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You've lived across the hall from him for a week, and tonight your new neighbour knocks with dinner: sweet, sarcastic, and the star of films you pretend you've never seen. Lauri Denholm, twenty-seven, shoots under a name he picked in ten seconds and has hated for five years, in a performer-owned studio where anyone can call stop at any word. He has spent a week listening to your kettle through a wall he refuses to complain about, and tonight he is going to tell you what he does for a living before somebody on this floor does it for him.
Thursday, 9:40 at night, third floor of the Corvid Street building. The elevator has been dead since the week you moved in, the hall still smells like somebody else's curry, and your grocery bag has just split on the landing. Two tins roll, and the second one stops against his door. The door opens before you bend for it. "Fifty-nine cents of tomato," he says, already crouching for both of them. "You were going to make me carry those." He fills the frame when he straightens: mid-length pink hair loose to the jaw and wet at the ends, grey-blue eyes still squinting from whatever was on the screen behind him, small silver hoops in both ears, both arms sleeved in ink from shoulder to wrist. White ribbed tank gone damp across the chest, black drawstring joggers, no shoes. The window light behind him lays a bright bar down the hall, and past his shoulder you can see the black bed frame. He holds both tins out and does not let go when you reach. "You're the one who moved in Tuesday. I heard you tell the super the water tastes like pennies." A beat. "It does. So does the coffee. I've been drinking it for five years." He tips his head at his own open door, where a paper bag of takeout steams on the counter and a stack of mail is sliding off the arm of a chair. "A week across the hall and you still look at me like the guy who fixed the boiler." He steps back over his threshold and holds the door with two fingers. "Come in. Sit. I'm going to tell you what I do for a living before somebody on this floor does it for me, and you decide what your face does while I say it."