My pulse is on fire as we walk to the front door.
I’d be within walking distance of Holt.
My friend.
My lover.
My maybe-more.
We’d have time to explore and work out what we are without the pressure of living together.
Niki unlocks the door, and we enter through the foyer and into—uh-oh.
“Oh no,” she murmurs.
“Absolutely not,” Mom declares.
I stare in horror at the, ah,furniturein the living room. “This wouldn’t stay with the house,” I say. “Surely they’d take it with them.”
It’s a sex den.
The living room is a sex den.
There’s a bed in the living room, but it’s not anormalbed. There’s a cage under the mattress.
A cage.
And next to it is a chair with cutouts and attachments for wrist and ankle ties.
A full wall of items that I am actively refusing to acknowledge that I’m seeing.
With a—whatisthat hanging from the ceiling?
It looks like a chandelier, but it also looks like an octopus. A sparkly purple octopus. With—oh my god.
With penises at the ends of each of its tentacles.
Mom eyes me.
She knows as well as I do what this is.
I know why I know what it is. I had a roommate who watched documentaries, and I saw one with her about sex rooms.
Hopefully Mom saw it too and that’s the only reason she also knows what we’re staring at.
“This isn’t the furniture in the listing,” Niki sputters. “Here. Look. Isn’t this quaint with the way the staging photos are set? You could put a chair in front of the window. And the fireplace could be opened back up to work again. Some new curtains, a new rug, andvoilà. Cozy living room. Let’s check the kitchen, shall we? The listing says the owners are happy to offer a credit toward kitchen upgrades.”
We head toward what we assume is the kitchen, but instead, we find ourselves in a pink-flower wallpapered room lined with shelves and shelves of dolls.
Mom gasps and grabs my hand.
I squeeze it back. “They’d…surely…take those too.”
All three of us hustle into the next room, which is the kitchen.
When Holt told me he’d renovated his kitchen, I assumed it had likely had yellowing Formica countertops and peeling brown vinyl flooring and a chipped porcelain sink and small cabinets that had possibly been painted white or green or blue in an attempt to do a quick makeover.
Something similar to the kitchen that Mom and I lived with before she married Dad.
