Where Nerves End

unusually nice weather. A trio of skateboarders with their pants around their asses wove between couples and families, the plastic wheels of their boards clattering across the squares reddish bricks. The bike rental stand was open, and several slots on the rack were empty. The brew houses and coffee shops had all opened their patio seating, and even at four thirty in the afternoon, most of the tables were occupied.
    Days like this, when the weather was nice and the crowd wasnt too thick, I could see how Tucker Springs drew people in. I supposed it wasnt a bad place to live. Expensive as fuck, and definitely not for the faint of heart in the wintertime, but it wasnt all that bad. Maybe I was just jaded because of how my life had gone in the last year or so, and I was ready to blame the city, the mountains, the sky, whatever was handy.
    These days, regardless of the nice weather of the beautiful view, I was in the mood to blame the quaint little mountain town of Tucker Springs, Colorado. What easier target was there than a quiet town of seventy-some-odd thousand people and a lot of shit that sounds better on paper than it actually is in person?
    Take the name of the town itself. If the founders had believed in truth in advertising, theyd have called it Tucker Mud Puddle or something. The only time the springs were anything noteworthy was after a major storm or some serious runoff from the mountain snow, at which point the road conditions were usually so bad they were barely accessible anyway.
    And then there was Villa Condominiums, the place my ex and I had lived before we bought the house. Condos, my ass. They were glorified apartments as far as I was concerned. Call it what you want, its still a cramped box stacked in amongst other cramped boxes with a narrow, echoing metal grate stairwell that seems fine until you try to move a couch up to the third floor. Condo or not, the real estate market was god-awful, and we should have known better than to buy a house after wed just barely sold the condo without losing our shirts and a few limbs for good measure. But then, the plan hadnt been to buy it and then try to vacate it any time soon. Phrases like “settling down” and “staying here a while” had been tossed around enough that buying in a shit real estate market seemed like an opportunity, not a chance to get fucked up the ass. And not in the way I liked getting fucked up the ass.
    I swallowed the last of my coffee and tossed the cup into a nearby trashcan. Then I sat back and thumbed the file folder containing the lease agreement while I watched the crowed with unfocusedeyes. Who was I kidding? This place wasnt bad. My run of bad luck would have happened whether I lived here, in Denver, in New York, in fucking Antarctica. This place was the crime scene, not the murder weapon. All the things wrong in my life were my own fault, not that of Tucker Springs.
    But maybe things would look up now.
If Michael agreed to move in.
Hell, if he didnt, I could always find a different roommate, but
    I liked the idea of someone with a mutual friend. And I wasnt opposed to a little eye candy. I could look but not touch, after all.
    Yeah, right. I was asking to drive myself insane with a guy like him around my house. God help me if he brought home any “company” for an evening.
    And speak of the devil, there he was. One second, the crowd was a blur of faces, the next it was a blur of faces behind Michael as he strolled toward me, sunglasses on and hands in the pockets of his blue jeans. The sun glinted off his watch, drawing my attention to his arms. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows again, revealing his lightly tanned forearms under a sprinkling of dark hair.
    I stood, and we shook hands before we both sat, metal chair legs scraping across cobbles as we inched our chairs closer to the small round table between us.
    Michael rested his foot on his opposite knee and absently — nervously?—tapping the side of his ankle with his fingers. “So, this sharing a place, you really think its a good idea?”
    “You dont?”
He’s here, though. That’s a good sign.
He shrugged. “Just mulling it over, I guess. Its tempting, Ill
    give you that. Im just not sure if…” He trailed off.
“Maybe its a good idea, maybe it isnt.” I sat back, folding my
hands in my lap. “If it doesnt work out, theres nothing saying we
have to stick with it forever.”
“Except the whole bit about paying first and last month on a
new apartment,