Chapter 8
Reece
“I swear to God, if you post one more half-naked blog rant about him tonight I’m going to kill you myself. You won’t have to worry about Roman doing it first.” Okay, maybe it was a little mean, but Eli was driving me crazy. “So help me, if you try to crash this site one more time when I’m supposed to be off work, I’ll talk to Preston about all this shit.”
“But—” Eli seemed contrite, but I had to remind myself he’d looked sorry the last two times we’d had the same conversation.
“No. I’m done with it. I’ve had to cancel plans and rearrange too many things lately. I even have a kitchen now, but you’ve had me working such crazy hours that I’ve eaten fast food the last two nights. Houston is starting to pout. If I have to cancel his lasagna tonight, he’s going to be impossible to live with.” If that sounded too much like we were in a real relationship, I was going to ignore it.
Eli either missed the underlying tone of the statement or was too dejected to care. “You love him more than you do me.”
His pouting tone didn’t make me feel sorrier for him. “That only works when you’re sleeping with someone. Try again.”
“You’re no fun.” Eli sighed and sank back into the chair, surprisingly fully dressed. It was weird.
Between his normal photo shoot behavior and the bet, I’d gotten used to him running around in just panties. Watching him walk into my office in jeans and a T-shirt made me want to cross myself and start planning for the apocalypse. “Because I’m tired. I’m serious, Eli.”
I was promised a forty-ish hour work week, not sixty-ish.
“I’ll behave.” He gave me a sincere smile, but I was too smart to fall for it—again.
“Just wait a few days. Then you can post again. By that time, I’ll have everything updated and we’ll be able to host a Ticketmaster event without crashing the site.” Preston had finally given the okay for an even bigger upgrade than we’d initially planned. There was no way around it.
Traffic to the site was twice what it had been even three months before, and he knew it was due to Eli’s almost daily rants. If Eli’s gawkers were just looking, then Preston would’ve had more issues with the problems, but Eli’s fans were buying what Preston calledspoils of warto support Eli in his fight with Roman.
When Roman said Eli was a moron for taking bets from online strangers, Eli crashed the site again and sold out of the panties he’d been wearing when he made his ranting video post. When Eli had gone on to win the bet—that I still didn’t think Roman really understood—his followers had donated almost five thousand dollars to the LGBT youth center to protest Roman.
I was just tired of all the insanity.
I had a beautiful kitchen waiting for me and a sexy man who was desperate for me to cook for him, and I was stuck cleaning up Eli’s mess. “No more posting after hours. I don’t care how much you’ve had to drink or what Roman said. I’ll freeze your blog at night if I have to.”
I sounded like a parent grounding their teenager, but that was kind of how I felt. My “teen” was in the middle of a bad breakup with a guy he wasn’t even really dating, and we were all suffering because of it.
But if those two didn’t get their shit together, I was going to lose my mind.
Eli finally sat up, insulted. “That’s just mean.”
“You’ve forced my hand. If you’d followed the rules, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I was officially my mother.
“But—”
“Nope. I’m done.” Yup, I distinctly remembered hearing that come out of her mouth as well. “Now, I am going home, and so are you. Stay off the computer. Find something on TV and order in takeout. No blog posts or pictures or work or anything else you’re juggling. Take the night off.”
As many hours as I worked, it always felt like Eli was doing more, so he had to be burning the candle at both ends. He must have finally understood I was serious because he slouched back in the chair and nodded. It was frighteningly un-Eli-like, and taking him to the doctor was not off the list. Maybe he was coming down with something.
Yup, my mother.
It couldn’t have been my dad, who would have told him to suck it up and move on. Shaking my head to get the mental image of my parents out, I stood up. “Go home.”
Forcing him to stand, I herded him to the door. As we walked through the studio, Eli finally started to look better. “Netflix and a pizza from that new place sounds good.”
“The one with the weird toppings?” We’d gotten menus for a new pizza restaurant dropped off earlier in the week, and some of the combinations had been startling.
“Yeah, I’m going to try something new.” His smile widened. “If it sucks, then I’ll have ice cream for dinner.”
Eli had the metabolism of a hummingbird; some days I hated him. “Sounds like a perfect dinner. If the lasagna turns out, I’ll bring in leftovers tomorrow if I can wrestle them out of Houston’s hands. I put stuff in the crockpot this morning to make homemade sauce, and it’s probably driving him crazy.”
Eli laughed and waggled his eyebrows. “You’ll enjoy wrestling him for it.”
