Chapter Text
The most important thing to know about Trixie Mattel is that she likes her evenings to herself.
She likes a cold glass of wine (always white), she likes a long warm bath with her favourite raspberry and almond scented bubble bath, and she likes to be in bed by ten o’clock after carefully applying her eighteen step Korean skincare routine.
For the last four years, thanks to her elderly neighbour Mrs Anderson, she’s been able to achieve all of this without any hassle; the eighty-five-year-old barely made a noise, Trixie’s pretty sure she spent most of her time asleep in her recliner. But two months ago, her family moved her out to a nursing home, and now there’s somebody new in number twenty-two, right next door to Trixie's pristine little Boston apartment.
For all intents and purposes, her new neighbour is, in Trixie’s eyes, a menace.
She can list the things that she likes about her on one hand – on two fingers, actually. The first is that she lent Trixie an egg one time, when Trixie was baking a cake and it was too late to go out to the store. And the second, is that she takes almost all of Trixie’s mail for her. Their apartment building is small, doesn’t have any mail lockers, and with Trixie running her own hair salon, she’s barely ever home during the day anymore. She never asked her to do it – the mail guy just left it with Katya once, and now takes the liberty of doing the same every time he delivers Trixie’s mail. Which, Trixie supposes is pretty convenient for her really, so she doesn’t complain about it. Apart from the fact that it means she has to see Katya every few days.
Katya, with her bright white smile, messy white-blonde bangs, and fidgeting hands.
Trixie would almost think she was endearing if she didn’t know the truth, if she didn’t know what an obnoxious, inconsiderate neighbour she was.
The list of things that she doesn’t like about Katya, is a lot longer.
First there’s the clattering, the clanging, the banging. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning. And sometimes on a Sunday. Katya parades up and down the stairs at an unforgivably early hour, carrying who knows what – Trixie doesn’t even know what she does for a living. But it must be on purpose, because nobody is that loud accidentally. And then she hears her talking, laughing, chatting away to god knows who, and it’s all just too much for six o’clock in the morning and Trixie wants to scream. Which she has, once, through the wall. She doesn’t think that Katya heard.
Then there’s the music. Obnoxious Russian pop music, every Saturday and Sunday evening. Sometimes, Trixie has a date over, somebody she’s trying to impress, and all that she can hear is the up-tempo beats of Svetlana Loboda – Trixie once asked her phone to analyse the song so that she had somebody else to direct her anger at – pulsing through the wall. It makes her grit her teeth, right through the evening and into the night. Katya sings along too, shouts words, presumably in Russian, that Trixie doesn’t understand. It doesn’t help that she’s tone deaf. She could turn it down, must know that it’s loud from all of the times that Trixie’s banged on the wall, but she doesn’t.
The late-night food deliveries. Trixie could rant forever about the god-damned food deliveries. At least once a week, when they’re both in their respective apartments, Katya will order a takeout, and ‘accidentally’ enter Trixie’s apartment as the delivery address instead of her own. Trixie knows that it’s just to piss her off, and it works. She knows what the 9pm knocks on the door are before she even answers – she’ll take the food, storm out into the hall, bang on the door of apartment twenty-two until Katya answers, and then push the food into her arms without so much as a ‘hi’. The number of times that her evening bath has been disturbed by a pepperoni and banana pepper pizza is far too high for her liking. One occurrence, she could accept as a mistake, but eight is way too many to be a coincidence.
But worst of all, Katya is trying to come for Trixie’s gig. Not hairdressing, but the second love of Trixie’s life – baking. Trixie is the baker of the building, it’s a well-known fact. She hosts a bake sale in the foyer every month, and Katya is most definitely aware of this, because she’s been to a couple of them since she moved in. She even leant Trixie that egg once. Trixie loves making tiny cupcakes in pink polka dot cases, adorning them with pretty little sugar flowers and glitter sprinkles and presenting them for everyone to coo over. One day, Katya knocks on her door, a Tupperware of chocolate chip cookies in hand, holding them out for Trixie. She asks if Trixie wants to try one, and Trixie rolls her eyes, giving her a quick ‘no thanks’ before closing the door. Katya tries two more times after that, once with a chocolate sponge cake, and once with cupcakes, which she knows are Trixie’s delicacy. But Trixie isn’t falling for it. She knows a snake when she sees one, and she isn’t going to let Katya win.
All in all, Katya Zamolodchikova is the worst neighbour in the world. Probably.
Unfortunately for Trixie, she’s managed to get herself into a situation where she’s almost certainly going to have to spend time in the same vicinity as Katya, maybe even hold a conversation with her. Living in the flat directly below Trixie is a very enthusiastic early twenty-something named Sasha; fresh out of college, she has a zest for life that Trixie could only dream of, despite the fact that Sasha is only four years her junior. She’s having a New Year’s Eve party, and inviting the whole apartment block, and Trixie can’t really say no, can she, because two weeks earlier she’d hired the girl as her new salon assistant. Damn it. All she can do is hope that Katya isn’t a party person and won’t turn up, which seems unlikely given her habit of playing obnoxiously loud music on weekends.
And apparently now on weekdays, too.
It’s a Wednesday evening, around 8pm, and Trixie is only just returning from a typically long day at the salon. She can only afford to employ two other hairdressers at the moment, along with Sasha as their assistant, and the combination of managing a business alongside taking on her own clients every day is a lot, even for a self-proclaimed workaholic. Even before she'd graduated from college, Trixie had wanted to start her own business, and having studied Hair and Beauty, opening a salon was the natural choice. She takes great pride in it; her pastel pink salon is her baby, and for the last year she’s worked tirelessly to turn it into a profitable endeavour. It’s still tiny, she knows that, but the pride of making enough money to survive from a business that she started makes everything worthwhile.
As she ascends the stairs to her floor, hot and bothered in her pink pencil skirt and matching blouse, she hears the all too familiar sound of Russian pop blaring through the walls. She scowls, and then huffs to herself as she remembers that she’s going to have to knock on Katya’s door; she’d allowed herself to order a few things online the previous weekend, as a special treat, because she’d been stressed lately and it was what she deserved. The first item was a beautiful plush pink bedspread, which she’d purchased alongside some of her favourite room spray, and a new, very expensive vibrator – a practical purchase, she reminds herself, because her old one isn’t working properly anymore, and she’s wanted this one for a really long time.
Once she reaches Katya’s door, she mentally prepares herself to have a conversation with her. It takes a lot for her not to snap, especially after a long day at work, so she practises her controlled, unbothered expression a few times before rolling her neck either side to dispel some of the tension in her muscles and joints. She lets out a heavy breath, pushes her long, blonde curls behind her shoulders, and gets ready for Katya’s inevitable verbal ambush.
After three curt knocks on the door, Katya’s music stops playing, and she opens the door almost straight away. Her expression of confusion immediately morphs into a wide smile as she spots Trixie in front of her. She’s wearing a set of denim dungarees, splattered with paint in multiple different colours, and a bright yellow t-shirt with daisies all over it. Her hair is mussed as usual, the top half scraped up into a messy bun on the top of her head, her bangs falling down haphazardly onto her forehead.
“Hi!” She beams, one hand on the door as she uses the other to straighten out her bangs. She’s panting slightly, looks like she’s been dancing around judging by the slight sheen of sweat across the skin of her clavicle.
Trixie presses her lips together, raising her eyebrows, “Don’t you have something for me?” She’s trying to be polite, she really is, but all she wants is that glass of wine and her bathtub.
Katya looks confused again for a second before she catches on, “Oh, yeah!” She disappears for twenty seconds, before reappearing with two small boxes, stacked on top of each other, “These came for you earlier today. Here.” She holds them out for Trixie, who takes them sceptically. “I uh, hey I baked some cookies earlier today, if you want one?” She tries, “I- I can get changed real quick and we could-”
“I’m good, thanks,” Trixie interrupts, pressing her lips together, impatient as ever, “Where’s the other package? There’s three of them,” She opens her phone, scrolling through the delivery confirmations, “It says they were all delivered today.”
“Another one? I only-” Katya’s frowns, before she seems to come to some sort of realisation, and her lips turn up into a smile, “Oh. Right! You mean the sex toy. Give me a minute.”
Trixie’s heart stops. Did she just say… no, she couldn’t have, right? How would she know?
It’s a long thirty seconds before Katya returns. “Here,” She smiles innocently, holding the box out to Trixie. She pauses, scratching at the back of her head. “Sorry, I uh, I opened it. Accidentally! If you-”
Trixie immediately feels her cheeks burn red, her eyes almost bulging out of her head. “What do you mean, you opened it? Why are you opening somebody else’s mail?!”
“The mail guy handed it to me with some of my packages, and I thought it was one of mine!” Katya rambles, “I just saw the logo and I order from there too sometimes and figured it was something I’d forgotten about, but then I opened it and saw it was pink and-”
“Stop!” Trixie interjects, “Enough. Please never take my mail in again.”
Katya’s face drops. “Oh! Yeah, okay, no, whatever you want. I’m really sorry about-”
Trixie waves her hands in Katya’s direction, effectively dismissing her. She doesn’t look back as she storms away from Katya’s apartment into her own, and slams the door behind her.
She lets out a long, loud groan as she leans against the wall, drops her packages, and sinks down to the floor.
She could have sworn that she’d checked the ‘discreet packaging’ box on the website. But there's the logo in all its glory, right on the front of the box. Which has been, by the looks of it, rather excitedly torn open. Trixie snarls at the thought of Katya having touched her pretty pink vibrator, and immediately goes to wash it in the sink, removing all traces of her.
She makes a mental note to never order sex toys online again, to book herself in for a full-body massage at the weekend, and to start looking for a new apartment.