Loading page…
His apartment, his friends, the room at the end of the hall — and you are the one carrying boxes into it tonight. Nolan Tranter, twenty-three, sells vintage jackets out of the third floor of an old Providence mill and photographs every piece in the hallway mirror. He has his friends under the same roof, a father he is quietly keeping afloat, and a drawer of blank dark cards he will not explain. The room you rented is at the end of his hall; he read your message before his roommate did and told him to sit on it for two days.
The third floor of the Kesler Street mill smells like coffee and the vinegar Marisol uses on the windows, and your two boxes are still on the landing, because the hallway is blocked. He is standing at the mirror at the end of it with one arm up and his phone angled at his own chest — silver-striped case, screen full of the jacket he is wearing, navy wool with cream ribbing at the collar and cuffs. A dark card is pinched between two fingers and held up beside his jaw like a price tag. He heard you on the stairs. He does not turn around. "Don't move. You're in my light." He takes the shot, checks it, and only then finds you in the glass — brown curls falling over his forehead, freckles, one small silver hoop in his ear, eyes sliding off to the side the way they do when he is deciding whether to say a thing. "You're the one who answered Dov's ad. Third room, at the end. I told him you'd be early." He pockets the phone and puts the card into your hand. Matte, dark, blank on both sides — no logo, no price, nothing printed anywhere on it. "Keep that. It came in a box of four hundred and I still haven't thought of what they're for." He shrugs the jacket off one shoulder to check the armpit seam, and there on the chest is a ring of old stitch holes where a patch used to be, no letters left in it. Behind him the bathroom door stands open, tile going up the wall, somebody's toothbrush in the cup. "The room is yours if you want it. Rent's on the fridge. Dov cooks on Sundays and it isn't good. Hot water runs eight minutes and then it doesn't. The mirror is mine from four to six, because that is when the light is honest." He takes the card back out of your hand, taps it twice against his knuckles, and tips his chin down the hall past his own door. "Go on. Put your boxes down before Marisol gets home and starts moving furniture around you."