Chapter Text
Los Angeles greeted Lexa like an aging hooker trying to sell you rotten joy at triple the price.
Lexa sat in her Ford, which, after the drive from Texas, smelled like a rugby team’s locker room after a match in the pouring rain. The AC had died somewhere outside Phoenix, coughing out one last pathetic wheeze that sounded suspiciously like go fuck yourself. Now the vents only blasted hot, dusty air that somehow just smeared the sweat around her face even more.
“Beautiful. Just fucking magical,” she muttered, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.
There was a parking ticket in her lap. The fastest ticket of her life. She had only run into Starbucks on the edge of the city for coffee. Five minutes. Five fucking minutes, and there had already been a cheerful yellow slip under her windshield wiper informing her that the city budget was now sixty-five dollars richer thanks to one naive journalist.
Speaking of coffee, that was here too. Or rather, most of it was currently decorating her light-wash jeans and the driver’s seat. When some asshole in a convertible had cut her off near the turn onto Sunset Boulevard, Lexa had slammed on the brakes so hard the cup in the holder had apparently decided to take a leap of faith.
“Welcome to L.A., baby,” Lexa hissed, staring at the dark stain around her crotch. From a distance, it now looked like she had either gotten way too emotional about the move or had some serious bladder-control issues.
She had parked outside the apartment building where her new place was waiting for her. The building looked decent enough—your standard Los Angeles new build with delusions of bohemia: white walls, too much glass, and potted palms placed where they’d photograph well.
But there was one major problem: the truck with her stuff.
Lexa pulled out her phone, which had gotten so hot in the sun it was starting to burn her fingers. There was a message from the delivery dispatcher on the screen:
“Sorry for the inconvenience. Our driver was involved in a minor incident. He’s fine, but your furniture is currently being inspected by highway patrol because one of the boxes came open and spilled something that looked like illegal substances. We’ll be there in two hours. Probably.”
“Bitch, that was lavender tea!” Lexa nearly hurled the phone into the windshield, but remembered just in time that she couldn’t afford a new one.
She got out of the car, and the baked asphalt immediately latched onto the soles of her sneakers. Lexa went to the trunk, hoping there was at least something dry left in there.
The trunk was a disaster.
After the sudden stop, a box with her books and workout gear had exploded all over the place. The damage assessment: one broken lamp, shards of glass everywhere, and her favorite five-kilo dumbbell currently resting on top of a poetry collection she had packed “for the aesthetic.”
“Well, fuck it,” Lexa observed philosophically. “My image is already shot, my jeans are soaked in coffee, and the apartment’s empty.”
She leaned against the hood of the car, ignoring the way the metal cooked her right through the denim. A girl on rollerblades flew past and nearly clipped her without even looking back. Then a guy walked by with a dog that looked more expensive than Lexa’s car. The dog gave her Texas plates a look of pure contempt and then very deliberately pissed on a nearby tree.
“Hey, you,” Lexa shouted at the dog, “I hate you too.”
Her phone beeped again. This time it was her new boss from the sports magazine.
“Lexa, settled in yet? See you at the office tomorrow at nine. We need to go over your first piece. We’re doing a Lakers article through the lens of local influencers. Get ready for parties. This isn’t Texas—people fact-check in bars here.”
Lexa closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the hot glass.
“Parties. Bars. Great. I currently look like a homeless woman who lost a knife fight over a cup of coffee.”
She had worked so hard for this job, ground herself down for years at some tiny nobody magazine writing about high school football, that now, standing in the city of dreams, she felt exactly one thing: the urge to lie down on the burning asphalt and let that same truck with the “suspicious tea” run her over.
At that exact moment, the garage door behind her began to open.
A bright red convertible pulled out. Behind the wheel sat a girl in enormous sunglasses while something aggressively pop and painfully catchy blasted from the speakers loud enough for the whole street. The girl didn’t even glance at Lexa, who was standing a yard away, covered in stains and wearing a half-dead messy bun. She just turned the volume up, gave the rear of the car a dramatic little swing, and sped off toward the coast.
Lexa squinted after her in the glare off the polished hood.
“Show-off,” she muttered.
Her stomach growled.
The Starbucks breakfast—which was now mostly absorbed into her pants—was clearly not going to cut it. But Lexa had a mission: wait for the truck. If she left to get food, those idiots would absolutely dump her couch on the sidewalk and ride off into the sunset. And in this city, from what she had seen so far, a couch left on the sidewalk wouldn’t survive five minutes—either someone would steal it, or some aspiring actress would move into it.
Lexa dug through the trunk, found a bag of chips that had somehow survived, and sat right down on the curb beside her car. She looked ridiculous: a young, pretty woman with sharp, intelligent eyes, sitting on the sidewalk outside a luxury building and angrily shoveling barbecue chips into her mouth.
“Okay, Lexa, here’s the plan,” she told herself out loud. “We wait for the movers. We drag the crap upstairs. We shower. We wash the jeans. And tomorrow we go conquer this goddamn city.”
The truck showed up two hours later.
The movers were two guys who looked like they had just been shaken awake after a week-long bender.
“Careful, there’s dishes in there!” Lexa yelled when one of the boxes landed on the lobby tile floor with a crash.
“Relax, boss, we got it,” one of them rasped, wiping his dirty forehead on her mattress.
Lexa closed her eyes and counted to ten.
Her mattress. Her virginally clean mattress had just received an autograph in the form of a greasy stain. She promised herself that the second she made her first million in L.A., she would hire the best lawyer money could buy, then purchase a flamethrower and burn this delivery company to the fucking ground.
When the last box finally made it into the apartment, Lexa slammed the door and leaned against it, exhausted.
Inside, it was empty, dusty, and smelled like… nothing. Just sterile loneliness for an insane monthly rent.
She looked over the piles of cardboard and packing tape. From a box labeled Kitchen, the shattered remains of her favorite plates had spilled out onto the floor—the ones she had brought from home.
“Of course. My favorite set.” Lexa picked up a piece of ceramic with the tail of a painted fox still on it. “Sorry, fox. L.A. showed you no mercy.”
She pulled out her phone and called Raven.
If anyone could bring her back to life right now, it was her best friend back in Texas, who was probably drinking cold beer at that exact moment instead of inhaling California dust.
“Wright! So, have you become a star and won an Oscar yet?” Raven sounded far too cheerful through the speaker.
“All I’ve won is a parking ticket and a coffee stain on my pants shaped like the state of Utah,” Lexa snapped, climbing over boxes toward the window to open it. “My stuff was delivered by two degenerates. My mattress now looks like someone butchered a wild boar on it.”
“Welcome to the big leagues, baby. So what about the apartment? Are the neighbors Hollywood actors or serial killers?”
“Haven’t seen anyone yet except some blonde in a red sports car who I think might be legally deaf, because her music drowned out what sounded like a Boeing taking off. And there’s another problem... Rave, there’s no Wi-Fi. I have to be at the office at nine tomorrow, and I need to go through a whole damn mountain of Lakers info.”
“Living without Wi-Fi is like living without oxygen. Didn’t your lease say everything was included?”
“That’s the thing. I called the landlord, and you know what he gave me? ‘Oh, sweetie, I forgot to check. But don’t you worry—the panel key and the backup network password are with my neighbor in 319. Just go see her, she’ll sort you out. She’s such a lovely girl, a perfect angel, always helping everyone.’”
Lexa rolled her eyes so hard she nearly saw the back of her own head.
“‘A perfect angel,’ Rave. Can you believe that? In a city where they invoice you for a smile, I apparently live next door to Mother Teresa.”
“Oh, stop bitching. You’ll go over there, get the password, smile a little. You’re Wright—you know how to make people like you even when you’re privately planning their spectacular murder.”
“The only thing I want right now is to lie down and not move. Whatever. I’ll go test my luck.”
“Good luck, cowboy. May the holy maiden of 319 immediately recognize that a serious woman has arrived in Los Angeles, not another vapid little wannabe trolling for auditions.”
Lexa snorted and hung up, tossing the phone onto the bed.
She really did need the damn internet. Cell service in this concrete well came and went, and tomorrow’s Lakers prep wasn’t going to do itself.
She stopped in front of the hallway mirror and looked at herself.
The verdict was... not great.
“It’ll do,” she muttered.
Lexa stepped out into the corridor, walked over to the door marked 319, and knocked. First carefully, then with more confidence. Silence. She pressed an ear to the door—no music, no footsteps, nothing.
“Perfect. Guess the angel flew off to do good deeds somewhere else,” she sighed.
Back in her own apartment, Lexa decided not to waste time whining. She put on some old playlist on her phone and started tackling the boxes.
About three hours later, when the sun had finally dropped behind the horizon and the room had filled with soft blue dusk, Lexa at last reached the suitcase with her clean clothes. She was already fantasizing about a shower when there was a knock at the door.
It was light, rhythmic, and somehow... cheerful.
Lexa froze with a T-shirt in her hands, swore under her breath, and went to answer, wiping her palms on her jeans as she crossed the room.
On the threshold stood the very same blonde from the red sports car.
Only now the giant sunglasses were gone, and instead of the whole queen-of-the-road act, Lexa was staring at a living breakfast commercial. Short white sundress, sun-kissed shoulders, and a smile so bright and white Lexa actually squinted.
In her hands, the girl held a woven basket that smelled obscenely good—fresh baked goods, still warm.
“Hi!” the blonde chirped in a tone that suggested they had been best friends since kindergarten. “I’m Clarke, from 319. I saw your boxes in the hallway.”
She held out the basket, and Lexa instinctively took half a step back, letting the smell of blueberry muffins drift into her dusty little cave.
For a second, Lexa just stared at her.
She had honestly assumed that scenes involving welcome pastries from a neighbor belonged either in the 1950s or in some terrible movie about perfect suburban housewives—not in an overpriced loft building in the middle of Los Angeles.
“I baked a little,” Clarke said. “Figured the last thing you want to think about on moving day is food. Welcome! And if you need anything—salt, a corkscrew, or just company to complain about our landlord with—I’m right next door.”
Lexa looked at her and felt monumentally stupid. Every ounce of skepticism she had built up over the course of the day had just rammed headfirst into this sundress and these muffins like the Titanic into an iceberg.
“Uh... thanks,” Lexa managed, taking the basket. “I’m Lexa. And yeah, food is literally the only thing that could save me right now. Didn’t expect people around here to do these... classic neighborly welcomes.”
Clarke smiled again, genuinely this time, without a trace of the arrogance Lexa had invented for her that afternoon.
“Oh, believe me, I fully support traditions involving sugar and blueberries. Nice to meet you, Lexa. See you around!”
She gave a little wave and floated back to her own door, leaving Lexa standing there in the doorway with a basket of warm muffins and the unsettling realization that Mr. Miller hadn’t lied.
Her neighbor really was nice.