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Shit. Quick, come up with something snarky.
“This is charity work. Like working in a soup kitchen, but instead of feeding the poor, I’m convincing a rich guy that it’s okay to wear a shirt with a yellow stain on it.”
“A saffron stain…” he mutters.
“Right. A saffron stain. Not anything else.”
His grin doesn’t go away, though. “Fine. Continue your charity work, Addison. I just wanted to tell you I’m glad that you’re doing the charity work instead of someone else. That’s all.”
The only thing he’s convinced me of is that a date at the thrift store with a billionaire feels so much better than I imagine being wined and dined would be. Granted, I’ve never been wined and dined by a billionaire, but something tells me that this is better. I’m learning more about the stranger I slept with right now than I ever would over caviar.
It's just too bad that this is as far as the dates can go. When his little experiment is over, he’ll go right back to being the big boss. Everybody knows that dating the boss is a terrible decision, and I’ve dreamed of this job my entire life.
There’s no way I’d bet my dreams on a man that’s insane enough to choose to be poor for a month.
Fifteen
PHILLIP
I stareat the subway map with Addison standing next to me, memorizing the routes. I may not know how to survive on a junior editor’s salary, but I can memorize anything.
“Are you really going to go back to Loughton House?” she asks. It’s hard to hear her over the din of the subway tunnels. Soft footsteps shouldn’t be noticeable, but hundreds of them put together, each one of them echoing off the concrete walls, is damn near deafening.
I turn to her, trying to hear her better. “Where else am I supposed to go? Like you said, I don’t have a down-payment, and hotels are expensive. Even the cheap one I stayed at the first two nights will burn through my paycheck before next Friday, and I’d like to eat something occasionally.”
She chews her lip and slowly shakes her head. “You’re such an idiot,” she mutters. I can’t hear the words, and I know they’re not directed at me, but I can read her lips.
“I know I am,” I say with a grin. This evening has given me a little more life than I’d had this morning. Even knowing that I’m stuck living in a storage closet for the next three weeks, I don’t feel like I’ll be crawling back to my father anytime soon.
She just shakes her head more. “I wasn’t talking to you. I…” She grits her teeth and says something, but I can’t hear it.
“What?” I ask, completely confused about the way she’s acting.
“Do you want to sleep on my couch?” she asks, loudly enough for me to hear her.
I’m taken aback. “You want me to live with you?” I say the words slowly and much louder, so there’s no mistaking them.
She sighs again, but then she says. “Not particularly. But I have a couch and a shower and a washer and dryer, and I know how to cook so you don’t end up starving to death. Mostly, though, you let me sleep in that damn motel bed when we were actual strangers. It wouldn’t be right to let you sleep on a freaking table in a storage room after you did that for me.”
I don’t really know how to respond. If we were doing business, I’d agree that she owed me, but this isn’t business.
And I care about how she feels.
That’s not something my father would say. It’s not something I’d have thought I’d have said, either. At least, not until I met Addison. Now, I think I’d rather sleep on a table in a storage room than make her life more difficult, even if she owes me.
“No. I’ll be fine, Addison. I chose to do this experiment, and I’m not down on my luck. There weren’t any catastrophes that ended with a roof falling on me and soaking my very white shirt.” She glares at me, but I continue, even though my grin gets a little wider. “I basically asked for this, and that means that you’re not saddled with taking care of me. Nobody is except me.”
She sighs and grabs my hand. Ignoring my objections, she drags me to a different section of the tunnel, completely tuning me out even when the subway I needed to get on stops and the doors open.
When Addison finally stops dragging me across the platform, she turns to me with a fire in her eyes. “Alright, Phillip. Here’s how this is going to work. I know how much you get paid. You’re going to give me thirty percent for rent and utilities. That way I get something out of it, and there aren’t any hard feelings. Then we’re going to split the cost of meals. I’ll help you survive your experiment, and when you go back to being a billionaire and my boss, you’ll pretend like this whole thing never happened. Just like I’ve been trying to pretend our sex-free one-night-stand never happened. Do you understand?”
“But Addison, that’s not something you really want. Not really. You refused to even eat lunch with me before, and now you’re trying to force me to live with you? I feel like I’m missing something.”
She puts her hands on her hips and gives me one of those “Are you serious?” looks. “I didn’t want to go on a date with my boss because that’s a recipe for ruining my career. I don’t want you to live with me for the same reason, but I can’t just watch you be miserable. The same way you didn’t want me sleeping in a car in a freaking thunderstorm.”
I start to tell her that her staying in my motel room that night had been the highlight of my month, but I stop myself. She wouldn’t understand.
“Well, I can’t stand seeing you like this, and maybe it won’t be that bad, anyway. My apartment gets a little lonely, so it might be nice to have someone around. It’s not like you’ll take up much space since you only have the two outfits.”
