Page 2 of A Roommate for Ronny

I set down my fork and pulled out my phone. Unknown number. So I let it go to voicemail and finished eating. About a half hour later, I remembered the call and checked my messages. I nearly dropped the phone.

“Ronny?” Karma was standing in front of the bar. “What’s going on?”

I handed her the device, speechless.

“You got…is this the role you told me about, right before you came here?”

We’d had conversations in the months since I arrived and like everyone else here, I had found Karma to be a kind and attentive listener.

“It is. But I am going to have to turn it down.”

“It’s going to be months of filming, three or more, and I can’t expect you to keep my position all that time.”

“That’s not even a question. We will absolutely hold your job. And we’ll store any of your things you need us to.”

And what about Bosco?” The kitten I’d found when shopping in the local outlet mall only a month before. “I can’t leave him behind.”

It would break my heart to say no, but I would never break the heart of a kitten someone else had already abandoned. Fate just didn’t intend me to be an actor.

Chapter Two

Brach

When I first started dating Jeremy, my friends all warned me not to. They said he was using me, that I was nothing but a plaything to him, that he was no good. But me? Did I listen? Heck no.

Taken in by his sweet glances and soft smiles, I ignored everyone who so much as hinted a bad thing about him. Why would he be using me? I had nothing. My crappy job barely paid the bills, my city apartment was the size of a college dorm room, and there was nothing better on the horizon. I brought nothing to the table.

What a fool I’d been.

Jeremy turned out to be the complete piece of shit everyone warned me about. Even his smiles were lies. Looking back, all the warning signs were there from the night we met at a bar, but I explained them away.

He was rude to the server because he’d had a bad day at work.

He didn’t call when he said he would because he was busy.

He avoided my friends because he was shy.

Basically, I lied to myself over and over again.

Six months in, I caught him cheating for the first time. That should’ve been the end of us. It wasn’t. I allowed myself to believe his lies.

He’d sworn he wasn’t cheating, that it just looked bad from the angle I walked in. He said they never kissed and that their faces hadn’t been glued together the way it appeared. He swore I was reading too much into it. Said I needed to be less sensitive.

And the lie that sealed my forgiveness: he was hurt t I didn’t trust him the way he trusted me.

My dumb ass didn’t spend two seconds thinking of the million examples that showed he hadn’t trusted me at all. He monitored my phone, had me cancel plans with friends, and would interrogate me when I went out without him.

I believed him despite all the reasons not to. Or maybe I just wanted to because it felt easier than being alone.

For a while after that, he was nicer. He took me on dates. Nothing fancy—out to pizza or to grab burgers—but we were having fun and I felt special again.

I convinced myself he wanted forever with me and let him move into my place, since it still had ten months on the lease. In hindsight, he only asked because his lease was up and he wanted the cheap and eventually free housing.

In the beginning, he paid his share then slowly but surely his contributions lessened, as did the frequency with which he came home.

The next time I caught him cheating, there was no denying it. The omega was pregnant and called him his baby daddy.

At the time, I’d already been distanced from my friends. They hadn’t wanted to watch me throw my life away, because I’d been showing them I was really good at doing exactly that. Their absence made the breakup harder.