Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 129460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 647(@200wpm)___ 518(@250wpm)___ 432(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 647(@200wpm)___ 518(@250wpm)___ 432(@300wpm)
It’s been a while since I danced the tango with anyone, much less a stranger, but not long enough for me to bleed. Furthermore, our ‘exchange’ didn’t take place near the vanity.
With my heart in my throat and my stomach somewhere in the vicinity of my feet, I step closer to the shattered mirror hanging above the shard-coated bathroom sink.
There are no shavings of skin or strands of hair around the obvious fist-inspired rupture, but it doesn’t lessen my panic in the slightest.
I dodged a bullet, but thankfully, this time around, it was fired from a stranger’s gun instead of the man I agreed to marry the day I turned eighteen.
CHAPTER 5
CALEB
My eyes shift from the splinter-size cuts on my knuckles to Octavia when she enters the living room of our dowdy apartment. From the way she’s been fussing the past hour, you’d swear we were about to rock up for a job as a concierge at a glamorous hotel instead of serving drinks to snobs at a wedding thirty miles out of town.
“Don’t look at me like that, Caleb. We agreed to do any job available. This is all that is available.”
“For three bucks an hour? There are jobs in this town paying five hundred for twenty minutes of work.”
“Where?” she asks after straying her eyes from the couch she’s searching for her keys in to me. “Because I’ve been looking, and I’ve not found anything close to that being offered.”
I murmur under my breath that she’s looking at the wrong section of the classifieds before grabbing her keys from the fruit bowl and tossing them into her chest. Our crash pad no longer resembles a storage shed since we spent the last week unpacking, but the removal of the boxes didn’t cheer the place up. It still looks as bland as fuck.
After ensuring she has all the girlie shit every woman fills their purse with, Octavia drifts her eyes over the dress shirt I wore at her mother’s funeral before dragging them down the black pants I borrowed from her father’s wardrobe.
He’s dead, so he won’t need them, but even if he did, I still would have taken them.
That man wasn’t worth the designer suits he wore.
I loosen the tightness of my jaw when Octavia murmurs, “I really wish you’d wear a tie.”
“And I really wish you would have bartered for a better pay rate, but we can’t have everything we want, can we?” I grit my teeth, aware she doesn’t deserve my wrath but incapable of holding back the grumpy mood I’ve been in all week.
I wasn’t supposed to spend my week thinking nonstop about a woman I was meant to hook up with then forget. It just couldn’t be helped. Jess made me forget the dark thoughts in my head for over two hours. No one has ever managed that. Not even my cousin responsible for half of the murkiness.
After opening the front door, I gesture for Octavia to lead the way before I demand she tell the snob from the employment agency what she can do with her minimum-wage crap. I’m all for working for what you want, but I hate how they underpay the hardest workers by using the excuse that they can live off tips.
That might be the case if management didn’t take the biggest slice of the tips’ pie.
“Did you report the dumpster fire incident to the apartment sup?” Octavia gallops down the first two flights of stairs before twisting back to face me. “The fact he hasn’t alerted residents to be vigil is bad enough, not to mention leaving the emergency fire extinguisher case empty.” Her expression reminds me a lot of my mother when she huffs out, “He shouldn’t be getting rent relief if he can’t do his job.”
Incapable of lying to her face, I overtake her partway down the stairs before replying, “I had a word with him. He didn’t seem overly interested in anything I had to say.”
Although I did talk to the building supervisor yesterday afternoon, it had nothing to do with the lie that I nicked up my hand by breaking the Break in Case of Emergency glass cabinet in the lobby of our building so I could extinguish a dumpster fire in the alleyway.
The emergency fire extinguisher case was empty when we moved in, but since Octavia failed to notice that, I used it to my advantage. It is better than telling her the sight of my face in a bathroom mirror with wide pupils and flushed cheeks makes me wish she had found me hanging off the rafters of our grandfather’s church instead of him.
In true New Jersey naivety, I toss my arm into the air to flag down a cab when we arrive at the curb of our building. Octavia laughs at my stupidity before dropping her eyes to the screen of her cell phone. “That’s our guy over there.” She directs us to a dark SUV, climbs into the back seat, then slides across to the far side before asking the driver, “Has the other rider updated the app yet?” When my head snaps her way, confused as fuck, she murmurs, “Rideshare is all the rage in Seattle. It will save us a fortune until we can get a car, and even then, it might still be more economical. Parking in the city is expensive.”