Chapter Four
Paint
Rosalie
“This place isso cute,” Mompractically squealed.
I stood in the living room of the house Snap and Chaos movedme into.
She was not wrong.
It was cute.
Clean, cozy, cute.
Andgorgeous.
It also smelled faintly of paint.
Which meant they’d painted it between Snapper’s rentersmoving out and them moving me in so that they could move me into a pad that wasfresh and felt new.
I touched my couch, which had its back to the door and wasfacing a freestanding fireplace, allowing my head to move slowly around to takein the space.
Beck and I had lived in a nice apartment complex in Aurora.It had some personality but it was a modern complex, built within the last tenyears.Not exactly an architectural masterpiece or having had the time to bequaint or historically appealing or having so much of its style demolishedaround it that it was now unusual.
This place of Snapper’s was obviously an old carriage housethat sometime along the way had the mansion it had been attached to disappear.
It also had been added on to.
Giving it a sense of privacy and serenity, it was set farback from the curb, much farther back than the other houses on the block,seeing as it once sat behind the house it had served.
It now, amusingly, since it used to be the same thing, had alarge two-car garage with the doors of the garage facing the side of theproperty so the garage looked like an extension of the little house, not amonstrosity of what was essentially storage space almost as big as the livingspace it had been tacked onto.
The garage was accessed through the kitchen.
We’d walked in the front door.
And the front door led to a living room that was relativelyspacious, but definitelywell litwith an abundanceof beautiful, old-fashioned, multi-paned windows at the front and side of thehouse.
The walls were creamy white and had my Toulouse-Lautrecprints and other wall stuff already up on them.My flat screen had been mountedon the creamy-painted brick above the freestanding fireplace.And thatfireplace was set in a wall of that brick that sat in the middle of the livingroom with a spiral staircase off to the side.
My furniture, that was in yellows (couch) and denims(armchair and some of the toss pillows on the couch), which I’d always thoughtwas awesome, but had never looked like much in the pad I shared with Beck,looked amazing against the buttery-white walls and the hardwood floors (thoughI now needed a rug).
To the left, there was a dining area that led off from akitchen (which meant I also needed a dining room table).
The hardwood floors stretched everywhere, including thekitchen that was open to the space entirely, didn’t even have an island or bar.But the big window at the back, the pearly-tiled backsplash, thewindow-fronted, milky-painted cupboards and the uninterrupted space made itseem bright, crisp and airy, but also warm and welcoming.All this juxtaposedwith some sharply angled parts of the ceiling just made it interesting.
I wandered the kitchen then came out and moved between thefireplace and the spiral staircase.I saw a little alcove at the back that wassomewhat roomy but mostly snug that could be a reading nook.But Chaos (ortheir old ladies) had set it up with my desk and laptop, making it my office.
And again, my white, sectional corner desk with its long armand the kickass wicker rolling chair I’d found hadn’t seemed like much in Beckand my extra bedroom in our apartment, but there it looked crazy-cool.
Also, with the desk fit into the corner and down the wall, Icould still fit an armchair and ottoman in there, making it a dual-purposespace, adding the little reading nook.
Some of this space was an addition, definitely the powderroom I saw through an open doorway at the back.
I knew this because it jutted out past the kitchen and hadFrench doors at the side aimed toward the corner of the jut made from mini-denand kitchen that created a little courtyard.
This was covered in a vine-festooned pergola.It had a wooddeck and some big glossy pots, but since it was February, there was nothingmuch there.However, in the summer it could be a riot of flowers interspersedwith the garden furniture I right then decided to buy, a little piece ofoutside tranquility in the heart of the city.
