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Roman parked in the driveway in front of my garage where my car was stashed away. Each townhouse in the neighborhood was two stories and part of a three-home section. The two on the ends had pitched roofs and shutters, the one in the center with a flat roof and a extended picture window. The bricks on the fronts were also in a pattern in colors: Regency brick, Dover, then Orleans. I had a house on the left with the pitched roof, the shutters, and the Regency brick. I might have resented the money coming from my trust fund, but it was a gorgeous house.
"Do you want to crash here instead of driving home?" I asked as the car idled. We each had stuff stashed at each other's houses for the occasions when one of us got too tired or too drunk to drive home. He had an entire dresser in one of my guest rooms. I had half a closet in one of his.
"You don't mind?" he asked, facing me and I noticed how tired he looked for the first time.
"No, of course not," I said, shaking my head. "You can always stay."
With that, I climbed out of his car and made my way over to the stairs that led to my front door, reaching under my shirt for the key I kept around my neck before Roman came up behind me. It was another thing that he would find out of character. I had a janitor's key chain I usually carried, fifteen different keys on it that I considered everyday essentials to have on me. So just having the key to my door, not even the deadbolt key, around my neck was weird. But I was worried about the keys jingling while I was looking around in the slums.
I hit the code for the security and stepped inside. "Haul it, Rome. I don't want to call the security company again," I called, flicking on the lights as Rome came inside and closed the door. He hit the code for me as I moved to kick out of my flats before I remembered Paine's comments about me bleeding all over my shoes.
The entryway was wide with a white staircase leading upstairs and crown molding. To the left was a large living room painted in a soft blue-gray and decorated with gray sofas and chairs and white accent furniture. There was a television mounted over a fireplace I had never used. The living room led into a small enclosed sun room off the back of the house. To the right was a dining room in a slightly darker shade of blue with a white dining set and sideboard. The dining room led into the kitchen off the back, white cabinetry and walls with stainless steel appliances and a massive island.
"Coming up?" Roman asked, gesturing toward the stairs.
"You go ahead. I think I am going to have a cup of tea before I tuck in."
"Goodnight, Else," he said, running a hand down my arm before moving up the stairs.
I waited ten minutes, standing right in my doorway like a weirdo, listening to him move around and settle down in bed before I dashed up the stairs as silently as I could and made my way into my room, going straight through to the bathroom and slipping off the shoes.
Adrenaline and fear gone, the pain was settling in. The backs of my heels were cut open and, as Paine said, there was a fair amount of blood smeared onto the once-expensive ballet flats. I reached into the shower and turned on the heads as I stripped out of my clothes.
Even though he wasn't exactly a scary guy, I was glad to have Rome in the house that night. It was silly to feel unsafe locked into a gated community with a full time staff of guards and a state of the art security system, but after the events of the night, I did. It was nice to have a man around. If for nothing other than my peace of mind.
Rome's house, if you could believe it, was a step up from mine. He had a much better relationship with his father than I did with mine. This was evidenced by the fact that he worked at his father's tech company, one of many businesses he owned and the only one that wasn't medical or pharmaceutical. Rome and his father, Rhett, were in no way nerdy or even all that up-to-date on technological advances, but they were shrewd businessmen who knew that technology was where the money was. So after college, Roman came back to Navesink Bank and got a job making high six-figures and had something I called a mini-mansion one street over from where I grew up. In an actual mansion, like he had grown up in as well.
