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“You can get him to extend his deadline,” Poppy says.
“Maybe by a week, but this is about money. He’s not going to hold off for long.”
“You could move in?” I suggest. I say it before I’ve thought through the implications. It just solves the problem of having more time together in a short space of time.
“With you?” Avril says.
“No, with your neighbor.”
“Live with you?” she asks, like the idea is absolutely ludicrous.
“For a week?” Poppy asks.
“Nine days,” I counter.
“So you already know I won’t fall in love with you in seven days,” Avril says. “You want more time.”
My brain switches into deal mode and all I see is the finish line. I want to close this thing—I want to convince Avril to agree. “I’m out two nights in the next week. There’s no way I can get out of them. But if you stay for nine nights, that means we get nine breakfasts together and seven dinners. Weekdays, we can’t leave before eight in the morning after at least thirty minutes of time together, and we have to be back by seven at night and we can’t go to bed before midnight.” As I listen to what I’m saying, I start wondering if I’m crazy for agreeing to this. It sounds ludicrous. Why am I negotiating myself a roommate?
Because it’s Avril.
Because it’s as if she’s woken up a part of me I didn’t realize existed. I don’t want to let that go. I don’t want to let her go.
“Midnight?” Poppy says. “That’s late.”
“What about weekends?” Avril asks.
“We start tomorrow and end the following Sunday,” I say. “We have two full weekends together. And we have to spend the days together at the weekends.”
“I get my own room?” she asks.
“Agreed. But if I’m in the apartment, you don’t get to hang out in there. We have to be together.”
“Done,” Avril says. “And then the following week, you go get me my Boston hotel.”
“You’ll be deep in love with me by then. You’ll realize we could never work together.”
“Maybe you’ll be in love with me and you’ll want to do anything that makes me happy.”
I laugh. “Not going to happen.”
Although if I could fall in love with anyone, I’m starting to think it might be Avril.
TEN
Avril
As I pull my suitcase up the steps to Ben’s apartment building, I start to wonder if someone was spiking my drinks last night. Why on earth would I agree to live with a man?
Oh yeah, so I can make the Boston site work, prove to Worth and Poppy that one, I’m not a quitter, and two, I can do things on my own without their help. I need to keep reminding myself of the end goal for the next eight nights. It’s going to be tough to spend a lot of time with Ben. He’s drop-dead gorgeous and can make a mean omelet, but he will also have an ego the size of Texas. Men like him always do. By the end of our time together, not only will I not be in love with him, I might be in an orange jumpsuit with an assault charge pending.
And it will all be Poppy’s fault. I’m still not quite sure why she was so keen to broker this deal. I thought she preferred having our second hotel in New York. Maybe she’d lost track of the number of cocktails she had, although that seems unlikely. But now she’s down a roommate and I’m about to live with a man for the first time in my life.
As I come through the doors to the building, at six forty-five a.m., the doorman rushes over to me and reaches for my suitcase. “Let me help you with that,” he says.
“I’m here to see Ben East,” I say.
He calls up to Ben, and then he nods and confirms a couple of things, although I can’t quite make out what they’re discussing. Is Ben insisting on a background check before I’m allowed to go up? Does he think I might have come armed?
