Unhinged
: Chapter 1

As a door, I didn’t know when I fell in love with Tana, only that I most assuredly was.

It might have been the first time she’d laid her soft fingertips on the cool brass of my knob, the day she first toured the apartment I faithfully guarded. I’d watched, fascinated by the play of light against her cheek, as she’d signed the papers on the chipped formica counter of the tiny kitchen just beyond my threshold.

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It may have been when I noticed the care she always took sliding the key into my lock. In the six months she’d spent safely tucked behind my back at night, she’d never jiggled her key uncomfortably, or twisted the knob too hard. No, not Tana. She always made sure the lock had unlocked before she tried to enter, and never tried to force her way beyond a sticky catch in the deadbolt.

She wasn’t like my previous tenants, a gruff pair of male roommates that shouldered me too hard, and let me slam even when they didn’t have to. No, they hadn’t been civilized enough to lay out a beautiful welcome mat like Tana did, or sweep the pitted concrete square that faced the thickly-wooded forest beyond my front.

Oh, the bliss I felt when she’d press her cheek to my painted surface, peering through the peephole to ensure her food delivery person was actually who they claimed to be. In those fleeting moments, I could perceive her perfume, the warmth of her breath and body, sometimes even the side of her silky lips as her head shifted away.

Once, I got carried away by the press of her breasts as she rose on tiptoe to look through the peephole, her t-shirt whispering against my flat back. Try as I might, I couldn’t hold back my deadbolt, which slid free with excitement at the touch of her soft cheek. Tana, my sweet, puzzled little Tana, gently twisted the bolt back into place, opening the unlocked door to nervously chuckle with the waiting delivery man on the other side. I listened to her murmur about the building settling oddly, the summer humidity surely swelling the wood of the door frame.

Truth be told, I loved the humidity, even if Tana had a point about my swelling. The apartment complex’s air conditioning units were ancient, and offered little relief from the early summer heat. That meant that she dressed appropriately once I was securely latched, which meant she was hardly dressed at all. In barely-there tank tops and tiny shorts, she pranced around the apartment, doing little dances to music on the radio as she vacuumed or worked at her computer job.

One particularly sweltering day, one I’d never forget, we were pressed together for long, sweaty moments. Tana had gotten a store-brand cherry twin pop from the freezer to cool off. After peeling off the sticky paper packaging and tossing it away, she leaned heavily against my back, sliding down until she was sitting on the floor. The sheer, magnetic attraction of prolonged contact shuddered through me from lintel to doorstop, making me realize I definitely had feelings for her.

In fact, my desire for Tana grew greater by the day as I watched her, filled with pleasure from every brush of her fingertips along my knob, every gentle grip along my edge as she returned home in the evenings. I was torn between wanting her to stay with me and wanting to usher her somewhere better, safer than these rundown apartments on the edge of the woods. Not that I could, regrettably silent sentry that I was.

Terrible things lurked here, only a building away. Shortly before Tana had moved in, I’d watched Tana’s overly-friendly superintendent, Randall, vanish one night into woods beyond the complex. The girl he’d tugged alongside him had been staggering unsteadily, and looked uncomfortably like Tana. For a moment on the day she’d signed the papers, I was almost sure it was the same woman I’d seen that night. But no, my Tana held herself a little taller, and had reading glasses perched on the edge of her adorably upturned nose. Her skin was a darker shade, too, something closer to my own painted-over oak than the pale woman that had never returned from the woods.

Every time Randall oozed by, all oily charm, to “check” something at Tana’s apartment, I barely held myself back from slamming across the creep’s spindly fingers. I had few instincts beyond protecting Tana, but the idea of blatantly revealing myself as sentient filled me with a horrific sense of sourceless cosmic dread: a warning from whatever force had given me life, surely. Still, I didn’t like the way Randall’s eyes devoured my precious charge when her back was turned, getting the requested papers, or tools, or something else that inevitably required her to bend over. To my relief, Tana seemed to pick up the predatory aura of the man, and always kept a stiff, polite distance between them, bending at the knees rather than the waist when something was requested.

And every time she managed to successfully, albeit politely, shoo the super out of her apartment, she’d turn the lock, rest her back against mine, and breathe a sigh of relief. Even though I was, architecturally-speaking, obligated to support her, I still felt like I was actively providing her comfort. The thought of that warmed me down to my threshold.

I still saw, however, what Tana could not: the way Randall would savagely grip the edges of my exterior frame once I was closed, leaning in so close his foul breath ghosted off of my front. His fingertips would flex in frustration, a predator denied his prey, shoving off and away to stalk down the hallway, muttering. His body language had been more aggressive the last time Tana had ushered him out, claiming an appointment that I knew was a ruse.

Unfortunately, I feared Randall knew it was a ruse too.

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