“Come on in,” he offered, needlessly, as she walked into the dark apartment. Only the streetlights outside glinting through the blinds gave any kind of lighting to the front room.
“No power?” Kamara said, a slight chuckle in her voice.
“It’s on until tomorrow.”
“I see. So this is for me, then?”
He smiled and took her hand, guiding her down the hall into the master bedroom in the back of the apartment. The blinds were parted, angled downward so that they could look out, but no one could look in.
“They never did fix your front door,” Kamara said.
“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” he responded. He had reported the hole in the outer part of his door when he moved into the apartment complex, and the front office had assured him it would be fixed. They never came to fix it, though. At first Grant had started to go down and raise hell, especially since he was the only one in the building paying full price for his rent, but the hole didn’t go all the way through the door and since none of his company seemed to complain about it, he let the issue go. In fact, as time went on, the hole became part of the apartment’s character, a reminder that he had slummed it his last year in college before heading on to Virginia.
“Want anything to drink?” he offered.
“Do you have anything to drink in here?”
“Some bottled water left over from when I loaded up the truck.”
“Sure, then.”
As he walked back toward the front of the apartment to the kitchen, he marveled at the fact that Kamara had even come. She was not his girlfriend and would probably never be, now that he was leaving Atlanta. He had run into her the previous day while combing the bookstore for college and Greek paraphernalia to take with him. They had had three classes together over the past two years and had always been cordial, but it wasn’t until they pledged and became fraternity brother and sorority sister that they began to talk more regularly. Even then, he had suppressed his attraction to her because there was already so much hooking up going on between the frats and sorors. Still, he considered her a good friend and had even had her over several times throughout the year, just to hang out and play Xbox with his friends.
As he stood at the refrigerator door, he was thankful that she had not left him hanging. At least now he would have someone he could talk to so that he wasn’t stuck with only the silence of an empty apartment to keep him company. All of his other friends had already headed out of town, either for the summer break or just to move on to the next thing.
Cracking the refrigerator door, Grant noticed that there was only one bottle of water on the bare shelf. He removed it and carried it back to Kamara.
“You weren’t thirsty?” she asked.
“There was just one bottle.”
“You want some of this one?”
“I’m good.”
“You sure? I don’t have cooties, you know,” she said, turning the bottle sideways in her hand and swiveling it like a bottle of juice.
“Have you noticed that when guys shake bottles, they do it like this,” he said, lifting and lowering his hand in a line just in front of his crotch. “But when women shake a bottle, they twist it like you just did.”
“Really?” she responded. “I have my theories about that.”
“Hey, don’t knock my only hobby.”
They both laughed, and he might have been embarrassed being so mannish with her, except for the fact that sex wasn’t foreign to their conversations. At various points they had had conversations about nearly everything under the sun, sex included. He had just never made a move. Now that he was spending his last night in Atlanta and she had come over to keep him company, the thought crossed his mind that there might be more to their situation after all.
“I guess I should have kept some chairs or something,” he said. “You don’t mind sitting on the floor, do you?”
She shrugged and took a seat on the carpet, her legs crossed, positioning herself directly across from him.
“Got any music to listen to?” she asked between swallows of water.
“Just what’s on my phone.”
Grant pulled his phone from his pocket and began scrolling through his playlists.
“Hey, remember this?” he said, turning up the volume on his phone and tilting the speaker upward for her to hear.
“Oh, shit!” Kamara said, jumping to her feet. She began nodding her head up and down to the beat. “We used to set it out to this track!”