Next To You

  Next To You

  Sandra Antonelli

  www.escapepublishing.com.au

  Next to You

  Sandra Antonelli

  A witty, quirky and unexpectedly moving story about cinema, secrets and a complicated love affair.

  A love of ‘70s bubblegum pop music isn’t the only unusual thing about William Murphy—being a six-foot-three albino also makes a guy stand out. Will’s life is simple and he likes it that way. But when he meets his new next-door neighbor, complicated begins to look rather attractive.

  Caroline’s trying to put her past behind her and grab life by the balls, which means finding new friends besides her dog, Batman. Will offers her neighborly friendship, and as they bond over old movies, Caroline regains her confidence and unexpected love blooms. But real life’s not like the movies, and their cute romantic comedy goes all Fatal Attraction when her vengeful ex shows up. Will learns that nothing about Caroline is quite the way it looks, and his simple life turns more complicated than he could ever imagine.

  About the Author

  I have deep abiding love for coffee, Rat Terriers, peanut butter, and cookies. I am a strong advocate for Eating Breakfast, the most important meal of the day. I come from the Land Down Under, but I do not eat Vegemite or drink beer. I drive a little Italian car, live in a little house with a big, bearded Sicilian, who is the moon and stars above my head and earth beneath my feet.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Bianca Knowlton-Johnson and her father, Mike Knowlton, for answering all my questions about albinism over a decade ago. I hope I have been respectful, positive, and accurate in portraying albinism. Any errors in descriptions and technical language about albinism are very unintended.

  A number of people are responsible for this book finally making its way out from under my bed after twelve years. Megan Whalen Turner read it in its original form, sorta liked it, and encouraged me to keep on writing. Thanks Megan, and thanks for being excited for me when I told you it was being published. Years later, Rachel Bailey found merit in William Murphy and thought that the story could be salvaged. Rhyll Biest, Annette Christianson, Anna Cleary, Kate Cuthbert, Vassiliki Veros-Elliot, Lily Malone, Ms Ainslie Paton, Jennifer St George, Dana Mitchell, and Gabrielle Wade-Steiner were all responsible for pushing Will Murphy out of his box. I am most grateful to Elle Gardner and Lisa Barry for believing in my writing no matter what. Thank you, Jim Stryker, for wearing an eye patch when you were a kid and letting me use that bit of your life. I am so very grateful to Belinda Holmes, my editor, for being in my corner and getting me here at last. HAIL BELINDA! As always, I must thank my big bearded Sicilian husband for his unwavering love and support, but I also have to mention the other family member who was at my side when I wrote this: my little Rat Terrier, my little peanut butter-loving friend and companion, my Buddy. No dog was ever truer and I miss you.

  Dogs don’t read, but this is for my little Buddy who liked to watch me write.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishing…

  Chapter 1

  William Murphy never saw it coming.

  The old-fashioned brass bell tinkled above the doorframe. Will looked up from his French toast and watched a woman step inside the diner. Honey-blonde hair skimmed her shoulders and dipped over her face, obscuring her features like a mysterious dame in a forties noir film. The modern day Veronica Lake leaned between the stools at the bar and asked Ray, the chubby owner behind the counter, if there were any cinnamon twists today. He nodded, and she turned to look about for an empty table. Will smiled at her when her gaze skimmed over him and settled on the booth beside his. Well, happy birthday to me!

  The man tending to his running nose had looked at her too. Dressed in a black-trimmed chef’s tunic, his disheveled, dark red hair matched the bushy beard poking around the edges of the white handkerchief swabbing his nose. His slender fingers stopped moving. Frozen in an awkward nose-picking pose, he stared at the woman. The handkerchief dropped as the redhead shot to his feet. His thigh joggled the square table, pitching it to the left then right, tipping his mocha. Creamy chocolate slopped onto a slice of pie and a cannon shot of cocoa-laced coffee vaulted across a sea of linoleum tiles. Milky brown starbursts splattered Will’s black shoes.

  In three strides, the scruffy man had gripped the woman’s elbows. Tufts of her red sweater welled like blood between his fingers. He jerked her onto her toes and drove her against the counter hard, bending her backwards, snarling fraught, incomprehensible, words into her face.

  ‘Alex!’ she screamed.

  Alex let her go and backed away, shaking, gasping, as Will—and the other café patrons—watched her run from the diner. Shuffling, sniffling, Alex sat back at his table, leaned his elbows into the dripping pale brown mess on top, and dropped his head into his hands.

  The moment of WTF shock wore off and Will hurried after the woman. By the time he’d made it outside she’d disappeared. With an irritated huff, he went back into the diner. He wiped chocolate milk from his shoes and dropped the soggy napkin on top of his half-eaten cinnamon French toast. He folded his newspaper, gathered his umbrella, and put on his raincoat with the torn sleeve. The tear was new and had happened during his the walk to the café. His umbrella had been turned inside out by a ferocious gust of Chicago wind, spidery spokes poked through the blue waterproof fabric, snagged the left sleeve of his raincoat, and ripped it on an exposed metal arachnid leg.

  The hole in his sleeve should have been a clue that his birthday wasn’t going to turn out very happily. It was barely past ten and events had already spoiled his day: his raincoat, witnessing a public display of near domestic violence, and sitting there gaping as the train wreck played out, doing … nothing.

  When did I become a man of inaction?

  He glanced back at his napkin-covered breakfast. Did his inertia have anything to do with his French toast? Could he place the culpability for his inaction on the French toast? Was it really fair to hold sugar-dusted, egg-dipped fried bread accountable when his motivation this morning had been all about the French toast? He loved French toast. French toast and coffee were the highlight of his weekend breakfast, and he’d been eager to enjoy himself, and …

  You hedonist.

  Hedonism had been his downfall. The French toast, the first cup of coffee, the woman and her Veronica Lake hair, he’d enjoyed all of them—until the sniffling nose-picker had entered with the gladiatorial spectacle of woman versus red-maned lion.

  William Murphy, hedonist, examined the rip in his coat sleeve and wondered if his birthday had turned him into something sluggish and lame. He wondered if a deeply hidden part of his mind was telling him to slow down, that this birthday meant he wasn’t far off being like his octogenarian neighbor, who’d just moved out and into a gated retirement community.

  The thought of retirement living made Will shudder like Homer Simpson. No, it made him shudder like Abe Simpson, Homer’s elderly, crotchety father. Only Will wasn’t old. Old was hunched over, unable to feed himself or wipe his own butt. Old was something like one hundred and seven.

  Great. You’ve reached this amazing conclusion that you can’t blame French t
oast and you’re not an old fart or old coot. Hooray for you. So now tell me again, why did you just sit there and watch?

  His mind did the equivalent of a shoulder shrug and, no closer to an answer for his lack of action, he paused at the coffee shop’s door to look again at the man and the sloppy mess the diner staff was mopping up. Will watched the redhead, who still sat with his elbows in a pool of chocolate milk. Alex scowled at the menu above the coffee counter, rubbing the left side of his jaw. Abruptly, his eyes changed direction.

  Will was used to being stared at. Given his appearance, it happened frequently. This particular time, instead of patiently bearing the gaze, a different idea sparked in his brain, urging him to take action, to retaliate, to shove Alex as brutally as he’d shoved the woman. Yet the preposterous notion of getting into a fistfight, which would have been the first since the numerous he’d had in high school, shut down whatever synapse had fired and told him to be caveman.

  With a discontented sigh, he exited the diner, put on blue-tinted sunglasses, his wide-brimmed fedora, and walked home. He dumped his broken umbrella in a trashcan half-full of rainwater along the way, and began splashing in puddles in a Gene Kelly ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ fashion on purpose.

  Will started to laugh. The funky idea of a birthday irritating him had nothing to do with the grunting noise he made when he bent over to tie his shoes, or the upset stomach he got when he ate deep-fried fatty foods, or the fact he found it hard to stay up past eleven. It wasn’t about the rain, a broken umbrella tearing his coat, or how his neighbor Reg had moved out. It wasn’t even about failing to come to the defense of an attractive woman.

  He reached this not so startling conclusion upon arriving at the front of his toast-colored six-flat apartment building, the same moment as a white and blue Schildkraut’s furniture van. This delivery van replaced the bigger moving truck that had been there when he’d left for breakfast.

  And there it was, the core of all his anxiety and dissatisfaction. His sluggish crankiness was completely due to the fact he hadn’t had enough sleep. If Reg hadn’t moved, this morning would have begun quietly, but instead of waking to the lingering scent of Reg’s morning Montecristo, Will had been jarred awake by the insensitive jackass who’d started moving into the vacant apartment at the crack of dawn, on a Saturday morning.

  The men in the delivery vehicle were obvious as they stared, pointing at him through the front windscreen. Will was close enough to see their lips move. As he unlocked the entry into the foyer, the van driver rolled down the window and called out to him.

  ‘Hey, excuse me, do you live in dis building?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what floor apartment E is on? I just want to know how many flights me and Doug are lookin’ at to carry dis couch up.’

  Will wondered what else was in the truck for the apartment across the hall from his. ‘Sorry fellas, E’s on the top floor.’

  ‘Ah, shit.’

  ‘You owe me ten bucks, Carlo,’ pug-nosed Doug said from the truck’s passenger seat.

  ‘You owe me ten bucks,’ double-chinned Carlo mimicked in a nasal, high-pitched voice. ‘Would you know if the lady in E’s home?’

  So, his Saturday morning sleep-disrupting new neighbor was a woman. ‘Sorry,’ Will said. ‘Don’t have a clue. You’ll have to ring the bell. E’s the apartment at the top left of the building, but the bell’s the last button to the left on the bottom row. Have fun.’

  ‘Thanks. You wouldn’t want to give us a hand, would you?’ Doug called out.

  ‘I may be a big strapping lad, but my real strength’s up here.’ Will tapped his head, waved and went inside the building.

  ***

  So much for grabbing life by the balls.

  Batman stretched his legs and yawned. Mouth open wide, his pink tongue curled out and up. Dogs often yawned when they were stressed. Caroline yawned and wondered if human beings did too. She rummaged around in a cardboard moving box and watched Batman turn in a few circles. He scratched at his pillow and little red flannel blanket, and plopped down, snuggling into his bed to sleep again. Dogs slept a lot.

  She’d slept a lot in the last two years. Really she’d been hibernating for the last two years, sheltering in a den of her own making. Now she was waking up, wiping a kind of brittle sleep from her eyes, stretching her unused limbs to take on life again, except she was doing this backward. Hibernating creatures came out in the springtime and this was two weeks into autumn. After such a long, long sleep, she was finally aware the hunger she felt was a literal hunger for food. It had taken a good while before her appetite had returned. This wet morning she’d woken up ravenous, with breakfast the only thing on her mind. Unfortunately, there’d been no slow start, no time to ease back into gentle dawn, because a state of wakefulness kicked in immediately.

  The Wellington Diner had been the ultimate food seduction. She’d found the place last week, when she had a walk around to get her bearings of the neighborhood. The place was a cross between the thirties-era corner diner Robert Redford frequented in The Sting and the deli where Meg Ryan did the fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally.

  She’d liked the coffee, the cinnamon twists they had that tasted like the ones her husband used to make, the little booths beside the window, and the fact the establishment, like the local cinema, was only a few blocks from home. Yeah, she was starting over. Yeah, she’d started to grab life by the balls, like Julie said she ought to. Yeah, she’d been about to sit in one of those booths, but that was before everyone in the diner had turned to gape at Alex screaming in her face.

  Alex made everyone look at her. The couple closest to the door had tsked and shaken their heads. The yuppie pair watched to see what would happen next, eating their scrambled eggs with their fingers as if it was popcorn, while the older couple looked at each other uncomfortably, and then looked at her.

  The big man with satiny, bleached-platinum hair and pretty eyes sat at a booth by himself, holding his newspaper at an angle as if he were examining a Playboy centerfold. He’d given her a smile when she first walked inside. That little smile had lit up his lovely eyes, but then he’d stared too—undoubtedly annoyed by the chocolate milk that had sprayed all over his expensive Italian shoes.

  A simple quest to forage for food had turned her into the center-ring act in an embarrassing circus and she did the only thing she could to avoid the unapplauding, unaffected audience.

  She ran home like a chicken.

  ‘Bock-bock-bock,’ she muttered under her breath, as she drew a Tupperware cupcake tray from the box marked bath towels. ‘Bock-bock-bock …’

  That’s what she hated most about starting over, about everything that had happened, that she’d turned into a chicken. She hated second-guessing how she felt, hated being tentative, unsure about decisions and the choices she had to make—unless fear reared its head and then she was off like a shot—because one decision had altered so many lives.

  The specter of that one choice, the spectacle of her life with Drew and Alex, had been interred in the mausoleum of her past, and she yearned to simply fade into the background like the past. She needed to be average, to have average with a capital A life. Some people strove for greatness, pushed themselves to reach the stratosphere, and craved recognition for the mark they made. What she wanted, more than anything in starting over, was to be in that seventy-fifth percentile, C+, middle of the bell curve.

  Yeah, she was almost there. She was close to ordinary, even if she missed being average height by almost three inches. Maybe she was thinner than most women her age, and pushing her way through to the other side of forty-five hadn’t seem to slow her metabolism down; in fact in the last three years it took off sprinting, leaving her skinnier than when she was in her mid-teens, but she had the average cellulite and stretch marks. Those were lines near her mouth, crow’s-feet at her eyes and her skin was losing its elasticity. Those average things were a comfort; she was glad she wasn’t a head-turner who worrie
d about fading prettiness. She knew her looks were average and average meant she could fade into the background. Getting older was a bonus too, since older women often went unnoticed in society.

  All right, there was one hitch to aiming for average and she knew it. She dressed well, and although it was problematic when it came to average, it was a distinct advantage for someone in her profession to be chic. I am old-school Hollywood glamor. I am the Jean Louis, Edith Head, Adrian, and Givenchy of personal shopping. Edith Head was stylist to classic Hollywood. I’m stylist to the busy urban professional.

  Like Louis and Head, she knew ways to disguise wide hips or play up the best assets of a figure by using colors and styles of clothing best suited to an individual’s frame, and make that person look better than average. While some might remember the fashions she chose for them, or remember the style tips she gave, or possibly the skirt she wore, few would actually remember Caroline. It was that precise the Jane Doe quality she wanted. After all, no one remembered what Jean Louis looked like, but they sure as hell remembered the dress he designed for Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

  She sang ‘Put the blame on Mame’ to herself and pulled a waffle iron from the box, instantly perplexed the device was in a carton that was supposed to house towels.

  She shrugged, Batman yawned again and made a curious little noise, drawing her attention. Last night, in this new place, camped out on the floor, she’d slept soundly with the dog snuggled under her elbow. It had been months since she’d woken to the imagined sound of crying, and crawled out of bed, bumping, stumbling, believing she had to ease that weedy, distressed infant sound. The auditory hallucination and anxiety had been gone for a long while, but the expectation had plagued her at times. It had taken forever for the stage between sleep and awake to lengthen from a few minutes, to a few hours at stretch, to an uninterrupted night. The last dark traces beneath her eyes had disappeared and a routine, restful sleep pattern had finally emerged.