We live in a house with a shared front entrance - an entrance which then leads to two separate doors side by side - one door leading to the main floor apartment - the other to our upstairs bi-level bachelorette pad.
One day this door fell off the hinges. Literally - the rectangular wooden piece used as a barrier from our home to the hall and by extension the outside world - just unhinged itself completely from the door frame. So for a good two weeks I would lift the door up - walk out - and then place the door back against the frame like a puzzle piece.
Was our Landlord any help whatsoever? Not really.
Well. Kind of.
He sent the tenant downstairs to help us out.
There is something you must know about the tenant downstairs - we barely interact with our neighbours mainly because we NEVER see them. We hear them - we smell their vegan cooking - and I'm sure they hear us bitch every time we open our broken door - but never in our year living at 779 have we had that major neighbourly face-time that progresses the relationship from strangers to acquaintances to friends.
Come to think of it, I think I drunkenly borrowed a corkscrew from them once. But this is the exception to the hard facts.
Now one evening I returned home after a long day at work - let's say around 9 pm - and I hear a knock at the broken door. I feel on edge - it's been a 12 hour work day and I'm feeling less than glamorous... but I decide to answer the knock anyhow - actually hoping it would be some bearer of good news. And by good i mean just that - and anything that would not annoy me or prevent me from staying in and enjoying a nice dinner by myself.
So it was the tenant downstairs here to fix our door in his relaxed stone-wash denim, plaid shirt and ball-cap. He is in a nutshell the all-Canadian boy. He's a man definitely - must be close to 30 (26-30) but he has this quiet boyish quality that is quite endearing. It's in his soft-face -gentle voice and boyscout threads.
Anyways - he grabs his supplies from his truck out back, and starts to fix this door with total expertise. The man has fixed doors before - it's obvious. It's obvious in the pencil behind his ear, the worker boots on his feet, that white blue collar tee - and oooo the way he uses his wrench. Dude's got skill.
I'm the only one home at this point. And I linger in the kitchen near the staircase looking down toward the door - which he's now transformed into his own personal workstation.
He finishes up but apologizes because he doesn't have the right screw - the screw that will hold the door firmly in a permanent-rather than makeshift kind of way. He says he'll hit the hardware store and then return on the weekend to finish the job.
He leaves and I'm still standing in the stairwell looking down at the door, gleeful - the image of the downstairs tenant in a hardware store still lingering in my mind - and it's making me sweat. I feel it on my neck - and it's not just because I haven't taken off my leather jacket yet - it's the thought of him picking up a screw for OUR DOOR. This babe doing something so husbandly for US. I can't help but think... "I wonder what his woman thinks of him helping us helpless young firecrackers - fresh out of university - with progressive dogma - and even more progressive interests..." I wonder if she knows. I wonder if she hears us thank him. Because we do. We thank him by batting our lashes and looking him in the eye - and smiling... and being flirty and girly. We're OBVIOUS - because he is so willingly kind without sending ANY sort of signal that he is at all interested or has ever been interested in seeing us girls in any way more than the girls upstairs - or rather - the tenants upstairs.
Because of this, he is even more attractive. Even more intoxicating. It's like we're a really flammable wick - and he's this combustible fire - and just the touch sends us up in flames. Roman candles hit the ceiling on a weekday night.
Fast forward a few days later and he returns with the correct screw. He spends nearly three hours at the bottom of our staircase - i hear rattling, and jiggling and sawing. Why sawing? You ask. Well... he went even further to level out the edge of the door to the foundation of our place - so we no longer have to slam the bitch to get it closed - to shield us from the prowling psychos of these downtown Toronto streets in which we live.
During this time I had many aimless conversations with Inari, had a shower and got dressed for my evening out -so by the time his work was done - i am transformed literally from a dirtbag to something somewhat suitable to look at. And I made him look at.
Yes, this is all just reflective rambling. And I don't really have a punch-line... but there is somewhat of a point in all this panting with my tongue out.
As he was working - i started to ask him a few questions about himself. It's weird thinking that I live above people and I don't even know what they do - how long they've lived there - if they have cats. In his case - he has two.
Turns out - the tenant downstairs is a carpenter by trade. And I guess I just wanted to say that I am attracted to such occupations. I like the idea of a man who gets calluses from the efforts he puts into his long hours of manual labor. I dig it. It's sexy. I'd like to be the artist on the arm of a steel-worker, or carpenter, or mechanic or whatever have you.
Maybe not today - and maybe not forever - but one time or another - just to fulfill this burgeoning fantasy of experiencing just who the tenant downstairs truly is - callused hands - boyish ball-cap - pencil behind his ear and all.
xo
Lo.
one thing i like to do but haven't done in a realllllllllly long time - bite his bottom lip.
