“It’s brand-new, so I don’t think there are former tenants to haunt the place.”
“You don’t know what was on this ground before they built the apartment building.”
“Shit. You’re right. Want to Google that when we get back to your place with dinner? If it could be haunted, I want to know before I sign a lease.”
“Sure.” She laughed. “And you should apply. It’s nice.”
“Would you come here to swim?”
“Drive an hour here to do something I don’t really like and drive an hour home after? Probably not.” She chuckled.
“You’re just mad that your parents made you lifeguard in the summers as a teenager, so you couldn’t really enjoy it. I, however, never learned, and we always said that–”
“That if we had a pool at either of our places, I’d teach you,” Larissa finished for her. “How are you this old and you don’t know how to swim?”
“I can do the basics, but I’ve always wanted to learn for real.”
“For all that swimming you never do?” she joked.
“How are we doing in here, ladies?” the leasing agent asked, walking into the bedroom. “I’ve got someone else I need to meet downstairs, if you don’t mind. We’re back-to-back today.”
“We’re all good,” Harlow replied. “I’m going to apply online. Is there anything I need to do or know first?”
CHAPTER 14
Harlow looked into the closet, where most of her stuff had been shoved when she had moved into Larissa’s house. She had a few things in storage, but that was mostly furniture, and she could take or leave that. Part of her wanted to start over in a new apartment and get new stuff, but the other part of her knew she couldn’t afford to do that when she’d also have to pay rent and a security deposit at the same time, so new stuff would have to wait. She did have a few things hanging up in this closet. Most of what she wore to work was the same four pairs of slacks with different shirts. She had a steady rotation, and people at work had to see the same combinations all the time, but she didn’t care and liked how she looked in the clothes she had.
Tonight, she had a work event. It wasn’t a holiday party exactly, but it wasn’tnota holiday party, either. They tried to do a company gathering two to three times a year. There was the summer festival, a winter event, and sometimes they did something smaller in the spring or let the teams do their own event with a smaller budget. This was their winter event, and it was mostly a dinner in a ballroom with a DJ that they held long before the holidays really started, because they wanted everyone to attend, and once the holidays kicked in, people took vacations and had excuses not to go because they were with their families and friends.
She didn’t have to dress up necessarily, so she decided to wear a button-down and a pair of black pants that she’d worn a thousand times before, with some black boots that would slide under the pants and would make it look like she tried a little. She’d do her hair enough to show that she’d tried, too, but doing her hair when it was short only meant adding a little more product to keep it in place. She wasn’t big on makeup, so she would just wash her face and leave it there.
After getting out of the shower and wrapping a towel around her body, Harlow went to pull her outfit for the night off the hanger, and her phone pinged. Expecting it to be Larissa, she walked over to where it was charging and checked the readout. Weirdly, it wasn’t Larissa. It was her ex-girlfriend. Before Harlow could reply, the phone rang, and it was acallfrom the said ex-girlfriend.
“Hey,” she said into the phone and sat down on the bed, still wrapped in her towel. “What’s up?”
“Do you have my curling iron?” Alicia asked.
“Your curling iron?”
“Yeah. Do you have it? The old black one, not the new blue one I bought a few months ago.”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t opened all my boxes yet, but I haven’t seen it.”
“Damn it. I was hoping you had it.”
“Why do you need it so badly?”
“I don’t, really. I can just buy another one.”
“You have another one; the blue one.”
“The blue one is for bigger curls,” Alicia replied. “The black one is for smaller. I’m going out tonight, and I wanted smaller curls. I think I might be out of my big-curl phase.”
“Can you suffer through the big ones?” Harlow joked.
“The blue one just broke on me, so even if I wanted the big curls, I can’t have them right now. I figured you were still stayingat Larissa’s and weren’t that far away, so I could stop by and grab it. I guess I’ll just have to pull my hair up tonight since I don’t like the ones you can buy at the pharmacy.”
“Yes, I remember: you order your curling irons online from some hair company,” she replied.
