Page 74 of Maid For Each Other
“What?”
“I…don’t want you to.” He paused for a second, almost like he was just receiving this information himself and needed to process it. “I don’t want to mess with your job, Ab, but…God, it just feels ick, doesn’t it, the thought of you having to clean up after me now that we know each other?”
Itdid, but I had a feeling it was more uncomfortable for him because he’d probably always thought of “housekeeping” as some faceless entity, not a person he could actually be friends with.
Regardless, I didn’t want to talk about the “after,” not like that.
So instead I said, “It could be fun messing with your stuff and leaving things in drawers.”
“What do you mean, leaving things in drawers?”
“Baby tarantulas or perhaps my new pet snake.”
“You have a snake?”
“No, but I could,” I said.
“Because no fur?”
“Because no fur,” I agreed, for some reason pleased he remembered my allergy. It feltnicethat he remembered this personal piece of information about me.
“Do you really want to land back inplease don’t fire meterritory again, though?” he teased.
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Don’t push me,” he said, but I knew he wouldn’t. “You don’t want to find out.”
“Okay, well, back to my point. I’m super excited to sleep in this monster bed again. Isthisthing custom-built? For a princess? Because I never dreamed a bed could be this comfortable.”
“No, I ordered it from CrashPad. You’re forgetting my family did furniture. It would be a travesty if my bedsweren’tthe most comfortable, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess I forgot about that,” I said, rolling over and snuggling into the pillow. “Does that mean everything in this apartment is from CrashPad?”
“Of course it does—as if I could buy furniture from anywhere else. My furniture here in New York was purchased at CrashPad, too.”
“Man, Nana Marian would freak out if she saw the particleboard coffee table that I bought at Target. And my entire bedroom set came from Amazon. She would hate me even more if she saw those things.”
“You’ve got her all wrong,” he said. “She snapped at you because she gets pissed when she forgets things. Trust me—Nana Marian is a brilliant, sweet lady who knows more about furniture than I’ll ever learn.”
I pictured her face and didn’t believe him. “I still stand by my previous answer that she would hate my furniture.”
“Well, she absolutely would,” he said. “But not because she’s a snob. It’s just because she appreciates the value of good-quality, handcrafted furniture. She was actually the one to come up with the scratch-and-dent center, where people can get good-quality furniture for half off. She wanted that. She made that happen.”
“That’s nice,” I said, wondering why I suddenly wished she liked me. Maybe it was because Declan thought she was sweet and brilliant. Obviously there was more to her than I’d seen, and it felt like a rejection, somehow, that I’d yet to see that side of her. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Yeah, same,” he agreed, and I heard him yawn. “Good night, Abi Mariano.”
“Good night, Declan Powell,” I said, my heart pinching just a little as I ended the call.
After we hung up, I burrowed my head into the big pillow, but now I even had questions about that.
Was I sleeping on his actual pillow, the one he slept on every night?
And why in God’s name did the thought of that make me happy?
24
The Invitation
