Borrowed Time

I was twenty minutes into clearing out my locker on my Thursday off, wearing yesterday's sock because I couldn't find the other one, when my dad called and told me he was downstairs at my precinct, and could he borrow a few minutes of my time, and by the way he'd brought a folder.

That should have been my first warning. My dad, retired Sergeant Damian Voss, forty-eight years old and a widower for five years now, does not bring folders for casual reasons, and he especially does not bring folders when he says the word "borrow," because to him borrowing means he is about to take something you didn't agree to give.

I threw on a hoodie that smelled faintly of my ex's cologne, which is a story for later, and took the elevator down to the lobby, where he was standing next to the front desk in his good coat, chatting up Alma at reception like he still had a badge.

"There she is," he said, spreading his arms like I was eight. "Teri. Twenty-three years old and already harder to get on the phone than the mayor's office."

"Dad, it's my day off. I was supposed to be asleep."

"You were eighteen when you told me you wanted to work investigations," he said, ignoring that completely, and held out the folder. "So I did something. You'll want to sit for this."

I did not sit. I opened the folder on the front desk like a rude person, and there it was, filled out in his careful cop handwriting, an application for the detective track, the promotion I've been dodging for two years, the one that comes with a desk and a tie and a schedule that eats your weekends, signed by him as if his signature means anything on an internal form, which it does not, but the gesture alone made my teeth ache.

"Dad. I told you. I like patrol. I like being outside. I like not sitting in an interview room for eight hours a day listening to people lie at me."

"You're twenty-three, honey. You don't know what you like yet."

"I know I don't like that folder."

Alma was pretending very hard to do paperwork, which meant she was listening to every word, and I could feel this becoming precinct gossip by lunch, so I steered us toward the corner by the vending machine, the one with the broken light that hums.

"Look," I said, keeping my voice low, "I know you worry. I know since Mom you've had this picture in your head where I'm settled, right, good job, good house, good husband, two point whatever kids, and I'm just not there yet, and that's fine, that's allowed."

"It's not about fine. It's about safe. Patrol is not safe, and neither is floating."

"I am not floating. I have a plan."

"You have a cat and a gym membership."

"He's a good cat."

And here is where I did the stupid thing, the lie, the one that has now eaten approximately six weeks of my life, because he gave me this look, this soft, sad, my-daughter-is-adrift look, and out of my mouth, with no preparation whatsoever, came the words, "Actually I'm seeing someone. It's new. It's going well. He's very stable."

My dad's whole face changed, like I'd handed him a lottery ticket. "Stable how? What does he do?"

"He's... he does computers. Freelance. Coding. Very steady work, lots of contracts."

"Name?"

And because God hates me, the first name that came out was "Philip," which is the actual name of my actual neighbor in 4B, a man I have exchanged maybe forty words with, mostly about the garbage chute.

"Philip," I repeated, digging the hole deeper and lying down in it. "He lives in my building. You'll like him. Very quiet."

My dad wrote the name down. On a napkin. From the vending machine area. He has one of those little cop notepads still, after five years retired, and I watched him do it and felt my soul leave through the ceiling.

"Bring him to Sunday dinner," he said. "Two weeks. I'll cook."

"Dad, that's so much, he's busy, he has deadlines..."

"Two weeks, Teri. I'll make the roast."

* * *

The problem, of course, is that I live in a converted warehouse in the industrial part of town where the rent is cheap and the walls are theoretically thick, except the soundproofing between 4A and 4B is apparently decorative, because I can hear Philip arguing with his laptop at two in the morning, and he can hear me crying at breakup o'clock, which was most of the spring two years ago, after Jacqueline and I finally, truly, finished it.

Jacqueline. Twenty-eight, gorgeous, terrifying, my girlfriend for eight months two years ago, and we split because I said I didn't want kids and she said she'd wait and I said don't wait on me, that's cruel, and she said fine, and then she spent two years occasionally texting me things like "saw a dog today, thought of you," which is emotional arson and I respond every time, because I'm weak.

Anyway. Philip. I caught him in the hallway on Wednesday, coming out of 4B with his hair doing that thing where it looks like he lost an argument with his pillow, and I just went for it, no preamble, because I'd rehearsed exactly zero versions of this and figured the rehearsed versions would all be worse.

"Philip, hi, hey, so, weird question, and you can absolutely say no and I will never bring it up again and I'll pay you in pizza either way."

He blinked at me. He's twenty-five, tall in a slouchy way, and he talks like someone who has spent years being careful about words because words are his whole job. "Is this about the chute again? I filed the ticket."

"No, it's, okay. So. I told my father I'm dating you."

Silence. The good kind of silent hallway, the kind he's always complaining the building lacks, and I watched a series of expressions cross his face like weather.

"You told your father... that you are dating me. Specifically me."

"By accident. His name question short-circuited my brain and your name was just there, because you're my neighbor, and now he's written it on a napkin and wants you at Sunday dinner in two weeks, and I can un-tell him, I will un-tell him, I just panicked, because he also showed up with a promotion application I've been dodging for two years and I needed him to think I'm a functional adult with a functional life."

Philip put his key back in his pocket very slowly, the way you'd set down something fragile. "How much pizza are we talking."

"Two months. Free. There's a place on Sixth that does the good thin crust, I'll buy you a large every week, and also, and this is the real offer, absolute silence. I will stop playing my music at night, I will stop dropping weights at six a.m., I will be the quietest neighbor this building has ever produced, I will whisper."

"I don't need you to whisper, I need to finish a contract before my visa grace period runs out, which is why I've been awake at two arguing with a compiler," he said, and then he rubbed his jaw and looked at the floor, and I could see the yes forming even before he said it. "One condition. If we do this, we do it properly. Backstory. Details. If your father is a cop, retired cop, even, he will interrogate me, and I fold like a chair under pressure."

"He absolutely will interrogate you. He's been retired five years and he still interviews people at my precinct for fun."

"Then we practice. Starting tonight. I'll order the pizza, you bring whatever facts about yourself you want me to know, and we script this thing, because I am not getting deported over a napkin."

I could have hugged him. I did not hug him, because we were not there yet, we were barely at "hallway acquaintances with leverage," but I wanted to.

* * *

His apartment in 4B is, and I say this with love, insane. There are foam panels on every wall, egg cartons taped over the windows, a draft stopper under the door, and a little sign by the entry that says QUIET PLEASE, RECORDING, except nothing is recording, it's just for ambiance, for his own peace of mind, I guess. It's the quietest room I have ever stood in. When he shut the door behind us, my ears actually popped, like stepping into a swimming pool of nothing.

"Sorry about the smell," he said, moving a stack of pizza boxes off the couch to make a Teri-sized space. "The takeout here is bad and I've stopped fighting it."

"It's not bad, it's aggressively mediocre, there's a difference," I said, sitting down with the carton of lo mein he shoved into my hands, and it was, in fact, aggressively mediocre, noodles that had given up sometime around noon.

He sat on the other end of the couch with his laptop open on the armrest, and for an hour we scripted, back and forth, like writers' room for a show nobody would air. How we met, in the hallway, over the garbage chute, that part was real so we kept it. When we got together, three months ago, which was a lie, since three months ago I was eating cereal for dinner and crying at a dog video Jacqueline sent me. Where we went on our first date, the noodle place, he said, and I said sure, the noodle place, and we high-fived over how seamless that was, which is the saddest high-five of my life and also weirdly one of my favorites.

"Your dad will ask what I like about you," Philip said, typing. "I need material. Give me three true things."

I thought about it, chewing a noodle. "I can name every bridge in this city. I make a soup that will change your life. And I am almost never on time for anything, which you already know because you can hear me leave."

"Two of those are usable," he said, and then he laughed, this short, unguarded laugh that came out of him sideways while he was looking at his screen and not at me, and here is the thing I noticed, the thing that has been sitting in my chest since Thursday like a swallowed marble. When he's not watching me, when he's just typing and complaining about the noodles, his laugh sounds real. Not polite, not performed, real, the kind you can't script.

Which is a problem. Because none of this is real, the whole thing runs out in two months when the pizza money dries up and my dad finds a new project, and I need to remember that, sitting here in the quietest room in Seattle, eating his mediocre lo mein, learning that Philip in 4B is funnier than I gave him credit for.

"Next session Friday," he said, not looking up. "Bring your dad's napkin. I want to know exactly what lies he's already written down."

Friday's session went fine, is the thing. Fine in the way a plane lands fine, everything smooth until you're standing on the tarmac wondering why your hands are shaking. We ran the backstory until he could recite my coffee order and my worst habit and the name of my childhood dog without blinking, and I learned that he grew up two provinces over from where his accent pretends he didn't, and that his one casual fling happened at a dive bar when he was twenty-four and ended so amicably they still exchange birthday texts, which is more than I manage with most of my blood relatives. He had a whiteboard, an actual whiteboard, mounted on the foam wall, with our timeline on it in three colors, and I stood there looking at three months of fictional dates written in neat blue marker and felt like a fraud with really good production values. The one thing we couldn't get right was the fake argument, the rehearsed spat about whose turn it was to pick the restaurant, which we ran three times and which collapsed into laughter every time.

"You're frowning at the board," he said, capping a marker. "Is the board wrong?"

"The board is great. The board is the most organized relationship I've ever been in."

He laughed that sideways laugh again and I pretended it didn't land anywhere, and then we ordered pizza, because I am a woman of my word, and that was the first of what is now, by my count, eight free pizzas, so the invoice is well underway.

The trouble started at the precinct. Alma waved me over at reception on a Tuesday, with that face she makes when she's holding something back for dramatic effect, and said, "Your friend's been coming by."

"What friend?"

"The pretty one with the good coat. She's been here three mornings this week, sits in the lobby with two coffees until your unit checks in."

Jacqueline. Twenty-eight years old, still wearing the coat I complimented exactly once in eight months of dating, showing up at my workplace with coffee like a woman in a movie about persistence being romantic. Two years since we broke up, two years of occasional texts I answered out of guilt, and now this. She didn't do anything wrong, technically. She brought coffee. She waited in a lobby. But she knew I'd hear about it, that was the point, and when I texted her, she replied in four minutes with a smiley face and the words "just thought you might want caffeine