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Me: Any time
I put my phone down and tried to let everything go from my mind. I needed to focus. I wouldn't worry about Ivar or my idiot little brother. I didn’t need to worry about Natalia moving in as I had dealt with all of it. I had to focus on my emails and the rest of the work I had to do. Seth had advised me that it would be a nice gesture to be there tonight to welcome Natalia to my home. If I wanted to take his advice, I had to finish up now instead of work overnight as I had originally planned.
My wife and my brother were a pain in my ass.
Chapter 10
Natalia
Iknewtheplacewas going to be huge if it was taking up the entire top floor, but I had no idea it was going to be this big.
Kiwi, Donte, and Logan each held trash bags full of my clothes and bedding. I didn’t know if I needed to bring bedding, but I loved my white sheets with blue and purple butterflies, and I didn’t want to leave them at my father’s house. I held my portfolio in one hand and my box of oil paints under my arm. In the other hand, I held the key. The door to the elevator opened up onto a short hallway with a marble floor and three mini chandeliers that matched the large one in the lobby, but were about one-ninth the size.
At the end of the hallway was a black door to match the black speckles in the marble floor. The walls were white, so it was a drastic difference that I greatly appreciated.
“This place just keeps getting fancier and fancier,” Kiwi commented, looking up at the vaulted ceiling.
“Right? I almost don’t want to touch anything for fear of breaking it,” I said and approached the door. I put the key in, unlocked the door, and opened it.
My jaw dropped open.
The door opened up into an entryway where there was a small table against a wall about five feet wide. Beyond that, the layout was mostly open concept in the shape of a “T”, and I was standing at the top of that T. To the right, there was the kitchen. Like the rest of what I could see, the walls were white, and the marble countertops were white with black veins running through them. The appliances—which included a stove, a giant refrigerator-freezer combo, a microwave, a coffee pot, and a toaster—were all a contrasting sleek black steel. The cabinets were white and had no handles on them. The large island in the center was also white marble. The door to the left, when looking into the kitchen, was black.
I was very happy to see that wood floors replaced the marble and stretched throughout the space. It gave it some color and design. The floorboards were laid in a herringbone pattern that I just loved.
To the left of the entryway was a dining room with a very clinical-looking table. It was a white rectangle with steel legs. The chairs were very much the same and didn’t look comfortable at all. I was much less impressed with that area than I was with the kitchen.
Going further into the space, on the far side of the apartment was the living room. That room I really liked. There was a huge L-shaped black leather couch with a small black oval coffee table and black side tables that each held a lamp. One side of the L faced an entertainment center with white cabinets that was built into the wall on the right, and the other part of the L faced the exterior window, which was a show of its own. The window was the size of the whole wall, with no breaks or panels in it—just a huge portal to look out over the city.
I walked up to it and looked down, which made my stomach go queasy. Everything looked so small because I was so high up.
“What a view!” Donte exclaimed, setting a bag of clothes down on the sofa and coming to stand beside me. “I can’t believe this is where you are going to be living now. You can see the whole city!”
“Right? This is crazy.”
“Scary is more like it,” Kiwi said, staying on the other side of the couch, eyeing the window with suspicion. “What if you fall through it?”
“I’m not going to fall through it,” I assured her but took a step back from the window just in case.
“You might,” she insisted.
“Baby, she’ll be fine,” Donte assured her. “They make that glass practically indestructible. The only way that’s going to break is if a plane comes crashing into it, And if that’s the case, the window is the least of her worries.”
“Good to know," I murmured and looked around, noticing little details that I hadn’t seen on the first impression of the space.
When standing with my back to the window, I could see a stairway on my right leading up to a presumed second floor. There were also two black doors on that wall that were both closed. The ceiling was tall, and there was recess lighting. Everything looked clean and in place. It didn’t look like anyone lived there. It was so clean and organized that it almost looked sterile.
There were no paintings on the walls, no photos anywhere. I set my stuff down on the couch next to the trash bag Donte had put there and wandered around looking for any sign that Jimmy lived there. There wasn’t much. The refrigerator was empty except for a bottle of hazelnut creamer. At least the coffee maker was used, as a half pot of coffee remained. I opened the door in the kitchen and found a large space that seemed to be a home gym with a washer and dryer by the door. All the weights were in their rightful spaces, and the mats were rolled up and sitting in a corner. There were no clothes in the washing machine or dryer.
When I went to the other rooms off the living room, they were much the same. One was a bathroom that was so clean there weren't even water stains on the glass panels of the white-tiled shower. White towels hung on hooks along the wall. The toilet was perfectly clean, and the whole place smelled like lavender.
The other room was a library. Floor-to-ceiling shelves with books lined the room with two large armchairs in the center and a small wooden table between them. On the table was a book on stock trading that had the receipt for the book as a bookmark. When I picked it up to see, it was dated from the previous year.
“Are you sure you want to live here?” Logan asked when I wandered out of the library. “The place has no character.”
“I can give it character if I have to,” I said, putting my hands in the pockets of my jeans. “I’m just worried that Jimmy is too much of a neat freak for me to live with. So far, the only thing about this place that tells me anything about him is that he has a lot of money, drinks coffee, doesn’t cook, and likes to read about stocks while using the receipt as a bookmark. Not terribly revealing.”
Maybe upstairs will be better?” Kiwi suggested.
