Chapter 3: Im not looking, not right now
The alarm screamed at 5:45 AM. Fiona’s hand slapped it into silence before the second beep could pierce the thin walls and wake the others. The dark room felt heavy, still humming with a restless energy she couldn’t name. She dressed in the gloom—jeans, a faded tee, the uniform of her life.
Downstairs, Frank was gone. A greasy smear on the linoleum and a sour odor were the only proof he’d ever been there. She moved through the quiet routine: brewing sludge-thick coffee in the cracked pot, buttering two pieces of toast for Liam. The house slept on, a beast of cracked plaster and weary dreams.
She woke Liam gently, his small body warm and limp with sleep. “C’mon, buddy. Adventure day,” she whispered, helping him into his clothes. He blinked up at her, trusting, always trusting. Guilt, that old companion, twisted in her gut. His adventure was a plastic bucket of broken toy cars and a corner of the stifling laundromat floor.
The Laundry Room was already an oven at 7 AM. The air throbbed with the humid breath of a dozen machines and the thick, chemical smell of cheap detergent. Fiona manned the counter, taking in soggy bundles of clothes from bleary-eyed customers, making change from the locked metal box. Liam sat in his designated corner, pushing a toy truck back and forth over the sticky tiles.
The hours stretched, measured in the rumble of dryers and the drip of condensation from the ceiling pipes. She watched Mrs. Gellar argue about a missing sock for twenty minutes. She broke up a fight between two tweens over who’d claimed washer number six first. She scraped something unidentifiable off the inside of a machine with a plastic knife, her stomach turning.
Through it all, her mind kept drifting to the cool of the kitchen floor, the solid weight of him, the shocking vulnerability in his voice. Never done this. She’d replayed it a hundred times, each time the memory morphing. Sometimes it felt tender. Mostly, it felt like a mistake. A complication she couldn’t afford, offered by a kid who should have known better than to wander into her disaster zone.
Liam napped on a folded towel behind the counter, his cheek smushed against the terrycloth. She watched the rise and fall of his little shoulders, and the familiar, ferocious love rose up, briefly pushing everything else aside. This was her purpose. The rest was static.
The shift ended at four. The trek home with a drowsy Liam on her hip, the grocery bag cutting into her other hand, was its own kind of exhaustion. The house was in its usual state of controlled chaos. Ian was blasting music from his room. Debbie was coloring at the table, crayons scattered like shrapnel. Carl was nowhere to be seen, which was almost always a problem.
“Bath, then bed, little man,” she said to Liam, her voice hoarse from the dry heat and shouting over machines. She got him through the routine—splashing in the lukewarm water, into pajamas, a story about a dinosaur who was, coincidentally, very tired. When his eyes finally drifted shut, the day’s first real quiet settled over her.
She gathered the armload of clothes from the hallway—Ian’s jeans smelling of grass and sweat, Debbie’s socks, her own work shirts. The basement stairs groaned under her weight. The old washing machine sat in the corner like a rusted beast. She shoved the clothes in, poured in a capful of generic powder that smelled like chalk, and slammed the lid.
She hit the button. The machine shuddered to life with a deep, metallic groan, then settled into its familiar, arrhythmic thumping. It sounded like it was full of rocks. One day it would shake itself apart. She’d be there to mop up the flood.
She leaned against the vibrating metal, her forehead pressed to the cool, chipped enamel. The noise filled her skull, a physical barrier against thought. She let it wash over her, a welcome numbness. The rattling was so constant, so loud, she almost didn’t hear the other sound.
A knock. From upstairs.
Her body went still. The machine thumped. The knock came again, clearer this time, cutting through the mechanical din.
Her heart did a hard, sideways lurch. She knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She took the stairs slowly, each step a deliberate act.
She opened the front door.
The evening light was fading, casting the porch in deep gold and long shadows. He stood there, just as he had the night before, but different. He wore a clean, dark shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His jeans weren’t torn. His hair was still that messy black cloud, but his face was clean, the bruise on his cheekbone a fading yellow smudge. He held a small paper bag in one hand.
He didn’t smile. He just looked at her, his blue eyes steady, taking in her tired face, her damp shirt from leaning on the sweating machine.
“Hey,” he said.
The word was simple. It held no apology, no assumption, no slick promise. It was just a recognition. A statement of his presence.
Fiona leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms. The defensive posture was automatic. “Hey back.”
He shifted his weight, and for a second, the ghost of the unsure boy from the kitchen flickered in his eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by that disarming directness.
“Wondering what your schedule’s like on Friday.”
She blinked, thrown. A date? That’s what this was? Not a booty call, not a drunken sequel, but a planned thing on a specific day. Her brain short-circuited, flipping through a mental calendar stained with coffee rings and overdue bills. Friday was grocery run, definitely, and Lip had that thing with probation, and the sink was making that noise again.
“Uh, I’ve got a party,” she said, the lie smooth and automatic. It was easier than the truth, which was just the grinding sameness of her life.
“Want a chaperone?” he asked, a faint, hopeful smile touching his lips.
She laughed, a short, sharp burst. “We’ve got it covered.” She waved a dismissive hand, the picture of someone with a bustling social calendar.
“Ah, girls thing,” he said, nodding like he understood. His blue eyes didn’t leave hers.
“You’re not that desperate,” she said, forcing a teasing tone that felt brittle in her mouth. She reached out and patted his shoulder, a buddy-buddy gesture meant to create distance.
“Wanting to see you again is desperate?” he said. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the distant thump of the washing machine.
“No, come on,” she sighed, the act slipping. “You can get laid anywhere.” She said it like it was a fact, a South Side bylaw.
“So I’m here for a fuck?” he said. The word, in his calm voice, sounded clinical and ugly.
“Didn’t cross your mind?” she fired back, crossing her arms tighter, a human fortress.
“Just when I thought I collared my dream girl and she’s blaming me,” he says, shaking his head. There was no mockery in it, just a weary sort of wonder.
“Your dream girl?” The laugh that escaped her was genuine now, harsh and disbelieving. “We had drunken sex on my kitchen floor.”
“Quit pretending you don’t know me,” he said, taking a half-step closer. The paper bag in his hand crinkled. “You weren’t that drunk.”
Lip walked around the corner then, crunching on a handful of ice cubes. His cheek was swollen, giving him a lopsided, chipmunk look. He eyed Joseph, then Fiona’s defensive posture.
“Hey, it’s Lip,” Joseph said, acknowledging him without looking away from Fiona.
“Hey, it’s dead man walking,” Lip mumbled around the ice. “Jim Fitz called looking for you.” His eyes, sharp and too-knowing for seventeen, bored into Joseph.
“No school?” Joseph asked, deftly sidestepping the mention of Fitz.
“I got some teeth pulled today,” Lip said, sucking on a chip of ice.
“Wisdom teeth?” Joseph asked, playing along.
“Sugar rot,” Lip replied flatly. He stared, the message clear: I know your type. I know this game.
“Lip,” Fiona said, her voice a low warning. She looked at him as if to say get the fuck out.
He held his ground for a defiant second, then shrugged. He shuffled back towards the kitchen, the crunch of ice fading. The hallway was suddenly, intensely quiet again, just the persistent thump-whirr from the basement below.
She let out a breath she’d been holding and leaned back against the doorframe, but it was unstable. She pushed off and walked past him into the kitchen, needing solid ground. She leaned back against the washing machine, the vibrations traveling up her spine. She looked at Joseph, who had followed her in.
He placed the paper bag on the counter. “Aspirin,” he said simply. “For Lip. And the chocolate pudding cups are for Liam.”
She stared at the bag. This small, specific kindness was a weapon against which she had no defense. It wasn’t flowers. It was aspirin for a kid’s toothache and pudding for a toddler. It was payment for nothing, a gift that demanded nothing in return.
He didn’t move to touch her. He just stood there, waiting in her chaotic kitchen, his presence both an accusation and an offer. The machine rattled fiercely against her back, a frantic heartbeat she felt through her bones.
She could feel her walls coming up even though she wanted nothing more than to feel what she felt last night. The aspirin and the pudding sat between them on the scarred counter, a quiet rebellion against everything she understood about transactions.
“Listen thank you for trying to get my purse back and stuff.” She says, the words coming out in a rehearsed, clipped monotone. She gestured vaguely toward the door, toward the memory of the alley.
“Stuff.” He says.
The single word hung there, soft but absolute. It wasn’t a question. It was a correction. He didn’t blink. He knew exactly what ‘stuff’ encompassed—the desperate heat on the linoleum, the whispered confessions in the dark, the staggering intimacy of their interrupted bodies. He was calling it by its right name, refusing to let her minimize it into something forgettable.
Her throat tightened. She looked away, toward the fridge plastered with her siblings’ faded smiles. The weight of it all—the needing, the fear, the five other souls sleeping upstairs—pressed down. Self-preservation won, as it always did.
“I’m not looking, not right now.” She says, folding her arms over her chest like a barricade.
He was quiet for a moment, absorbing the dismissal. He gave a single, slow nod, not in agreement but in acceptance. He didn’t argue. He didn’t plead.
“Okay,” he said, his voice even. “Is it alright I leave my number for when you might be?”
He didn’t wait for permission. He turned to the cluttered bulletin board by the phone, its surface a mosaic of old bills and school reminders. He plucked a pen from a cracked mug and tore a corner from a yellowing electric bill.
She watched his back as he wrote, the muscles in his shoulders moving under his shirt. The pen scratched. He finished, pinning the small paper square squarely in the center of the board, a white flag on a field of chaos.
He looked at her then. His blue eyes held hers for three long seconds, saying everything he wasn’t allowed to say out loud. Then he left.
The front door clicked shut with a soft, final sound. The roaring silence that followed was immense. The washing machine in the basement let out a final, shuddering spin cycle groan and went still.
Fiona didn’t move from her spot against the counter. She stared at the closed door. Then her eyes drifted to the bulletin board. The scrap of paper with his number seemed to glow, a tiny, insistent beacon in the dim kitchen light. She exhaled, a long, shaky stream of air that did nothing to steady her.