by Emma Hart
Keeping my glare in place was impossible when he was in this mood. Playful and borderline flirty was Jay’s sweet spot, and it was how he got out of trouble with just about every woman in his life.
Except his mom.
I smacked my lips together and kicked at him under the table. “Brat.”
“Yeah, but you love me.” His grin widened as he grabbed the syrup bottle from the center of the table.
And that was the problem. I damn well did love him, and unless I got a handle on my little crush, I’d probably be in love with him, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.
Nuh-uh.
No way.
And it was time to stop thinking about my totally inappropriate crush on my best friend.
I cleared my throat and took the syrup to put on my pancakes. “So. This agreement. You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“Oh, you’re crazy,” Jay said around a mouthful of food. “But I already knew that, and I still moved in.”
“You moved in because you waited so long to find a new apartment you were about to be homeless.”
“Good point. But still, I could have moved in with Sean.”
“And Brie would have killed you.”
“Another good point.” He clicked his tongue. “I know you’re crazy, Shelbs. Sane people don’t have voices in their heads or mutter to themselves as they wander around the apartment.”
“What else am I supposed to do? Let the fictional people take over? Do you know what would happen if they were allowed to assume control of my brain?” I tapped my temple. “Anarchy, Jay. Anarchy.”
He pointed a rasher of his over-done bacon at me. “If you’re trying to convince me you aren’t crazy, you’re not doing a very good job.”
I snatched the bacon from his hand and threw it at him. He laughed, throwing his head back.
He was such a shit.
“Are you done?” I asked after a minute, stabbing my fork into my pancakes.
He wiped under his eyes.
Was he crying? Oh, my God, he was. He laughed so hard he cried.
It wasn’t even funny.
“I hate you.” I put my bacon on the plate with my pancakes, grabbed the plate and my cutlery, and stormed off to my room.
He was insufferable.
CHAPTER FOUR – JAY
Sundays Are For Football
I knew she was trying to make a point.
The worst part? She had one.
I was a terrible roommate. Living on my own made me lazy, and it was easy to forget that Shelby was my polar opposite. I could handle mess, but it made her antsy.
Unless it was the desk in her room. That damn thing was the messiest fucking thing I’d ever seen in my life, but God forbid anyone tried to organize it.
She swears blind it’s organized chaos.
I just think it’s chaos, personally.
Everywhere else had to be tidy. And clean. God, it had to be clean. She could smell a watermark on a glass from the laundry room downstairs. I swear she’d once gone into the bathroom immediately after me to bleach the toilet and spray the room.
Still, she was my best friend. She had been for as long as I could remember, and I understood that it was her apartment and she liked things her way. We clearly couldn’t live together without making a shit ton of compromises.
Which was why I was sitting on the sofa with ESPN on in the background, looking at the fucking roommate agreement.
I meant it when I asked her if I needed to ration her on The Big Bang Theory. It was clearly where she’d gotten the idea from, and it was absolutely ridiculous that she’d actually made one in real life.
Even if it was a good idea. Something I’d never admit to her. The last thing I wanted her to do was to start thinking that she was normal.
Last month, on a deadline, she chopped a pencil into a salad and stuck a carrot behind her ear.
She hadn’t noticed that I’d thrown it out and made a run to the grocery store.
That’s when I knew she really was crazy.
Still, I was going to humor her. I’d read her little agreement, sign it, and really try to be a better person to live with. I was also going to offer up some of my own suggestions because no matter how fair Shelby thought she was being, this was going to be skewed in her favor.
If I had to pick up my socks, she had to stop leaving her bras all over the place.
I didn’t need any more encouragement to think about what she looked like not wearing them.
Wanting to see her naked was an unfortunate side effect of being her roommate, that was for sure.
Never in my life had I been attracted to her until I moved in. Not that I was blind to her—she was beautiful, in my opinion, but I’d never really wanted to grab her face and kiss her when she pouted in annoyance.
That…
That was a recent development. One that I wasn’t entirely sure I was comfortable with.
So yes. She needed to pick up her damn bras.
I sighed and leaned back on the sofa, opening the agreement up. She’d stapled the damn thing together and everything. I was half tempted to pick up my phone and text her to see if she had a lawyer look it over, but she was at her favorite café writing.
And you did not want to interrupt Shelby when she was writing. Not if you wanted to keep your balls, and I most definitely did.
Instead, I smirked as I scanned the first rule. Must wear pants. She’d written it in big, bold capital letters and underlined the word ‘must’ three times. Thankfully, this was a rule I whole-heartedly agreed with. As comfortable as I was while just wearing boxers, this applied to us both.
Shelby had a habit of running to the bathroom in her underwear when she thought I was in my room. I’d caught a flash of her white ass more than once as she sped down the hall, and all that did was put my dick in an uncomfortable situation.
Lusting after your best friend was more hassle than it was worth.
I clicked the pen I was holding and skipped to question two. This one was also in capital letters: Get The Fuck Off My Oreos. I just about choked on my own spit as I continued reading.
Jay will ensure that he does not eat Shelby’s Oreos. If he does, he must replace them within twenty-four hours with the added interest of one packet of double-stuffed Oreos.
Laughter burst out of me. What was she going to do, put a label on each packet to make them hers?
Actually, you know what? That wasn’t a bad idea. I drew a little arrow pointing to this section and wrote that down at the side of the page. How else would I know which ones were hers? And the answer of “They all belong to Shelby” was, sadly for her, not the right one.
By now, she should be keeping them in her room. It’s not my fault if she leaves them in the cupboard and I’m hungry.
Like I said: put a label on them.
Compromise, see?
Rule three: The Washer Will Not Kill You.
That was debatable. I didn’t know how to use the damn machine, so there was, in fact, every chance it might kill me. It wasn’t that I was a lazy-ass guy who’d never done any of his own chores, but my old apartment building was just that—old. It didn’t have a laundry room, and my grandma wouldn’t hear of me using a launderette, so she’d washed my clothes once a week when she’d dragged me around for dinner.
All right, it hadn’t been dragging since she was an amazing cook, but still.
I sighed. This rule was one I couldn’t actually argue with. She had been taking my laundry down with hers and leaving it on my bed when it was dry, and that wasn’t fair.
In my defense, she just kind of took it out of the basket and did it.
Again, see the fact that she didn’t like mess. Apparently, clothes in a laundry basket was mess.
I guess it was time I learned how to use the washers and dryers in the laundry room in the building. And where the room was.
I didn’t say I was perfect.
Rule four was a rule I could get firmly on board with: Sunday
s Are For Football. They’d long been a point of contention between us, mostly because a bunch of guys in her living room didn’t exactly help her when she had to work.
Not to mention that Shelby hated football. In fact, she despised it. She gritted her teeth every time she left her room to get water or whatever.
She’d already given me a general idea of this rule this morning, so I settled in and read what she’d written, cringing a little at some of it.
Sundays are for football. During the on-season, Shelby will leave the apartment to work if the Dallas Cowboys are playing and the game is on television.
That was specific.
The only exception to this rule is for the Super Bowl, regardless of the teams in it.
Right. Because the Cowboys were going to win the Super Bowl, weren’t they? Fucking hell, woman, don’t get my hopes up like that.
I carried on reading.
Arrangements can be made for other sports on Sundays during the off-season. If a sports event falls on any other day of the week, Jay will leave the apartment and find an alternative place to view it.
I winced.
Yep.
There it was.
The zinger.
Jesus fuck, she was striking a hard bargain with this.
Breach of this agreement will result in a one-month ban of football from the television.
My lips twitched. It was as if she was writing a fucking child’s rule list out. A monthly ban? What was I, five?
I scratched that last one right out. The rest of it wasn’t exactly bad. It was frustrating on a personal level, and that made me sigh and run my hands through my hair, but it wasn’t unreasonable. Keeping it only to Sunday was fair since she was the one who had to move her office for it.
I scribbled a note to negotiate the games—one a week regardless of the team wasn’t unfair—and moved on.
Rule five: The Feather Duster Is Your Friend.
I stopped.
What in the ever-loving fuck was a feather duster? Was it some kind of bird-based cleaner? Would I be cleaning the floors with a headless ostrich or something?
The lock on the door clicked, and it swung open, revealing a wind-swept Shelby hugging her laptop bag to her stomach.
I ran my gaze over her. Her dark hair was a disaster with strands of it flying in every direction, including over her face. Her cheeks were flushed and pink, and she blew out a long breath between her lips.
“Did you get into a fight with a tornado?”
She jerked her gaze toward me, blinking at me for a second. “No. I went to Java Jam on the front. It wasn’t bad when I got there, but the winds really picked up about half an hour ago.”
“Is there a hurricane coming?”
Slipping the strap of her laptop bag over her head, she said, “A hurricane? In May?” She rolled her eyes. “Just a regular storm coming in, probably. That’s what the forecast says anyway. What are you doing?”
I sat up straight and put the agreement down as she smoothed her hair back from her face. “Reading the agreement through. I just got to rule five.”
“The feather duster?” Her brown eyes scanned my face.
I did my best to keep my expression blank. “Yep.”
She paused. “You don’t know what a feather duster is, do you?”
“Well. I can’t say I’ve ever used one, but I’m imagining cutting off an ostrich’s head and using its body to clean the floors.”
Shelby stared at me, her expression flat. “I have no idea how you’ve made it this far into adulthood without seriously hurting yourself or someone else.”
“What? Because I don’t know what a feather duster is?”
She turned on her heel and walked to the small closet in the hallway that I’d never opened. She pulled on the door, reached inside it, and pulled out a long stick. One end of it was covered with a rainbow of… I didn’t actually know how to describe it. It was bushy and looked soft; at least in the areas that weren’t looking a little on the gray side.
“This,” she said simply, “is a feather duster.”
I looked at it then her. “But it doesn’t have any feathers on it.”
“You took that literally?”
“I just told you I thought you wanted me to use a headless ostrich to sweep the floors, and you didn’t think I took the word ‘feather’ literally?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Actually, I was hoping you just weren’t that stupid.”
I showed her my middle finger. “I’ve seen that before.”
“Why didn’t you use it, then?”
Shrugging, I got up and walked to the kitchen for a bottle of water. I shut the fridge and turned back to her. “Not gonna lie, Shelbs, I thought it was some kinky as fuck sex toy.”
“How on Earth do you confuse a feather duster and a sex toy?”
“The stick. The fluffy stuff.” I shrugged once again. “It’s not like I know what you’re into in the bedroom, is it?”
“Who the hell uses a feather duster as a sex toy?”
“Hey, some people might be into that. I mean, I’m not one of them, but for all I knew, you were.”
My best friend looked at me with confusion shining in her eyes. “You are so freaking weird.”
“From the person who talks to people who don’t exist? That’s a bit rich.”
“Hey.” She whirled on me, brandishing the feather duster as a weapon with it pointed right at my chest. “I know I’m weird. It’s the people like you who don’t admit it who are the ones we need to watch out for.”
I rolled my eyes and sat back on the sofa. Sure. I was the weird one; not the girl who wandered around in tiny shorts, without a bra, her hair a mess atop of her head at six a.m. on a Sunday.
Aha. That was another one.
Decent clothes.
I scribbled that on the agreement.
Shelby shut the door with a click and peered over at me. “What are you writing? If it’s permission to use the feather duster as a sex toy, the answer is no. Unless you buy your own, but if you haven’t figured out where the laundry room is yet, I doubt you’ll find where to buy one.”
She was as funny as a car crash, this one.
“Hilarious,” I drawled. “No, I’m making amendments as I go. I added a new rule.”
“You added a new rule?” She raised one dark eyebrow and walked over, hovering over me. “All right, what is it?”
“Decent clothes must be worn. Do you know how many times I wake up early on a morning to open the gym and find you basically in your underwear in the kitchen?”
“Basically in my underwear? Who are you seeing in the kitchen? I wear shorts and a tank top at the very least.”
“Yes, but the shorts barely cover your ass, and you’re sure as hell not wearing a bra.”
She paused, eyes glittering as she said, “And why are you looking at my ass and my boobs?”
That was an excellent question.
“Because there’s nowhere else to look!” I rushed out before my stupid cock could get any ideas. “Look, waking up in the morning can be challenging for a guy.”
She stared at me.
“I don’t need to get up for a coffee with… you know.” I motioned to my groin. “And see you half-clothed.”
She flicked her hair over her shoulder and walked to the kitchen, turning her back to me. “Why does it matter? I’m your best friend. I hardly think your little friend is remotely interested in whether or not I’m wearing a bra.”
Yeah, well, he is.
“Fine. If I have to wake up and see your perky nipples prancing around the kitchen, I’m going to stroll around in my underwear so you can get a good view of my morning glory.”
She spun, lifting up a finger. Her cheeks were flushed, and she had to swallow before she could speak. “My nipples do not prance. They are not horses.”
I grinned.
“Also, I have no desire to have anything to do with your morning erection, much less get a good view of it, t
hank you very much.”
“Have I told you that you’re cute when you blush?”
“Have I told you that you’d be a cute dead guy?”
I laughed, leaning back on the sofa. “C’mon, Shelbs. We need to respect each other’s privacy. You don’t want to see my cock hard over your breakfast, and I don’t want to see your nipples standing to attention when I make a coffee.”
She sighed. “Why did I ever let you move in again?”
“Because I was going to be homeless and you’re the best friend ever?”
“Mm.” She grabbed her coffee from the machine and leaned against the counter, cradling it against her chest. “Okay—fine. I accept that. What other changes have you made?”
“Every Sunday is a sports day, no matter the team or sport.”
She clenched her jaw. “I suppose that’s fair.”
“That killed you to say, didn’t it?”
“Get on with it before I kill you.”
I chuckled. “You either have to put a label on your Oreos or keep them in your room, or I’m not responsible for eating them. If I don’t know they’re yours…”
“You’re just being a picky little bastard now.”
“Hey, I’m only on rule five. You’re the one who made…what? Twenty-five-ish of them?” I shrugged and picked up the pen, giving it a pointed click. “Now it’s my turn.”
She sighed, dropping her head back. “I knew I’d regret this.”
CHAPTER FIVE – SHELBY
The Feather Duster Is Your Friend
I typed the treasured two words that made me feel like magic at the end of every manuscript with a sigh.
They’d feel more magic if this book belonged to me, but alas, this was paying some of the bills this month.
I saved the document and opened up my email account, ready to compose a new message to send the book to my ghostwriting client. It wasn’t my favorite way to earn money since I was trying to get a stronghold in the industry myself, but my own books and the random bits of freelance work I got from local newspapers didn’t earn enough to keep me in Oreos, never mind my apartment.
This particular client was an easy one for me—she sent me the bones of a draft, and I picked it apart and put it back together again. I didn’t know much about her except that she loved to write but her day job got in the way, so she sent every book to me to fix up.
