"Yes!" The word explodes out of me in a breathless rush that sounds borderline hysterical even to my own ears. "Yes, that is—that is extremely acceptable, that is the most acceptable thing that has ever happened to me, actually, you can move in right now, today, immediately, do you need help carrying boxes or?—"
I'm babbling, the words tumbling over each other in my desperation to lock this down before he changes his mind or I wake up and discover this whole thing has been a stress-induced hallucination brought on by too much turpentine exposure and not enough sleep. My hands are fluttering uselessly in the air between us, gesturing at nothing, and I forcibly shove them into the pockets of my overalls to stop myself from doing something truly unhinged like physically grabbing onto his arm to prevent him from leaving.
He sets the table down gently, lowering it with the same careful precision he used to pour the coins, and straightens to his full, towering height. I have to tilt my head all the way back to meet his eyes, which are a striking pale amber color that I didn't fully register during the initial door-opening panic, and the sheer scale difference between us hits me all over again. He's a full two feet taller than me, maybe more, and built like someone carved a mountain into the rough shape of a person and then dressed it in expensive menswear.
"I have already brought my belongings," he says, nodding toward the hallway behind him where I now notice a single, immaculately maintained leather duffel bag sitting beside the door. "I do not require assistance. I will take the smaller bedroom."
The smaller bedroom is currently functioning as my storage-slash-disaster-zone-slash-place-where-I-throw-things-I-don't-want-to-deal-with, and I experience a brief flashof pure horror at the thought of him opening that door and discovering the archaeological layers of my failure to adult properly, but he's already moving past me with the kind of smooth, deliberate grace that seems physically impossible for someone his size.
"Great!" I chirp, my voice hitting a pitch that could probably summon dolphins. "That's, yeah, that's perfect, make yourself at home, I have to go to work now but we can talk about house rules and stuff later, okay?"
I'm already backing toward the door, grabbing my messenger bag from the hook and jamming my feet into my paint-splattered sneakers without bothering to untie them first, because if I stay in this apartment for one more second I am going to do something monumentally stupid like ask him where exactly he got six months' rent in solid gold coins and whether I should be concerned about the police showing up with a battering ram.
He turns to look at me, one dark eyebrow lifting slightly in what might be amusement or confusion or possibly just his resting face, I genuinely cannot tell. "House rules," he repeats, as if testing the phrase. "Yes. We will discuss."
"Cool, awesome, love that for us," I say, my words tumbling out in a breathless rush as I wrench the door open with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. I practically hurl myself into the hallway, my messenger bag swinging wildly against my hip, already pivoting away before he has a chance to respond or ask any follow-up questions that might trap me in this conversation for another excruciating second. "See you tonight!"
I don't wait for his response before pulling the door shut behind me and speed-walking toward the stairs with my heart hammering against my ribs and my brain screaming a continuous loop of what the hell did you just do, Chantel, what the actual hell.
The thingabout working a soul-crushing barista job at an aggressively hip coffee shop that insists on spelling everyone's name wrong on purpose as part of itsquirky brand identityis that it gives you way, way too much time to catastrophize while mechanically pulling espresso shots and steaming oat milk for people who treat you like a particularly disappointing vending machine.
I spend my entire six-hour shift spiraling through increasingly unhinged scenarios, each one worse than the last. Maybe Faugh is a crime lord and my apartment is now a front for some kind of elaborate underground Orc mafia operation. Maybe the gold is stolen and the cops are going to kick down my door and arrest both of us. Maybe he's going to murder me in my sleep and wear my skin like a poorly fitted suit. Maybe he's going to eat all my snacks and I'll come home to an empty fridge and a polite note that says "Thank you for the string cheese, I have consumed it all, regards, Faugh."
By the time my shift ends and I'm walking back through the rapidly darkening streets toward my apartment, I've worked myself into such a state of anticipatory dread that my hands are shaking as I fish my keys out of my bag. The building looks exactly the same as it always does, vaguely depressing, in need of a power wash, with one flickering hallway light that makes the whole place look like the opening scene of a horror movie, but now it feels ominous in a way it never has before, like I'm walking toward my own doom with full knowledge and zero ability to stop it.
I climb the stairs slowly, my sneakers squeaking against the linoleum in a rhythm that sounds like a countdown, and stop outside my door with my key hovering inches from the lock. My heart is doing something truly Olympic , and I take a deep breath that smells like stale building hallway and my own nervoussweat before finally, finally turning the key and pushing the door open.
The first thing that hits me is the smell, a wave of it that rushes through the open doorway and crashes into me with such immediate, undeniable force that I actually stop mid-breath, my lungs filling with something that is categorically, unmistakably not the usual assault of turpentine and forgotten takeout containers. It's clean and sharp and expensive in a way that makes my paint-stained brain struggle to process what my nose is reporting, and I stand there on the threshold for a moment, genuinely disoriented, trying to place it before the realization settles over me like a heavy blanket. Cedarwood. That's what this is, that rich, woodsy scent that I've only ever encountered in those high-end men's stores in the fancy part of downtown, the ones where everything costs more than my monthly rent and the salespeople look at you like you've personally offended them by existing. The smell is so completely, overwhelmingly present that it seems to have saturated the entire space, clinging to every corner and crevice, and I find myself frozen for a heartbeat, trying to reconcile this olfactory evidence with what I know about my apartment.
Not the usual assault of turpentine and forgotten takeout containers and that vaguely musty scent that comes from living in a building with questionable ventilation, but something clean and sharp and expensive. Cedarwood, I realize after a moment of confused sniffing, like walking into one of those high-end men's stores in the fancy part of downtown where everything costs more than my rent and the salespeople look at you like you've personally offended them by existing.
The second thing that hits me is my apartment, which is?—
Actually, I need to pause here and process what my eyes are telling me, because it seems genuinely impossible. The space before me bears almost no resemblance to the chaotic, paint-splattered studio I've called home for the past two years. Every surface I can see has been meticulously organized, wiped down, and arranged with a precision that feels almost surgical in its deliberateness. It's so aggressively, impossibly clean that for a moment I wonder if I've somehow wandered into the wrong unit entirely, or if I've accidentally stumbled into some kind of fever dream where my apartment has been abducted by a cleaning crew with military-grade organizational skills.
It's clean. Genuinely, actually, truly clean.
Not just clean. Immaculate. Transformed. The kind of clean I didn't even know was possible outside of home improvement shows where they make someone cry by revealing their renovated kitchen.
My mouth falls open as I step fully inside, my bag sliding off my shoulder to hit the floor with a soft thump that I barely register. The coffee table, which was previously holding up the combined weight of ancient highland gold and years of accumulated junk, is now sitting level on the floor with what appears to be a neatly folded piece of cardboard wedged under the broken leg as a temporary fix. The surface gleams in the overhead light, polished to a shine I didn't know cheap particleboard could achieve, and the gold coins have been stacked into precise, glittering towers arranged in perfect rows like some kind of dragon's accounting system.
The floor is visible. The actual floor. I can see the carpet, which turns out to be a shade of beige I'd completely forgotten about, and there's a vacuum track pattern running in neat diagonal lines across the entire surface. The mugs and plates and random art supplies that were previously scattered across every flat surface have vanished, presumably organized into some location that makes logical sense, and the windows are so clean they're practically invisible.
I turn in a slow circle, my brain struggling to process the sheer magnitude of the transformation that has somehow occurred in my apartment while I was out, my eyes darting from the gleaming coffee table to the impossibly clean floor to the organized towers of gold coins, and that's when I see him, all seven feet and one inch of him, standing in the center of my living room like some kind of enormous, incredibly well-dressed monument to the concept of domestic order.
Faugh is standing in the center of the living room, his massive body backlit by the warm glow of the floor lamp that I'm pretty sure wasn't working this morning, holding the tiniest, most delicate feather duster I have ever seen in my entire life. It looks absolutely ridiculous in his enormous hand, like watching someone try to perform surgery with a toothpick, and he's using it to meticulously attack a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling with the kind of intense focus usually reserved for bomb disposal.
He turns slowly at the sound of the door closing, his pale amber eyes locking onto mine.
"Chantel," he says, my name emerging in that low, rumbling bass that makes my spine straighten involuntarily. He lowers the feather duster with the careful precision of someone setting down a live grenade. "We need to discuss your organizational system."
I blink at him, then at the feather duster, then back at him. My brain is making the same grinding noise a computer makes right before it blue-screens. "My... organizational system."
"Yes." He gestures around the apartment with the feather duster, the movement somehow managing to convey profound concern despite the absurdity of the prop. "I have spent the last four hours attempting to locate basic cleaning supplies and have discovered that you do not appear to own a mop, your vacuum cleaner contains a bag that has not been changed sinceapproximately two thousand and nineteen, and there are seven different sponges in various locations throughout the kitchen, none of which are suitable for use on any known surface."
I start to speak, then catch myself, because there is absolutely nothing I can say in my own defense here, not about the sponges, not about the organizational chaos, not about any of it. The words die they can fully form. "I have... sponges?" I finally manage, my voice pitching upward into that uncertain, questioning lilt that always betrays just how lost I am. I glance toward the kitchen as if expecting said sponges to materialize and defend themselves, then back at Faugh, my hands fluttering in that useless, apologetic gesture I've perfected over twenty-six years of being a disaster. "Like, apparently I do, according to you, but I honestly couldn't tell you where most of them are or what condition they're in, so..."
His expression does something complicated. "You have sponges that have achieved sentience and are now classified as biological hazards. I have disposed of them in a sealed bag which I have placed in the outside dumpster because I did not trust your indoor trash receptacle to contain them."
