Chapter 4 The First Morning War

The First Morning War

POV: Lily

The first alarm went off at 5:47.

I had six of them set, staggered eight minutes apart, because one alarm has always been a suggestion and I have never operated on suggestions.

What I hadn't accounted for was the wall between the bedroom and the living room being exactly as thin as it looked.

By the third alarm there was a sound from the other side of it. Not words. The kind of low, strangled noise a person makes when something keeps happening to them that they did not agree to. The fourth alarm went off at 6:11 and something hit the wall from his side. Not hard. Just once. Just enough.

I turned off the fifth before it could start.

Got up. Made my bed. Tight, corners folded the way my mom taught me when I was nine years old. I had my clothes laid out the night before so getting dressed took four minutes, not ten. I was out of my room and moving by 6:14.

He was on the couch with his face in the pillow and one arm hanging over the edge like he'd given up on it. Murphy was awake though. Tail going the second I appeared, like I was the most reliable thing in the apartment, which maybe I was.

I went to the kitchen to make coffee and immediately ran into a problem.

Whoever had put this kitchen together had filed the mugs on the bottom shelf, the coffee on the top shelf, and the filters in the drawer beside the stove. Three separate locations for one task. I stood in front of the open cabinet for a full ten seconds before I started moving things. Mugs went up. Coffee and filters went together in the cabinet directly above the machine. Everything else shifted one spot to make room, and the whole thing took about eight minutes and made the space actually functional.

I had my coffee and I was at my desk by 6:24.

At 6:30 on the nose, a guitar chord ripped through the apartment.

Not soft. Not warming up slowly. A full chord, held, then a second one, then a whole rhythm that he had apparently decided was reasonable at six-thirty in the morning the day after I had handed him a signed document with noise limits clearly written in red.

I put my pen down on the desk.

He played for twenty-two minutes. I sat there and counted them. Murphy wandered into the kitchen and back out again. Something clanged near the stove. Then the coffee machine ran, and I smelled it, and I heard the cabinet open and close twice and then a third time, faster, the way someone opens a cabinet when what they expected isn't there.

I got up.

He was standing at the counter in a t-shirt and old sweatpants, mug in hand, staring into the cabinet above the machine with the look of someone doing math they didn't ask to do.

"Where did everything go," he said.

"Reorganized. The old layout didn't make sense."

He turned his head toward me slowly. "It made complete sense to me."

"The mugs were on the bottom shelf."

"Yes."

"That's where they were the least convenient."

"For you, maybe. I'm taller than your system accounted for."

"Nobody crouches to get a mug."

"I reach down. That counts as crouching."

He set his mug on the counter, reached into the cabinet, and took everything back out. Not dramatically, not fast, just methodically, piece by piece, putting things back somewhere close to where they had been before I moved them. I stood in the doorway and watched him do it.

"Rule eleven," I said.

He kept moving things. "What."

"Shared spaces maintain the agreed organizational layout."

"We did not agree on a layout. You made one."

"You signed the rules."

He turned around and looked at me. "The rules are about noise and bathroom windows and Murphy not touching your stuff. Nobody said anything about cabinet rights."

He was technically correct. I knew it and I could see that he knew that I knew it.

"We're adding a rule," I said.

"We are not adding a rule about mugs."

"It's not about mugs. It's about the principle."

He picked up his coffee and walked back to the couch without another word. Murphy followed him and sat on his foot. I went back to my desk and stayed there until seven, when I gathered my bathroom caddy and walked down the hall and found the door already closed. Light under it. Water running.

I knocked.

"One minute," he called.

I stood in the hallway with my caddy.

Eight minutes later the water stopped. Four minutes after that the door opened and he came out with his hair still dripping, completely unbothered, looked at me standing there, and moved aside.

"You were supposed to be out by seven," I said.

"I don't clock myself in the shower."

"That's what a phone is for."

"Not waterproof."

I went in and closed the door and told myself this would get better once the schedule actually settled in. It had been one morning. Routines took time. People adjusted. Even this particular person would adjust eventually.

My phone buzzed from the shelf while I was brushing my teeth.

Sophie.

okay but how's the new place?? is it everything you planned for??

I rinsed. Looked at the phone. Heard Murphy's collar jangling in the living room and Asher's voice, low, running through the easy rhythm of a phone call with someone he actually liked talking to.

I typed back.

It's great. Clean and quiet, close to campus. Really happy with it.

Sent it before anything else could come through my head about whether it was true.

Sophie would want more detail later and I would give her the version that made the most sense later. Right now I needed to finish getting ready, get to campus twenty minutes early the way I always did, and survive whatever tomorrow looked like.

I opened the bathroom door.

Asher had his back to me, standing near the window, phone up, Murphy sitting at his feet. His voice had that loose quality it got when he wasn't performing for anyone.

"Yeah, moved in yesterday," he was saying.

I picked up my caddy from the shelf.

"She printed out rules. Seventeen of them, man. Color-coded by category."

I stopped walking.

Something on the other end made him laugh, and it was the kind of laugh you get when someone says exactly what you were already thinking.

"Yeah." He shook his head at whatever came back. "My roommate is insane. This is going to be a disaster."

He still hadn't turned around.

I stood there in the hallway with my caddy in both hands, looking at the back of his head, and I had sent Sophie a text eleven seconds ago telling her everything was fine.