▪️Tuesday, December 1st, 2017▪️

▪️Chicago, IL▪️

The door of my room banging against the wall is what wakes me up.

"Bro, you said we'd be leaving at seven." My brother's annoyed rumble reminds me that staying up till one a.m. talking to Angie last night is what causes this morning to come too soon.

"Hmm." I turn away from Louka.

"Mom made breakfast. You better get down, or she'll be mad."

"Uhu." I take the pillow from under my head and cover my face with it.

Louka pulls the blanket off me. "I need this for my credits. You promised."

I kick with my left foot toward the sound of his voice, but he must've dodged it because all I encounter is the cold air of my room.

"I'll pour water on you, you know, right?"

And he will, the little jerk. Louka's woken me up with a glass of water poured over my head many a time. I jump off the bed and put him in a headlock, mess up his hair, shove him into the hallway, and slam my door.

"You're up, then. Breakfast's in ten. Maybe take a shower first." Louka's instructions from behind the door sound awfully like my mother's.

"Fuck off. And tell Mom I'll be there in fifteen."

I'm showered, shaved, dressed, and at the kitchen table in twelve. My stomach squeezes from the smell of strapatsada, scrambled eggs with tomatoes and feta.

"The eggs are amazing," I say, and I'm telling the truth. Mom doesn't have much time to cook, between taking care of the house, us, and working long hours at the salon, but when she does—I make sure she knows I appreciate it.

"My first client isn't until nine," Mom says. "And when I don't make breakfast, all you eat is your protein shakes. Don't know what you'll do when you live by yourself."

"He's never going to live by himself, Mom. I'll move out, and he'll be living with you until one of you dies."

"Louka, don't be gross at the table."

"We'll all die eventually, Mom. There's nothing gross about it."

"This is my table, young man, and if I say it's gross, then it is."

I put another serving on my plate, before Louka gets to it. "If you're coming with, we need to leave in five. Grab the extra helmet from the closet."

The first day of December proves that winters in Chicago suck. As we ride through the not quite rain and not quite snow, I hope Louka gets what he needs today for his photography class. We arrive to my office an hour before most of my colleagues show up, even though my boss gave me the okay to have Louka here. We navigate to my seat through rows of shared desks, glass dividers, dual monitors, and the brightly colored sound dampening hangings I always doubt actually work.

"So show me what is it that you do here every day?" Louka doesn't appear impressed with the generic office space of the Chicago West Engineering Consultants that hired me six months ago.

I sit on my rolling chair and turn on my computer. "This." I spread my arms wide.

Some professions conjure an instantly recognizable image. If you got structural engineer in a game of Pictionary, you'd be fucked. Most people imagine us pouring concrete and sticking metal rods into it. I spend most of my day staring at the screen in my gray cubicle of doom. On occasion, I go to the sites and check the work that the construction workers, the ones doing the pouring and installation, have completed, but that's it.

"What if you stand here and point at the screen?" Louka rotates me at my desk.

I try while I scan my inbox for anything urgent. There's not much room for me to make mistakes at this job. If I want to grow in the company, getting through the next two exams is my first step to the second tier of positions.

"Can you pretend your face is not carved of stone?" Judging by the mounting level of frustration in Louka's voice, I'm failing.

"I'm not a model," I mutter. I don't know how people can do the whole smile here, frown there thing as part of their job. I'm aching and sweating from just the thirty minutes Louka has been running me through the slight variations of exactly the same pose, as if moving my head by five degrees would change the outcome. My face is my face.

"I don't need a model. I need human interest. You look like you're constipated." Louka rotates one of my shoulders so it faces him, while positioning my chin to point to the monitor. "Are you constipated?"

"Don't start." My patience is wearing out.

"That's better. At least there's some emotion." He moves around me clicking on his old-school film camera. Technology has evolved, yet he sticks with this relic. He hangs it on his neck. "Do you have anything good to eat around here?"

I roll my eyes. "In the breakroom." Louka hungry. What a surprise.

The breakroom is more of a kitchenette with two fridges-one for food brought from home and the other with company-provided snacks.

"If the assignment were about food and not portrait photography, I might stand a chance at actually scoring an A." He opens and closes the cabinets and collects snacks like he's a fucking squirrel who needs all the acorns for his hibernation. "At the rate your stiff self is doing, I might need to call Mom and take her up on her offer to shoot her clients at the salon."

My phone dings, and I open the text to a photo of Angie, messy hair tossed across the pillow, sleeping mask on her forehead, smiling into the camera.

Angie: Up?

One part of me is certainly trying to get there after that view.

Me: At work.

Angie: I need to run to a writing session, but still talking tonight?

Me: Counting on it.

Ever since I met her, my head runs a countdown that tells me how long it's been since I've heard from her. It's like the time between our conversations warps, because the last one was too long ago and the next one is not soon enough.

"What are you grinning at like a fool?" Louka peers over my shoulder, and before I can hide the photo, he's seen it.

"Who's that?" The clicks of Louka's camera start. If taking photos of the food gets him off my back for a bit, I don't mind.

"A. . ." A woman I can stop thinking about? Louka will laugh. A friend with benefits? That doesn't sit right. I don't know what else to call us. "A friend."

"That took way too long to be true." The camera clicks stop. "But thank her from me. I finally have the shots I needed."

I almost wish he didn't. That he gives up on moving to LA and be a fucking movie director. Who in their sane mind decides to be a movie director at nineteen? My father used to live on the edge with his schemes and dreams. He trespassed too far into the not allowed part of it, which sent him to prison and left us penniless at my aunt's doorstep in Chicago.

Mom's been the only steady person in my life. I need to be like Mom. My wild streak ended my second year of college after too many parties, weed, girls, and getting my little brother into trouble that was not his. I strive to be stable, reliable, thoughtful. Unless Angie is with me. She overpowers me with her wild.

After Louka leaves, my day enters its standard monotonous routine as my colleagues trickle in. The firm is on a deadline, and I'm tasked with finishing the plans for the concrete column designs. The happy-hour-headed gang leaves the minute our boss departs, but I'm struggling with a couple of calculations. I puzzle over pages of the Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete. The moment magnification procedure, that's it—I figure out the issue, now it's just a matter of time for me to fix it. I'm so close to solving the problem.

What feels like another workday later, I'm done. As I stretch, my chair rolls back beyond my cubicle wall, and I can see through the window. The sky is dark, and I check the time. Fuck. It's after ten already. I send off the design, log out, and walk to Beauty, scrolling through my phone as I go. No messages from Angie. Her social media has a couple of photos but it's hard to say if those were canned pre-planned ones or actual live posts. Why haven't I heard from her? A hardness forms in my gut. She's just busy. She doesn't have to text me every second of every day, even though I'd love that.