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My heart pitter-patters with sympathy.
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s fine. But they dumped this place off on me to manage. The market’s still lukewarm in this price range, so we’ve been renting it through an online clearinghouse.” A sour look covers his face. “Why am I telling you all this? Anyhow.” He gives me a look that says somehow it’s my fault he’s spilling his guts. “The neighbors tipped me off to ‘unusual activity.’ I came here expecting a rowdy house party. Not–” He looks pointedly at the anal beads on the floor. “–this.”
“Then that makes two of us,” I offer up. “I didn’t come here expecting ‘this’, either.” I mimic his finger quotes. “I’m a house fluffer. I fluff pillows. Not penises.”
“You’re a house stager?”
“Stager. Fluffer. You know.”
“And you’re pretty sheltered,” he adds. “I’ve never heard the term ‘house fluffer’ before. Stager, yes. Fluffer, no.”
“And I’d never heard of fluffer as a porn term,” I say with a rush of heat to my face.
“Fair enough.”
“Nothing about today is fair, Will.” Saying his name to his face tastes like ice cream with toffee pieces and hot fudge.
“Maybe your friends were right.”
“Right?” I peer at him, eyes dry, my mouth parched from stress.
“Remember that day in the parking lot? When they painted your windshield?”
“You remember that?”
He holds his hands up like he’s imagining a marquee. “Mallory Monahan. Most Likely to Become a Porn Star.”
Oh, God. He does remember.
A light laugh comes out of him as he shakes his head, eyes hard. “I assumed that was a joke.”
“It was!” I sputter. “A total joke! I’m not—”
Karen returns, fingering the zip-tie cuffs. “Am I taking her in?”
It’s tempting to say yes right now, to escape this unending humiliation.
But I may be embarrassed, but I’m not stupid.
“Please,” I say to Will. I’m super close to begging. “Today has been awful, and I just realized I’m not getting paid. There goes three hundred bucks.” My shoulders drop in defeat. “And I gave them good feng shui advice about the living room.” I look up, troubled by that misaligned furniture. “All that work for nothing.”
Karen leads us into the living room as Will huddles with her, their voices just whispers that make me feel even more ashamed and needy. Technically, Will should not have a say in whether the cops arrest me, but in small towns, this is how it works. The wealthy family has pull. Notice how he punched Beastman and no one’s talking about charging him with assault?
And I really did rat Karen out twenty-two years ago, so she has a reason to hold a grudge against me. After watching twenty minutes of that horrible horror movie, I peed the bed in fear for a week before telling Mom what happened. I thought she got her payback when Karen busted that house party when I was in eleventh grade, but I guess not.
While Will and Karen chat at the front door, I make myself useful, pushing with my shoulder to move the sofa. They stop talking and watch me as I grunt.
“What are you doing?” Will finally asks.
“I know why you can’t sell this house,” I blurt out. “It’s not the lukewarm market. It’s your energy flow.”
“Energy flow?” he chokes out, face half amused, one eyebrow up.
“Are you arresting me or not?” I ask Karen. “Either release me and let me go home to lick my wounds, or take me in and make this day suck even more.”
“Lick,” one of the other officers says with a snicker.
