Page 2 of Challenged By the Next-Door Veteran

In my defense, I read it after I'd plugged in the heater.

I find the heavy steel flashlight in the junk drawer by feel. Grandma Ruth gave it to me when I moved out, for burglars or gentleman callers, whichever showed up first. Neither has so far.

The beam jumps across the kitchen as I head for the basement door. Halfway down the hall I realize my other hand is still holding my palette knife. It's clean and long and honestly not nothing. I decide to keep it, because there's a stranger in my basement. Also because I've never been able to put anything down in the middle of a stroke.

The stairs are steep and old and smell like cold stone, cedar, and a hundred years of apples. The basement is a long low room split down the middle by sagging chicken wire, my half on the left and his on the right. One shared panel and one shared water heater squat in the middle like a referee.

Mr. Alfred has labeled everything in black Sharpie on masking tape, because he is a man who believes in tape.

I can see a thread of light moving over the far wall, low and steady, angled at the floor and not at my eyes. Under it, the sound of someone breathing evenly.

"Hello!" I say, brightly and much too loud, which is what I do when I'm frightened and don't want anyone to know. "Don't be alarmed! I live upstairs! I'm armed, but only a little!"

I'm so busy being cheerful and aiming the flashlight at the far corner that I forget the last stair is a liar. It's been a liar since 2019.

My foot comes down on a tread that isn't there, and the whole front of me pitches into the dark.

I don't hit the floor.

I hit something with give and heat and a smell of cedar and clean sweat and cold night air. A hand lands flat at my waist and another at my ribs below my arm, hard and sure. Then I am just stopped. Stopped, fully, as if I'd been set down on a shelf.

I know the next half second. I have spent my whole adult life knowing it. It's the moment when a man's body does arithmetic, the tiny hitch in the shoulders and the brace of the knees, then the grin he puts on to cover the cost.

I wait for it. I wait with my palette knife in the air and my whole weight against a stranger's chest.

It doesn't come.

He takes me exactly as heavy as I am, as if it were a fact about the weather. He doesn't so much as shift his feet.

"Last step's gone soft," a voice says near my head. It's low and patient, with a gravel in it that makes my knees feel less like knees. "I found that out too."

"It's a liar," I say, to his collarbone. "I'm so sorry. Hello. I'm Hollis. I live upstairs. I'm not a burglar, obviously. I don't know how to be one. I'd have knocked."

"That a knife?"

I look up. He's tall enough that I have to go all the way up, past a gray T-shirt that's been washed soft, past a throat and a short beard gone to salt at the chin, to a pair of brown eyes that are very steady and very tired and doing something to my pulse that I'd like them to stop.

His flashlight is pointed at the floor so the beam doesn't hit my face.

I notice that. It's a small thing, and it hits me square in the chest.

"It's a palette knife," I tell him. "For mixing paint."

"It's very threatening."

"Thank you. I've been working on it."

Something shifts in his expression. It isn't a smile yet, only the weather report for one.

His hands are still on me, at my waist and my ribs, warm through the thin cotton. Neither of us does anything about that. I'm aware of every inch of my body his hands aren't covering: my hips, the soft give of my stomach against him, the thighs that are suddenly very present in bike shorts.

He doesn't look at any of it. He looks at my face, and then, for one second, at my mouth. Then he looks at the floor, and then he lets go.

It takes him a beat longer than it should have. I know, because I count.

"Ben," he says. "Mercer. I'm the one who tripped your power."

"Hollis Brandt. I'm the one who tripped it." I hold up the palette knife in surrender. "Probably. There's a space heater involved."