“Please.” I don’t even know what I’m asking for. Please stop destroying my apartment. Please bring me a fairy godmother who will float down, wiggle her nose, and make everything right again. Please bring back Gavin so I have a shoulder to cry on—even an unfaithful one—as the wreckage of my life stares me full in the face.
Instead, my sticky puppy finally seems to realize that I’ve come home. Her whole body goes into motion, wiggling in three hundred and sixty degrees as she romps across the room and flings herself into my lap, covering my face in wet, maple-scented kisses as she whines her delight that I haven’t abandoned her yet again.
“Hi, hi, yes, hi,” I coo to her on reflex, because even when she’s turned my apartment upside down, I can’t help but be charmed by her. She’s my princess. “Hi. I missed you too.”
My phone rings, and when I pull it out of my pocket, it’s Vann.
“Hello?”
Upset at no longer being the center of attention, Athena shoves her head under my chin. I’ve never been particularly adept at growing facial hair, but it’s okay, because she leaves a beard’s worth of fur along one side of my face and in my mouth, expertly adhered with syrup.
“Hey. You forgot your umbrella.”
“Oh.” When I left the apartment, the weather app said there was a forty percent chance of showers, so I’d grabbed my umbrella on the way out. But the sky had stayed blue and cloud free the whole time I was at Bold Brew, and I must have forgotten to grab it when I packed up to come home again.
“You want me to bring it over after my shift?”
“No!” I shout it loud enough that Athena scrambles off my lap, bouncing up and down in the paper snow before she disappears up the hall, no doubt looking for new havoc to wreak.
Vann’s my best friend. He’s one of the few people I don’t feel the need to clean up for when he comes over, but even if he literally stands at the door and passes off the umbrella, he can’t see the apartment like this.
The silence says my protest was a wee bit too emphatic.
“Everything okay there?” Vann asks.
“Fine.” I stare at the destruction. There’s nothing to save. Maybe not even the Roomba, which at least hasn’t caught fire. I’m going to put on a mask and gloves and just shovel everything into garbage bags and pretend this never happened.
“Charlie.” Vann’s tone is stern. If he hadn’t spent years watching me get my heart broken by straight boys and fuckboys and every other kind of boy, it’s the kind of tone that would turn me on. But he knows me too well. Romance needs a little bit of mystery, and Vann and I have no secrets.
I sigh. “One sec. I’ll text you.” I take a picture of the scene in my office and send it to him. It takes forever before the message reaches his phone, but I know when it does because he whistles low.
“Jesus, what is that?”
“My book.” I sigh.
“The dragon thing?”
I flush. I hate it when he calls it that. He probably doesn’t even mean anything by it, but it sounds so juvenile the way he says it.
“Yeah.”
“But you have another copy. On your computer?”
“Not like this one.” I only had one hard copy with my notes on it. Some of it I remember, but so many little changes will be lost. It was finally starting to feel like a story with a real beginning, middle, and end, but all those thoughts and edits are gone now.
“What’s the black thing in the corner?”
“My Roomba. She pooped by the door, and it kind of dragged it...” I wave my hand vaguely even though he can’t see it, and he must get the idea because Vann laughs.
“Oh, shit.”
“Literally,” I grumble.
“How bad?”
I drop my head. “Don’t even get me started on the maple syrup.”
There’s a long pause, and I know what he’ll say before he says it.
