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Without smiling, I let a deranged few laughs fall from my lips. “You’re misunderstanding. Brigid is fine, living a fairy tale, and Penny and I don’t live together because she’s like you—bright and bubbly and loud. I love her to death in every possible way, but she listens to music in her bedroom. Without headphones. I’d simply kill her. And then myself. Because I don’t want to picture a world without her.”
“You have very complicated feelings.”
“Thanks. I think it’s called being a person. Not a fan, honestly. But here we are.”
Combing his fingers through his hair, he says, “It’ll be fine. The house is thirty-thousand square feet. You can have opposite side bedrooms. On different floors.”
I lose the ability to access my cognitive functions for a moment. By the time I’m back online, F-man has located the pajama shirt I tossed into the corner of my bed-less bedroom on his way to what I can only assume is the next step of forced transportation—emptying my clothes into his bodyguards’ arms so they all can dump me off in a th-thirty-thousand square foot palace.
My current apartment is roughly five hundred square feet…so that means…the place F-man’s talking about is roughly…sixty apartments.
Ha ha. I might scream.
F-man actually begins digging through my drawers, and that snaps me out of my coma. “What are—”
He waves a pair of holey underwear in my face. “What is this?”
“My panties!” I shriek. “What the—” I swear. “—are you doing?”
He rips sock after sock out, unrolls them, and stuffs his fingers in the holes. “Why does everything you own have holes? You’re always so put together at work.” He rips out a bra, examines the staining, the strap. He tugs on the elastic, or he tries to, at least. It’s gone. It’s been gone. No more elastic to speak of. “What the—” A breathless curse whispers from his gaping lips. His head begins shaking softly. “Marcella…” When he sees my face, something like sense snaps into him. He peers between me and the cheap, plain bra I’ve had since high school. Heat explodes in his cheeks, and he swears as he drops it back into my drawer. “I’m sorry.” More swears. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m so—” Swear. “—sorry.”
Swallowing uninhibited rage, I mutter, “Are you done?”
“Y-yes.”
“So you’ll get out of my apartment now?”
“No.” He swipes a hand down his face; it’s trembling. “I’m dead serious, Marcella. I’m not leaving you here. And tomorrow, we’re taking the day off to get you a new wardrobe.”
“Do you even understand how much work it will be to adjust your schedule for that?”
“Marcella.” Tone hard, he meets my eyes.
I flinch. “Stop saying my name. And definitely don’t say it like that.”
“You’re my girlfriend, right?”
“I mean. Kinda?”
“How does your name on a legal document that says you’re my girlfriend result in kinda?”
I cannot argue with the logic. Or, well, I could, but it would not make me correct, and then I’d feel gross. “Okay. You’re absolutely right. Yes, I am your…girlfriend.”
“An exemplary one, no less?”
I knew I’d regret saying that. Lips peeling back from my teeth, I fight my way through, “Y-eesss…?”
“Are you not also my assistant, who is under a different contract outlining that your availability is to be made around my schedule, outside of emergency situations involving health or familial disruptions?”
“Yes, I traded my soul to your company. That is a fact.”
“So, as my assistant, arranging time for me to spend with my girlfriend whenever I deem is perfectly reasonable, and, as my girlfriend, letting me spoil you when I discover you lack basic needs is also perfectly reasonable, isn’t it?”
I throw my hands in the air. “I don’t know! Maybe in rich people land it’s reasonable to give your girlfriend a house and buy her a new wardrobe on a whim, but I’m not from rich people land! The gunshot scared me. I appreciate you coming by and reminding me that a stray bullet most likely isn’t going to come through my floor now that the cops are here. You have done your perfectly normal boyfriend duties. Must you be such an overachiever?”
“Yes, actually.” His arms cross. “It’s a compulsion of mine.”
Oh my word.
