area on the verge of demolition The apartment itself was small and simple. In the last month, the water and electricity had been cut off intermittently. The electrical circuits were old and often malfunctioned; as a result, the lights would turn on and off on their own.

I asked again, pushing harder now. My voice had suspicion in it, sharp and curious. Sophia unlocked the door to their apartment. It was a two big bedrooms with huge windows from floor to ceiling, looking out over the whole city skyline. Soft plush couches. Kitchen full of shiny new appliances. Even a balcony with plants moving gently in the wind. Straight-up worlds away from that stinking shared cell we used to rot in. “Chill with the questions for now,” Sophia said, tossing her keys on the counter like she didn’t give a fuck.

“Short-term. Cheap. Available today.” She gave us a once-over, grabbed a key without much interest. “Got a little one close to campus. Check it. If it’s not trash come back.” Jace took the key. “Appreciate it.” Apartment was basically a box. Bedroom barely fit a mattress, living room/kitchen combo you could span in three strides. Kitchen screamed 1995. But it was clean. No bloodstains, no mold. Good enough. “Fine by me,” Jace said.

Not because it had been wrong for the first year — it had been exactly right, the proximity to the work, the way it had simplified the question of where to be by making the answer simply here, upstairs, ready to go back down in the morning. But a year was enough of that. I found an apartment in Newtown proper, a terrace house on a tree-lined street, the second floor of a building that had been there since the nineteen-twenties and had the specific character of something that had accommodated many lives without losing its own. Moving in took a Saturday. I had not accumulated very much in a year. The basics. Some kitchen things I had bought because the flat had not had them. The pottery bowl.

The plasters have left the walls a long ago and most of the doors are either fixed or hanging on the hinges. "Which apartment number, Brady?" I ask Brady in a whisper. "Apartment number- 17, Boss." He tells me and it doesn't take me a minute to locate the last apartment on the first floor. The noises coming from the neighbors, both drunken husbands yelling on wives and children screaming in front of the television. The air only reeks of grease, alcohol and tobacco. How can someone live with families in such shitty place and what future these kids will have? "Oh..stop..you animal..ahh..You're hurting me now." A woman moans while the bed is slamming against the wall.

"Oh come one you two, you're being too dramatic for two persons who hate drama. It's just a boot, and the apartment I rented for you is wide enough that you don't even need to meet each other if you don't want to..." "y-you rented an apartment for us?!" Jun exclaimed "Yes and even a moving company for the two of you. You two have a lot of books so I made sure that there's enough space for that too. there's also a huge table where you can keep your work on the book ongoing. to be honest, it's a high-grade apartment in the middle of the city, it took me a pretty penny to secure it but, I wanted the two of you to be comfortable;e. You're my two favorite writers after all..."

THE OTHER MAN ~ANNETTE'S POV~ The address Monica sent me wasn't a hotel. It wasn't a café. It was a pre-war apartment building in Hell's Kitchen. The kind of place that had character, sure, but definitely didn't have a doorman or a concierge service. It wasn't the kind of place Monica Blackwood usually set foot in, let alone visited voluntarily. I checked the text again. Apartment 4B. Don't knock loud. I took a deep breath, gripping my purse strap tight enough to hurt, and walked up the three flights of stairs. The hallway smelled like old cooking oil and floor wax.