Do some errands

Deciding that you just need to get out of the apartment you share with Doe for so long, you make a quick shopping list, gather up your laundry, pick up the bills for the week and head out to your car. It's a bright sunny day and you wish you'd brought your sunglasses. It's nice out, but you look like a vampire after hiding out and crying in your apartment for most of a week.

To get to your car, you need to walk down a little landscaped path and a bridge over a water feature before reaching the access point to the garage, which is down some stairs. The fresh air is doing you some good, but struggling along with your basket of laundry, you don't see your upstairs neighbor, Andrea, coming up the stairs with her arms loaded with groceries. The two of you collide; you sit backwards and land heavily on your ass on the concrete steps, and she barely manages to catch her milk and eggs before they fall down the flight of stairs.

"Oh, Andrea, I'm so sorry," you mumble.

"Hey, John, are you OK?"

"Well, my ass hurts a little bit..." you start, then shut up when you realize what that sounded like. "I mean...I should be fine. I didn't see you there." Which is kind of amazing, since in the past you've always tried to ignore her so you wouldn't stare. Not stare at her long tanned legs as she'd climb the stairs to get to her apartment above yours, not stare at her curved ass nicely filling those khaki shorts when she came back down the stairs past your kitchen window, not stare at her luscious tits begging to be released from whatever confining clothing she was wearing, nor even stare at her heart-shaped face as she looked up at you and repeated: "But are you OK? I...I've heard you, sometimes, the last few nights. It sounds like things have gotten pretty bad."

You look at this beautiful girl in shock. Now you remember how thin the walls in the apartments are, and how you and Doe used to hear everything Andrea and her boyfriend Mark did upstairs. The two of you would laugh to hear them fucking wildly in their bed, her screams sounding ridiculous and artificial to your ears. Then later you heard the fights, during dinner two months ago you'd heard when Mark had dumped Andrea for another woman, and for a month you heard her sobbing and wailing to herself.

Mortified, you realize that she has been able to hear all of your torment and anguish these past several days; your self-pity, your rage, your desperation to get Doe back at any cost, your pitiful denials that she's really gone for good. Andrea forces a smile, shifts her bags to one arm so that she can touch your wrist in sympathy. "It'll get better, John. It really will."