I wasn’t going to panic. It wasn’t like there was anything that could stop these kinds of guys, anyway. At the start of my podcasting, I’d tried, but every move seemed to make things worse. The police couldn’t do anything, not unless a stalker acted on his threats. Fighting with guys like this riled them up, and blocking them had no impact, since they were mostly using burner accounts. It was a fact of life for a public figure on the internet.
And everyone kept telling me they were harmless.
I know where you live.
He was lying, right? Like, he couldn’t be planning to show up to my building and… I shuddered, not even wanting to let my brain go down that path.
I was just closing the door to the dryer and tapping my card on the reader when Rhett stumbled in, looking like he hadn’t slept in days, with a laundry basket full of towels balanced on top of a basket full of dark-colored jeans and t-shirts in a precarious pile.
He tripped over the doorstop, nearly face-planting as he lurched forward, trying to keep the stacked baskets balanced. Rhett was many things—tall, broad-shouldered, irritatingly handsome—but clumsy wasn’t one of them.
The door began to swing closed behind him, and my heart leapt into my throat. I lunged forward, shoving past Rhett with enough force to make him stumble backward.
“Don’t let it—!” I yelled, reaching for the door, my fingers grazing the metal as it clicked shut. “Fuck.”
“What?” Rhett blinked at me, his exhausted brain clearly not processing what had happened. He set down his overflowing laundry baskets and ran a hand through his already chaotic hair. “Oh. Hi, Aims.”
I pointed to the sign taped above the doorknob—a wrinkled piece of paper with DO NOT CLOSE DOOR. KNOB BROKEN written in red Sharpie. “The door’s broken. We’re locked in.”
Rhett stared at the sign like it was written in ancient Sumerian. “What? Sorry, I haven’t been sleeping. Twenty-four-hour shift turned into more of a thirty, and I got home and realized I had to baby-safe the whole apartment.”
I turned from my futile jiggling of the doorknob to stare at him. “Baby-safe?”
“Did you know kittens chew on electrical wires? It’s wild keeping them from danger.”
“You and Troy got kittens?”
“Troy keeps saying they’re my mistake, not his,” he muttered vaguely. Then he sighed dreamily. “But none of it is a mistake. They’re adorable.”
I smiled. “I’m sure they are. But how? Why?”
Rhett sighed and moved to the washing machine, dumping in his laundry with zero regard for sorting or capacity limits. “It was an accident. We had the annual calendar photoshoot for the fire department. With animals. For charity.”
He jabbed at the buttons on the machine like they had personally offended him, then turned back to examine the door.
“How do you accidentally adopt kittens? Don’t you have to fill out an application?”
“I don’t know, Aims. They were cute. The lady handed me some papers, and I wrote things. Troy kept flexing his muscles. Did you know he has cum gutters?”
“You… wrote things.”
“Yep. I was sad he hasn’t asked me to suck his cock, and I panicked. Next thing I knew, I was driving home with a cardboard box that meowed while Troy sat there having cum gutters.”
“Stop saying cum gutters.”
He shrugged and knelt to inspect the doorknob more closely, his exhaustion seeming to give way to irritation. “I can stop saying it, but we both know they’re there and we both want to lick them.”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to extract that insanely sexy mental image from my brain, a flush of heat rushing straight to my core. I turned to Rhett, watching him kneel beside the doorknob and examine it.
“This door is a goddamn fire hazard. Who leaves a broken door without fixing it?”
“Our shitty landlord?”
“Screws are on the other side.” Rhett pulled out a Leatherman multi-tool from his pocket and started examining the doorknob. I watched his long fingers handle the multi-tool with a confidence that made my stomach tighten.
Beneath Rhett’s goofball exterior, he had a soft, steady capability that did something for me, especially when paired with Troy’s charm and protective nature. Together, the two of them could take a woman apart in ways she’d probably never recover from.
I shook off that thought as he sat back with a sigh. “No luck?”
