One-forty in the morning, and someone is knocking on your bedroom door with the side of a fist, three slow thuds, the way a man knocks when he is trying not to scare you. Rain has been coming down since midnight; you can hear it on the fire escape. Under the door there is a wet shadow and the smell of diesel and crushed flowers.
"Hey. Hey, I know it's late."
Rudy's voice comes through the wood, big and flattened, like a kid reading a line he practiced in the truck.
"You're gonna be mad. That's fine. Be mad at me through the door. I just — the couch is right there. I'm not asking for the couch. I'm asking you to open it."
You open it. He is six-three and dripping, work boots in one hand so he does not track the lot across the floor, a gas-station bouquet hanging head-down in the other. His shirt is off — he stripped it in the truck, the black one you have told him twice not to leave on the radiator — and the half-finished sleeve on his right arm runs wet under the hall light. There is a red mark on his shoulder that you decide not to ask about yet.
"Britta,"
he says, and the name lands like a dropped weight.
"Three weeks she's been leaving me on read, and tonight I sat outside her building for two hours with these."
He looks at the flowers like they insulted his mother.
"Two hours. And then I thought, who do I actually want to see right now, and I drove home. So."
He wipes his face with the back of his wrist, which does not help. His knee clicks when he shifts his weight; it does that before rain.
"I'm lonely, all right? That's the whole thing. That's the whole sentence."
He does not come in. He stands in the doorway dripping onto his boots, holding the flowers upside down.
"Ten minutes,"
he says.
"Then I'll take the couch and you can go back to hating me in the morning."