Lift Me Up

A metallic clang echoed on the balcony, snapping Alec’s attention from lines of coding consuming the laptop screen. Rising from his desk, Alec hissed at the stiffness in his knees from sitting at his desk for hours. Silently, he slid open the screen door and edged out onto the slab that passed for a balcony in his New York City apartment. Quietly cursing himself for his hesitancy, Alec glanced quickly among the small jungle of plants lining the rails. His ongoing battle with one of the neighborhood pigeons had escalated over the two months of the city’s pandemic lockdown. Convinced the winged creature harbored anger issues, Alec assumed the noise to be the most recent attack on his beloved wildberry heuchera. “Dang it!” a voice called from somewhere above, followed by a rattling against the side of the balcony rails. Alec took the two steps to the edge to see a make-shift metal basket snagged along the edge of his balcony. The thin ropes leading up shook slightly, disappearing into the balcony above him. “Hello?” called Alec, reaching out toward the basket before he halted. Every warning about germs and distancing ran through his brain. “Hey!” Relief swelled in the voice above him. “Sorry about this, but my lunch seems to be stuck. Would you mind giving it a shove?” Peering toward the basket, Alec saw a cardboard box from the pizza place down the block that made breath-taking calzones. His stomach rumbled from just peering at the green logo in the shape of Italy. “Um, sure,” said Alec, glancing around before snatching his gardening gloves. He wondered if they counted as official PPE as he leaned over the side. He spied a small hook on the edge of the basket caught on the corner of the railing. In his clunky gloves, Alec managed to free the basket and steady it before turning his face upward. “Thanks,” said the voice, now attached to the bluest, blue eyes Alec had ever seen. Laced by dark lashes that matched a tuft of wavy hair falling into his face, Alec decided the only word to describe the man was sculpted—as though carved by some ancient Greek artist with a penchant for perfection. “Did you want some?” the statue of beauty spoke. Yes, please, thought Alec. “I ordered a full calzone,” the vision above him added, snapping Alec from his admiring stupor. “No way I can finish it.” “Oh, that’s nice of you, but I, uh…,” Alec thought of the sad egg salad waiting for him in the fridge. “Come on. It’s a thank you for saving my food. I’m Nico, by the way. Nico Franzetti,” he said, a smile lighting up his dark, gorgeous features and relieving Alec of the ability to speak. So not a Greek statue then, but a Roman one. He stood unmoving for a beat more, until a breeze brushed the metal basket up against the railing. “Sure,” Alec found the word leaving his mouth before he could kill it with common sense. “Let me grab…something.” He raced into the apartment and reached for plate and fork from the drying rack. Seeing his hands still encased in the gardening gloves, he quickly whipped them onto the kitchen floor in one move. Yanking on a pair of blue gloves he saved for grocery deliveries, he took a moment to try and tame the tuft of his strawberry blonde hair that generally refused to stay in place before stumbling back out to the balcony. “You sure about this?” he called up. “Hurry up, or we’ll both have cold calzone,” Nico laughed. Alec waved his blue-covered hands above him, part in agreement and part in assurance to the moving statue that he was being COVID-careful. “Okay, thanks,” he said and maneuvered the basket back to reattach the hook. “I know it’s only four stories, but the guys at my fave pizza place are really weirded out by all of this. So I rigged this up,” said Nico. “It’s lucky I have rope,” Alec’s brain stuttered to a momentary halt before Nico finished, “for my job.” Alec shook his head to clear his thoughts, then carefully opened the box. The heavenly smell of the sweet, red sauce and melted cheese hit him, eliciting a barely contained groan. The basket rattled slightly. Without looking up, Alec hurried to rip the calzone with his hands and slide the smaller portion onto his plate. Closing the box, he freed the basket and glanced up to see Nico looking at him with an odd expression. “Thank you again.” He waved up to Nico, though the basket continued to sway at his balcony. “Oh, I’m Alec,” he called. “Hi, Alec,” said Nico, his voice suddenly softer than before. “Do you want to join me for lunch…with balcony-to-balcony distancing, of course.” Alec opened his mouth, ready to agree with an eagerness that would reveal he possessed not even a modicum of cool. Then he remembered the endless lines of coding still waiting for him. “I…I would, but my office is trying to navigate a buggy program,” he said, suddenly wondering how many emails he had missed while distracted by the beauty of Nico. “Bug problem?” the handsome man in question asked as the basket slowly ascended. Alec worked to suppress the sudden daydream of his newly formed acquaintance hoisting the small basket with sweat-glistened bare arms and flexing muscles. I’ve been isolating myself too long, he thought. Not that the lifting of restrictions would make much of a difference where Alec was concerned. While his upstairs neighbor inhabited the realm of the physically chiseled, Alec practically embodied the word nondescript. Hair that preferred to stick up rather than be styled, eyes somewhere in the vicinity of pale green, shape skirting the edges of soft—Alec knew someone as beautiful as Nico would walk right past him in a bar. “Computer bug. I’m a programmer,” answered Alec, cringing visibly as he wished once again his job did not sound like a life choice equivalent to a sweater vest. “So, you are still working?” Nico called as the basket disappeared over the rail. “Yeah,” Alec answered meekly. About sixty hours a week, and I’m sick of it, he added silently. His company helped businesses move programs and workers online. They had been flooded ever since February, when the call for at-home offices skyrocketed into the stratosphere. He rarely mentioned the long hours to his New York friends, most of whom were connected to hospitality, and therefore currently unemployed. I’m lucky. I’m lucky. I’m lucky, Alec constantly reminded himself, before usually finishing with and I’m tired. “That’s cool,” said Nico with a hint of uncertainty. He peeked over the edge of the railing again, offering a smile. Alec’s body froze in place as his brain launched into overdrive to conjure ways to see that smile again. Before he could land on a solution, Nico added, “Well, I’ll let you get to it.” And the beautiful Roman statue vanished. Alec sighed, heading back inside. A quick flutter of wings yanked his attention back to the railings. His eyes narrowed at the familiar sight of a s***h of crimson in the ratty, gray wings of his lockdown nemesis. The pigeon tilted its head in jerky movements between Alec’s lunch and the vivid purple flowers of his dolce wildberry heuchera plant. “Don’t even think about it,” he hissed, sliding quickly into the apartment, and slamming the screen closed. So this is my life now, he thought, setting the plate on the counter and peeling off the sticky gloves. Fantasizing about my neighbor and hiding from a pigeon. The ding of his phone pulled Alec back to his desk. He grabbed a bite of the calzone and moaned at the perfect harmony of tomato sauce and stringy mozzarella. As he slid into his chair, he noticed the bouncing of his Zoom icon at the same time he saw the text reading, “Where are you?” “Crap,” Alec garbled over the bite of calzone, and scrambled to log into his Zoom account. He was greeted with a mop of curls dominating the screen. “Sorry, sorry!” he said, swallowing the bite of Italian perfection and moving the coding document over to his side screen. The curls swung away to reveal the face of his friend. “Dude, I thought we were checking in ten minutes before the meeting,” said Zach, his eyes still focused on his secondary screen. “You need to give it up with the psycho pigeon. I’m telling you, he’s not after you.” Alec rolled his eyes in an attempt to dismiss the accuracy of that statement. Zach was the liaison on most of the projects Alec coded, meaning he ran interference between panicked clients and coders who generally failed to speak beyond techy terms. The drain of translating between the often-harried groups showed on Zach’s face today. He scratched his reddish beard, which Alec noted was getting longer as the weeks wore on. He wondered what Zach’s wife thought of the burgeoning mountain man look. “We got two minutes. Whaddya got?” Zach asked, his usual way of kicking off updates. Clicking into go-mode, Alec gave him an abridged version of the potential problem, and the search he was running to try and solve it. Zach wearily rubbed his face in response. “So, it’s a Bruce,” he said. Their clients tended to face the same types of problems, so Zach employed a short code of names for the most common. A “Bruce” meant a well-meaning, usually former, employee who had cobbled together programs with the coding equivalent of bubble gum and paper clips—tangled, often incoherent, and nearly impossible for anyone else to understand. At Alec’s nod, Zach sighed. “Okay, I’ll give them the search-and-patience spiel,” he said, before he glanced up at the camera. “You ready?” he asked, a small smile quirking up. “No renegade birds pulling you away?” Alec pursed his lips. “I had to help a neighbor,” he said, opening up a new doc to take notes. He turned back to the screen to see Zach with eyes locked onto his camera. “You…spoke to another human?” Zach asked slowly. “Was it an…interesting human?” The sudden teasing tone in his voice sent Alec reaching for a stack of papers to straighten. “Geez, Alec Bishop, I can see your blush through the screen,” he declared. “You have a cute guy living near you!” “We have a meeting with a client,” Alec snapped. Zach waved a hand in dismissal. “They can wait. It makes us look far too busy to make meetings on time.” He leaned his chin onto both his hands. “So, spill.” Alec narrowed his eyes and c****d one eyebrow in response. Zach sighed, as if recognizing the look that signified his friend digging in his heels. Zach shook his head and smiled. “Fine,” he relented, quickly followed with a finger pointed to the screen, “but you owe me a story over a beer. Soon.” Alec suppressed a smile until Zach announced, “Game face on, buddy.” He nodded as Zach pulled them into the next meeting, though he suspected his blush still lingered.