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-Text from Izzy to Rome
Izzy
I hated cleaning.
Which was funny, since I owned my own cleaning business.
But, since I was so good at it, I did my job, and I did it well.
“Would you mind cleaning the baseboards today, dear?” Mr. Antilles asked slowly, enunciating each and every word like he thought I was hard of hearing. “They’re looking a little dingy.”
I looked down at the baseboards that I’d already done and didn’t see a single dingy part. But, alas, I’d go back over them again. I didn’t want an unhappy client. Especially this one.
He was a US senator who I cleaned for weekly, but only saw when he was in his residence in Texas.
I was not, under any circumstances, pissing him off.
I could just see him ruining my life—and my brothers for that matter—just because I told him to go take a flying leap off a freakin’ cliff and using his dingy baseboards as a pogo stick on the way down.
“Sure, Mr. A,” I said breezily. “Was there anything else you wanted me to focus on today?”
He looked around, shook his head, and shrugged. “What you normally do, dear.”
With that, he walked outside to go swim his laps.
In his Speedo.
Speedo.
His way too small Speedo.
His way too small Speedo that should never, not ever, be worn by a man with a barrel chest and a beer belly the size of a small Texas town.
But whatever.
If he wanted to swim, or pretend to swim, in his Speedo, I’d let him.
As long as he had clothes on, I was a happy person.
Mostly.
The fact that he had so much hair on his body really grossed me out. It especially caused my gut to roil when he shaved himself and didn’t clean up the hair.
Like this morning.
I’d walked into his bathroom, unprepared to find almost a full body’s worth of hair on the bathroom floor, counter, and on the rug. Hell, it was even in the sink.
But these were only just a few of the things that grossed me out.
Speaking of grossing me out, my phone vibrated with a text, and I pulled it out to see that Rome had finally replied to the text I’d sent him.
Rome: that better not fuckin’ be pubes.
Grinning, I replied with a GIF and shoved the phone back into my pocket, getting back to work.
My phone vibrated almost immediately, and I stopped only having taken one more sweep to pull it out and look at it.
Rome: I’m having lunch with Bayou. He said to sweep it all up and put it in the air vent in his car. That way when he starts it up later, it blows in his face. What a fucker.
I grinned and typed out a message.
Me: Don’t get me started. That’s just a little taste of what I have to deal with here. I think he thinks I speak only Spanish. He talks to me like my IQ is low. Oh, and he points and gestures a lot.
Rome sent back a barfing emoticon, and I gave an inadvertent giggle before shoving my phone back into my bra and getting back to work.
The next text message that came I didn’t bother to answer.
Not when I had places to be, people to see, and things to do.
All of those things centered around a tall biker with a really great ass.
Luckily, we were both working today, or I’d probably be getting a whole lot less work done.
Rome and I had turned into quite the Chatty Cathys lately, not that I was complaining or anything.
I was actually quite relieved.
Having him actually going out of his way to talk to me was so much more than I ever expected. Especially since he’d spent six months doing everything he could to avoid me.
But, I wasn’t going to complain.
My grandmother had been one of my only support systems for too long.
I missed having companionship with people my own age.
Even more, I’d missed Rome.
I missed everything about him and didn’t realize how much until he’d literally come out of his cave these past few weeks.
But, as much as I wanted to pull my phone out and continue to have a conversation with him, I had work to do.
And once I was done with the floor, I moved back to the baseboards, and then began dusting.
It was when I was pulling the drawers out of the TV cabinet in the living room to get that line of dust on top of the drawer itself that my eyes lit on something inside the drawers.
What I saw made me slam the drawer shut, and my heart skip a beat.
My heart was slamming a hundred miles an hour in my chest, and my jaw was likely on the floor.
I moved hastily to the blinds in the living room and looked out at the pool, wincing when I saw Mr. Antilles swimming his laps—slowly.
