Depends on Who's Asking

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  And nearly groaned.

  The suite we were in was big, I’d give them that.

  But it was meant for a couple.

  Not two people that’d met each other, but really hadn’t ‘met’ each other, if you know what I mean.

  There was one single bed in the middle of the room. A large, king-size bed that had a big ‘queenly’ vibe to it. Four poles, one on each corner. Large, white drapery over the top of the bedposts. Hell, there was a very likely possibility that she had to jump up to get on the damn bed.

  I’d been too busy trying not to stare that I hadn’t watched.

  The bed had bright white sheets on it, multiple pillows. Fluffy nonessential ones and thick sleeping ones.

  And then there was the bathroom.

  “I sure hope that opaques or something, or we’re going to be getting real familiar with each other rather quickly,” Carolina said as she looked the same direction I did.

  I swallowed hard and walked to the wall, only to realize that there wasn’t a wall there at all.

  “They’re not finished with it yet,” I found myself saying. “I’m sure that there’s supposed to be glass here.” I waved my hand through the empty space between the toilet and the non-wall.

  “Great,” she grumbled. “Maybe they have extra sheets that we can hang up and put there so you’re not watching my ass while I pee.”

  I would’ve laughed had she not looked so forlorn.

  I walked to the closet near the front entrance where I assumed they’d keep the linens, and stopped when I saw the full kitchenette.

  “No oven,” I said. “But we have a full-size fridge, microwave, minibar, coffee maker, and a few other things.”

  She walked with me and peeked around the corner, humming with pleasure. “At least there’s that. What’s in here?”

  She pointed at the closed door that I assumed was the closet.

  Only, when I opened it up, I stared in surprise at a full-size weight room.

  “Umm,” I paused. “At least we can work out.”

  She turned up her nose. “You can have that. I’m good.”

  I turned to look at her and not the equipment. “You don’t work out?”

  I looked her up and down, taking in her shapely body.

  “Not if I’m not being chased or held at gunpoint,” she teased.

  “You’ve been chased and held at gunpoint before?” I wondered.

  She shook her head. “No, not technically I haven’t.”

  My lips kicked up at the corner in a smirk before I backed out of the room that might very well save my life the next three weeks in search of the closet with the linens.

  I found it in the pseudo bathroom.

  There were quite a few linens, too.

  “Nice,” I said as I pulled a sheet down and looked around the room for something to hang it on.

  Spying a coat rack and a tall lamp, I grabbed both and strung up the wall of linen that would protect our privacy—at least a little bit.

  “They didn’t finish with the couch or the chairs, either,” Carolina said as she helped me.

  Once we had it in place, we looked at the rest of the room.

  “There’s a balcony,” she pointed out. “And it looks out over a lake I’ve never seen before.”

  “With some comfortable looking chairs,” I agreed. “At least there’s that.”

  And that was it.

  We had what amounted to two thousand square feet of room with one bed, two comfortable Adirondack chairs, and that was it.

  We’d be using the bed.

  A lot.

  Wonderful.

  Just fucking wonderful.

  “There’re enough pillows to build a barrier.” She must’ve read the direction of my thoughts. “I promise that I won’t accost you in your sleep.”

  I turned to her and didn’t bother to hide what I was feeling.

  “That wasn’t what was worrying me,” I informed her. “It was me worrying that I would accost you.”

  Her eyes widened and she snapped her mouth shut, looking for all she was worth like a scared, innocent woman.

  I looked away and searched for the remote, finding it in the bedside table with a pad of paper, a Bible, and some menus from local restaurants and the grill on the first floor.

  Snatching up the television remote, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and then started dialing while simultaneously switching on the television.

  I stopped on the Die Hard Christmas movie when the line connected.

  “Hello?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief when my father’s security detail answered and not my father himself. Thank God that I didn’t have to actually talk to my father.

  “Brad,” I said into the phone in relief. “Listen, I have a situation.”

  Brad instantly became alert.

  “I fucking told you that you needed a security detail. When will you ever fuckin’…” He trailed off as I interrupted him.

  “I’m being quarantined for three weeks due to being exposed, possibly, to Ebola.” I interrupted him.

  Brad paused for such a long time that I wondered if he’d even heard me.

  “Are you listening?” I asked shortly.

  Brad started to laugh.

  “Yes, I’m fuckin’ listening.” He sounded like he was fighting the laughter and losing. Kind of like a donkey braying. “I’m just trying to figure out how in the hell you always seem to find yourself in these kinds of situations.”

  He had a point there.

  When I was fourteen, during one of my father’s election races, I’d fallen down a flight of stairs with nobody’s help but my own bad luck. When I was fifteen, during a visit to a Montana school where my dad was doing a debate, I’d contracted fucking chickenpox. Who got chickenpox anymore?

  Then, when I was seventeen, I got in a car wreck with a man who was getting a blow job by a prostitute with two more prostitutes in the back of his car fucking each other.

  A man that just so happened to be a United States senator.

  Needless to say, I always found a good way to get in the news, and it drove my father crazy.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I admitted. “I was at a fuckin’ coffee shop in the hospital’s cafeteria for God’s sake. A coffee shop. I thought to stop by on my way out for a fucking cup of coffee. I don’t even like their coffee, but you know how I am. I need it.”

  Brad did know how I was. Between all of us, Brad had, by far, been the one to encourage my love for fine coffee.

  “I understand.” He sounded amused. “I’ll tell your father, but he’s going to want to do something about this.”

  “Nothing he can do,” I admitted. “It sure is going to be a shame that I’m going to have to miss all of those events that he wanted me to go to, though.”

  There was a long pause then he said, “Why do I get the feeling that you introduced yourself to fucking Ebola rather than come to the White House for dinner?”

  Because, honestly, a disease that did scary things to my body was preferential to going to the White House for a Christmas party and putting on an act.

  By far.

  “What does Ebola even do to you if you catch it?” Brad asked.

  I looked over at Carolina who was lying on the single bed in the room, and said, “I’ve been trying to avoid looking it up. Listen, I have other calls to make. I don’t have a charger and there’s no telling if and when I’ll get one. I’ll keep you updated as I can. If you don’t hear from me, you can contact Jace, I can’t remember his last name, with the CDC in Longview, Texas.”

  Brad groaned. “Goddamn you. You know this is going to piss him off.”

  I was laughing as I hung up the phone.

  “Why do I feel like I have no idea who you really are?” she asked. “Because based on your end of the phone conversation, I’m insanely curious.”

  I didn’t answer and instead made my second call.

  “Hello?” Malachi answered on the fo
urth ring.

  He sounded breathless and annoyed.

  “Malachi,” I said as I looked around the room. “I know you’re busy with your girl, but you’re the only one that has a key to my place. And I’ve found myself in a bit of a situation.”

  Malachi moved somewhere on his end of the line. Doors squeaked. A slam. And then he was back saying, “What’s up?”

  I explained to him what was going on, ending with, “I need you to check on Smoke.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Malachi said. “Yeah, I’ll check on Smoke. Would it be easier to bring him over to my place?”

  I thought about that.

  “With him being a police K-9, I don’t really know the protocol here. I’m going to have to call the police chief and see what he wants to do,” I found myself saying. “I, uh, also have cats. Can you feed them, too? They don’t really need looking after just yet. Just fed. They have a cat door. They do all their business outside.”

  Malachi paused. “You have cats?”

  I did.

  “Yep,” I confirmed.

  “All right,” Malachi said. “How about I talk to Luke? He’s on his way up here anyway. We have a few things to talk about. Then we can figure out what to do from there.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

  We hung up, and I looked over at Carolina.

  “You have cats?” She smiled.

  “I do,” I admitted. “Earlier in the year, there was a problem with some kittens being stolen from various places. Then a box of them were tossed. I don’t know. I used to be a big cat lover when I was younger. Wanted to be a veterinarian. When all these cats started to pile up at the shelter, I helped find a lot of them homes. Paid for their spays, neuters, and shots. Things like that. But a few really latched on to my heart so I kept them.”

  “I heard about that,” she said. “The cats and the storm drain. You’re the anonymous donor that cleared out the shelter, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I read about it in the paper,” she continued. “So how many did you actually keep yourself?”

  “Five,” I answered. “Are you going to make any calls?”

  She sighed, long and loud.

  “I was trying to refrain,” she confessed. “My mom and dad, like I said, are going to freak out. My brothers’ll get pissed.”

  “Well just call one and allow that person to relay what’s going on to everyone else,” I suggested.

  She sighed. “That may work in your part of the world, but it doesn’t work in mine. They’ll all want to talk to me. Hell, I’m going to be doing some fast talking to keep my mom from coming up here and trying to take care of me.”

  “The threat of Ebola should do the trick in keeping her away,” I teased. “But if it doesn’t, I’m sure Jace with the CDC will have no problem telling her to go away.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know Nikki Pena Perez, though.”

  I gestured to her phone as my phone pinged, signaling a message.

  Malachi: you’re a closet cat freak.

  Malachi: you have a fuckin’ cat tree in your living room.

  Malachi: your cats are all freakishly big, too. What the fuck?

  Saint: They’re a litter of brothers. Maine coon, I think. They are fairly large. But they’re outside and inside cats and their fur coats are coming in for winter. They appear bigger than they actually are.

  Malachi didn’t respond, so I turned my ear back to Carolina where she was now having a conversation with what sounded like her mother.

  “Listen, Mom,” she ordered. Obviously, I was correct on the mother part. “There’s nothing either you or I can do. But, just sayin’, I’m going to start ordering all of my presents online and having them shipped to your house. I’m going to need your help wrapping them.”

  I tried to tune her out, but I listened to her and Die Hard as she argued with her mother about what she was going to do over the next month to which Carolina would correct her to three weeks.

  “Listen,” Carolina tried, but she never got her mother off the phone.

  I was fifteen minutes into the movie that was playing on the screen when there was a knock on the door.

  I walked over to it and waited, not sure what I was supposed to do.

  “Yes?” I called out.

  “Mr. Nicholson,” I heard a man call. Jace maybe, but I wasn’t sure. The equipment they wore distorted their voices.

  Vaguely I heard Carolina, desperate and happy to have a reason to get her mother off the phone, say a hasty goodbye.

  Then I felt her move closer to my back.

  “Yes?” I repeated. “Do you want me to open the door?”

  “No,” Jace said. “Back away. I’m going to open the door, then put these boxes inside your room and shut the door again. The smaller box has some electronic stuff in it. The bigger boxes have clothing, drinks, and snacks. We had a male and female go out and buy y’all some clothes. If you wish to have your own clothes, please allow us to have access to your apartments and we’ll get them for you. Or you can call or text someone to bring the things here, and we’ll bring them up to you. Bottom box has toiletries for, erm, essentials that Ms. Perez mentioned earlier.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Carolina who, once she saw me looking at her, rolled her eyes.

  “It’s a normal human bodily function,” she replied defensively.

  I shrugged.

  “You happen to have access to chocolate?” I asked. “Or something sweet? We might need that. You know how things are.”

  Jace paused. “We’ll have food delivered to you. There’s a room service menu in the bedside drawers, I believe. Or, if you prefer something else, we can get that for you, too.”

  With that, he told me to step back, and I did.

  Moments later the door opened, two men carrying boxes came in, and I all of a sudden had a stack of boxes at the entrance.

  Seconds later the door closed, leaving us by ourselves once again.

  “That’s fun,” she chirped. “It’s like Christmas. Let’s see what’s in there.”

  She started to go through the boxes then instead of calling the rest of her family—something that I noticed that she was putting off.

  CHAPTER 3

  Everyone’s a dumb whore.

  -Caro’s secret thoughts

  CAROLINA

  Opening boxes.

  That was what had me excited in that moment.

  My mother had me freaked out for sure.

  The moment my mother said ‘Ebola hemorrhagic fever’ I’d understood the severity of it.

  Hemorrhagic. Hemorrhaging.

  Blood.

  Lots and lots of blood. I now knew why I didn’t want to pay attention to the CDC guy on symptoms to report. It was making me sick just thinking about it.

  “Hey, did y’all get any stuff yet?” I heard said through the dividing door between our room and the one next door. “We’re still empty. And I’m getting hungry.”

  At least she hadn’t gotten to eat, either. Well, we had a box of snacks, but snacks weren’t going to cut it forever. I needed actual food. A cheeseburger. A taco. Or ten tacos. Whatever. Something with substance. For now, I was making do with a protein bar.

  At that moment in time, however, I wasn’t feeling very responsive to her as a person.

  She was the reason I was in this mess to begin with.

  I now had to call my boss and explain everything that was going on. Court cases would be pushed back. Everyone that thought they were going to fix their lives before Christmas would find out differently, and I had to then, somehow, figure out how the hell to buy Christmas presents, get them wrapped, and hide them from my brothers.

  My brothers who, though I loved with all my heart, were fairly awful in the trying to keep secrets department.

  I would have to come up with a solution that didn’t have them over at my house unwrapping and rewrapping all the gifts.

  They were adults, and I knew
that they’d still do it.

  Hell, just last week Connor ate my sandwich while I was in the bathroom. Like an unattended hungry dog.

  “Are you going to open that?”

  The dark, very non-sensual words that purred off his tongue sent a shiver of desire down my spine.

  “Yes,” I replied, hoping that it didn’t sound as husky as it felt.

  I didn’t bother to look at him, though, to find out.

  Instead, I opened the box that was folded in on itself and blinked.

  “This was the one that I assumed was just cords and stuff,” I found myself saying.

  Except, inside it was a brand new Xbox, a PlayStation, two new iPads, cords to go to all, and two MacBook Pros on the very bottom.

  “What the hell?” I asked as I showed him the box.

  He sighed and took the box, setting it down on the bed next to him.

  I opened up the next box, this one with clothes. And they sure as hell weren’t Walmart clothes like I’d been expecting. They were clothes from the mall. Dillard’s. American Eagle. Buckle.

  “I’m not sure where they think you and I are going for the next three weeks,” I said as I showed him a dress. “But if you dress up for the day, I’ll dress up.” Then I showed him the button-down Oxford shirt.

  He just shook his head, confused, I was thinking, just like I was.

  The next box held toiletries and stuff for me. And, let me tell you, I knew with just one glance that all the shit inside that box, the one that looked like Sephora exploded in it, cost more than my last month’s paycheck.

  Even the tampons looked fancy.

  “This one must be the food box,” Saint said as he ripped open the box.

  And he was right.

  Luckily, nothing in the box looked like it cost an arm and a leg. There were all the good, perfect essentials.

  Lucky Charms, Pop-Tarts, Little Debbie snack cakes.

  Everything that was good that didn’t require me to actually have to cook.

  “We’re going to have to get something in here that’ll help us cook and eat healthy,” Saint said. “There’s no way in fucking hell I’m eating all this processed food for long.”

  “I’m sure all that will come,” I hedged, kind of hoping that it wouldn’t.

  With three weeks of people bringing food to me, it would be kind of nice that they brought me stuff that wasn’t good. That way I could say that I literally had no choice.