I shake my head. “Vinny and I don’t have any of those.”
“Wow,” she mutters. “It must be lonely sometimes.”
She’s not wrong. During my program in Australia, I shared an apartment with one other guy and two girls, and it was chaotic. Coming back from that was an adjustment.
“Ali’s an only child as well,” Carly continues. “She doesn’t mind because Carson makes her thankful to be an only child.”
“Carson?”
“Sorry, I feel like I’ve brought him up before.”
Uh, she certainly has not. I shake my head. “You don’t need to apologize.”
A wry smile graces her features. “Force of habit. Carson’s my twin brother at USC.”
My brows fly off my forehead at the mention of our rival school. “Carly Ryder, fraternizing with the enemy?”
She sighs as she takes her final step. “Yeah, the humor is not lost on either of us.”
We reach my floor and walk across the hallway. Once we reach my door, I unlock it and step inside, taking my shoes off immediately. I almost expect Carly to head straight for the couch after removing her shoes, but she doesn’t. Instead, she moves straight to my fish tank before I can utter the words, “welcome.”
She doesn’t utter another word for about five minutes as she watches my pet betta fish swim around in his little tank, around the small treasure chest Vinny added while I was away. It opens and closes.
“Hi there, little guy,” she coos.
For someone who’s terrified of the ocean, she sure gets pleasure out of the little things about it—literally—but her wonder and excitement for it make her an even better person. To be in your twenties and still hold this curiosity and excitement about what life holds is a rarity. One that I lost before I even turned twenty.
“What’s his name?” She asks excitedly, her face not moving away from the orange betta fish.
“Vinny and I call him Nemo.” As a gift to ourselves when Vinny and I first moved into this apartment, I went straight to the pet store and bought a tank that would hold a betta fish. We spent a good two weeks learning how to properly take care of him.
I won’t say this out loud but it was so fucking worth it because Nemo is the best part about this place. He actually brings life into it.
She scrunches her nose. “Really? Like the movie? But he’s not a clownfish.”
“He’s orange.”
“You know what’s also orange? A mango.” Her face lights up. “I’m gonna call him Mango. Hi, Mango. My name’s Carly, and I think we’ll be best friends.”
Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen her excited over just about anything else. Then again, I’ve only known her for a couple of months. Now, I’m starting to think she likes my fish more than me.
Also, why am I getting jealous over a fish? Mango—I mean, Nemo—can’t speak a damn word, yet he’s entranced the first guest I’ve brought into this place.
“You know he can’t hear you,” I point out stupidly.
I don’t even need to get a second glance at her playful eye roll. “Okay, smart ass. I know that. But let me be delusional for a minute, okay?”
She continues to watch Nemo in his tank, and once he enters the little cave, her eyes move away from the tank, and her entire body shifts to face me. “How long have you had Mango?”
“Nemo,” I mutter to myself. “About a year and a half. Same amount of time we’ve been living here.”
“That answers my next question.” She chuckles.
“Do you always ask a lot of questions?”
Carly’s smirk is almost as identical as her smile, with a hint of mischief, as if she’s about to commit something heinous. “You know, Movie Star, if I didn’t know better, I’d assume you were getting nervous around me.”
I scoff. Nervous? Ha, please. I’m showing my apartment to a really pretty girl who happens to have a stronger fascination with my fish than me. Nervous is not the word I would use to describe how I’m feeling.
