I swallowed. “Just for now.”For nowhad already lasted six weeks. I had been evicted out of my rented apartment after the twins’ Christmas visit. They didn’t even know I had left. We moved every few years, so I told them I was planning on moving closer to work, hoping I could either afford to rent something before their spring break or convince them to stay in Boulder for it. No one, except my manager and Vi from work, knew that I was living there. I knew I was on borrowed time because, as lousy as that room was, sooner or later, they’d need it. I just hoped I could afford moving out before then.
“Why?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t explain all of that. Not right now.
But he seemed to figure it out, anyway.
“Move in here,” he suddenly said.
“What?”
“Move in here. I’m away a lot on business. You’ll have the place to yourself most of the time.”
I shook my head. I was sayingnoto all of it, although I was only human and this was much more tempting than living in a half room full of boxes that no one wanted for their aging parent. But living with Oliver even though he was away a lot? I couldn’t. I was only human.
“January,” he said in a commanding hear-me-out tone.
I took a step back then turned toward the door. “I have to get up early. Bye, Oliver.”
“January,” he called after me, but I was already out of the room, shouldering my backpack, and hasting past the hall, into the working kitchen, toward the exit and my car.
Chapter 2
Oliver
“Leave it. I’ll do it in the morning. Thank you all. Goodnight.” My tone didn’t leave room for arguments. My barely-existent social battery had run out, and the last thing I wanted was these helpful people in my living room and that smoking-induced cough of the caterer’s coming from the kitchen.
As I locked the door behind the last of them, I looked at the empty space and the moonlit ocean in the windows beyond it.
How the fuck had I let that Beaumont lady bulldoze me into holding her fundraiser party here? I had wanted to tell her to fuck off, but she had played good-cop-bad-cop with Patty Delaney on my doorstep, both my mother’s age, had she lived, leaving me no choice but to relent. I had made her promise to keep me out of the planning and my name out of her speeches and tributes.
I hated parties; never hosted them, hated participating in them. I donated enough money for people to take my checks and leave me the fuck alone.
Hismoney. I enjoyed shedding it, investing it, and spending it on things he used to think were useless, like charities, companies everyone thought were doomed. He had sent me to study finance. I’d mastered it. Hated it. Learned to appreciate it. In finance, everything, including people, was numbers, calculations, statistics. No feelings in finance. No sentiments in math.
My footsteps echoed as I crossed the living room.
Thiswasn’t his house. I had sold his house long ago.
Turning off all the lights on my way upstairs, I turned to look at the place as if I were seeing it for the first time. It wasn’t that far off from the truth. I had bought it just a few months ago and spent a lot of my time away. It answered my needs—functional and aesthetically pleasing. I didn’t need more. The ocean view was a bonus. A cleaning company came in once a week, specifically asked to arrive when I wasn’t around.
My bedroom was pristine. “Cool colors and no throw pillows or any other shit I need to peel off the bed,” had been my instructions to the designer who had it ready-made so I could move in as I did into hotel rooms. I had begun investing more in Silicon Valley and needed a place close by rather than staying in hotels. I chose Wayford because better the devil you know.
“Please move my trip forward to this week,” I texted Bruce, my secretary. It was after midnight. He’d tend to it in the morning.
Taking my clothes off, I stepped into the shower. Scalding hot spray, and then a freezing one. Only thoughts allowed—the upcoming business trip. Not about how I was exactly likehim.Or the tired blue eyes surrounded by freckles and framed by bronze curls, and the relapse to suppressed memories, shipwrecked emotions, and long-forgotten weaknesses they roused.
Chapter 3
January
“Good morning, Vi.” I opened the curtains, and the dim sunlight of an early California morning washed into the room. Violet Jackson, or Vi as she insisted I called her, grunted like one of my teenage boys on a school day. She was our longest-tenured resident and my favorite, if only for her Rolling Stones tattoo and unyielding rock-n-roll vibes that might have felt foreign in Sandy Hills but enlivened the place for me.
“I love you, January, but can you please get the fuck out? I had a late night,” Vi grunted in a hoarse voice.
I could relate, being dead tired myself. I had gotten home, if my tiny room here could be called that, at almost one a.m., had trouble falling asleep, and had ended up with maybe four hours of sleep before I had to get up to start another shift. Living here didn’t come for free. I paid in extra shifts.
“Come on, Vi,” I said in a soft sing-song tone, like I did when my boys had still lived at home.
