Peachtree Beauty

Chapter 3

I round the corner onto Pete's street. The large house he lives in comes into view. The building always makes me a little sad. At one point the old homestead was a grand estate, but the brick manor was long ago broken up into student housing. The once grand foyer now serves as the building's entry hall; four metal mailboxes screwed to the wall. The once cavernous space lacks grandeur, cut short by walls thrown up with no respect for the intricate woodwork of the flooring, creating division for the apartments. They similarly chopped the upstairs landing up, leaving a small sad space with barely enough room for the two entry doors. Well-worn apartment doors look like they have seen a few dozen too many years. Cheap locks, older than any of us by decades, serve as the security for each of the apartments, adding to dreariness of the place. I'd be surprised if the locks even work, they are so old. Not that Pete and his roommates would lock the doors even if they could. I don't think Pete even has a key.

Each apartment officially has three bedrooms, a tight kitchen with enough room for a small two person table, a living room, a bathroom with a cast iron tub retrofitted to add a shower, and a dining room not used for dining in decades. Like the other three units in the building, the dining room in Pete's apartment was turned into an illegal fourth bedroom ages before any of us were even thinking about college. The landlord looks the other way, and the guys each pay less rent. This arrangement also means the residents are a key short. Pete and his roommates get around the shortage by not locking the door. Pete isn't even sure he got a key when he moved in. They have passed the apartment down through Pete's frat for years. Because the guys all know each other, the new guys meet with the landlord to sign the official lease, but handle the move in and changing of the apartment possession with the brothers currently living there.

With the apartment being passed down, and the landlord's hands-off approach, over the years certain "improvements" have been made. In Pete's unit, one of the previous brothers installed a set of paper accordion doors, the type of door you find in an RV, across the wide opening of the dining room to give the room some privacy. Not so fun fact: paper doors provide privacy in sight only; you can still hear everything. That was a shocking discovery one night. Pete and I were cuddled up, watching a movie on the ratty couch in his living room. The door to the apartment slammed open, Shane, the inhabitant of the dining room, stumbling in with a girl I'd never seen before in tow. After falling into everything between him and the paper door, Shane and the giggling girl made it into his room. I was positive the grimy barrier was going to shred as Shane yanked the divider shut. A smirk firmly etched on his face, Pete kissed my head and hit play again on our paused movie. The sounds of sex soon wafted through the greying paper wall, adding an incongruent soundtrack to the animated movie on the screen.

I wouldn't describe my sexual preferences as overly vanilla, but listening to sloppy drunk college sex is definitely not on my list of turn ons. Also, and not to knock a fellow female, but I have some serious questions about where she learned to give a blowjob. Let me just put it this way: a Saint Bernard could give someone a blowjob and it would have sounded less slurpy. Shane must have felt the same way, because after about five minutes he stopped her. Pete buried his face in my hair, stifling a laugh when Shane then asked the girl if she wanted to do it doggy style. I swear we were not trying to listen. Pete even turned up the sound on the TV. It didn't help. Did I mention the accordion door is super thin from use? Like super, super thin. By the time the chick started in with the bad porn dialog, I wanted to die of embarrassment for them. Pete was about to have an aneurism from trying to not audibly laugh. Dressed in a pair of Pete's boxers and a t-shirt, I yanked a trembling Pete out of the apartment just as we heard the girl call out in a creepy toddler voice: "Oh, yes Daddy, spank me hard! I've been a bad, bad little girl!" Poor Shane was apparently thrown for a loop. Instead of spanking, we heard him fall off the bed, the girl calling "Oh shit! Are you ok?" just as Pete grabbed the front door to close it.