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“You’ve been grounded?” she scoffs, biting her lip again so she doesn’t laugh.
I shrug. “Is it grounded if you get told you can’t stay at home or go to a hotel, but you have to hide and not come out under any circumstances?”
“I’ll get back to you,” she says, and for the first time since I’ve known her, smiles genuinely. It lifts her face into something mesmerizing, softening the harshness she’s met me with so far. It makes me want to make her smile again.
“Well, whatever you call it, that’s why I’m here. I’m not allowed to show my face until someone else makes a massive screwup of things.” I’m trying to play this off as being cool and unaffected, but I feel jittery and I think it’s making me look too sincere. My grin feels half-baked. The hangover’s wearing off, so I guess I need a strong coffee.
She mutters something under her breath, and I’m about to ask her to repeat it when she says instead, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Another piece of the puzzle. “Why’re you here, then?”
Just as I’m starting to break through to her, she closes back up again, her spine going rigid and her eyes wide and suspicious. A deer in the headlights. “I’m just staying at my brother’s for a few days. That’s all. Does it matter?”
“No,” I say, even though I’m desperate to know her secrets. To get to them, I’ve got to make her like me. And to do that, it looks like I’m going to have to make a real friend for the first time in years. This is a skill I haven’t practiced in ages. “I just want to know if I’ll get any more lamps thrown at me.”
She flushes a light pink, staring down at the ground as she speaks. “No. No more lamps. I’m sorry about that.”
“As long as it didn’t damage anything permanently, we’re all good.”
“I think the lamp might not have survived,” she says. I chuckle and she joins in, and for the first time I take a step towards her and she doesn’t move away. Her cheeks are properly pink now, the blush spreading across her nose.
“The window was in bad shape too,” I say, then add, “It lost a fight with me.”
“Must have been weak, then,” she says. She’s full of these snappy comebacks. I’m going to have to clear my head to be able to think that fast. “Come on, there’s some cardboard down the back of the fridge.”
“Okay…?”
She throws up her hands in frustration. “Get it and follow me. Unless you want a permanent hole in the window?”
I open my mouth in a silentohand grab an old box while she gathers some other tools. I’m feeling decorative as I follow her back to the window. She makes me wait until she’s swept the floor, then slams the window shut and beckons me forward. Considering she’s so sure she’s not a housekeeper, she seems pretty determined to clean up. It’s kind of amazing watching her, actually. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to tape anything to the window.
Knowing me, I’d have just left the hole.
Anna is precise, though. She cuts the cardboard to a perfect shape and tapes it over the hole until it looks just like what they do in shops when someone smashed a window.
“Awesome!” I say, delighted at the teamwork. “Now what?”
“Now,” she says, wheeling around to give me a hard glare. “You tidy all this up.” She gestures to the floor, then marches away to the guest room and slams the door, leaving me with a sore arm, surrounded by crap that I have no idea what to do with.
I have to stop being a normal person soon. Being forcibly detoxed is bad enough, but having to do menial tasks? That might just kill me.
CHAPTER8
ANNA
Every time I hear a movement out in the apartment, I flinch. Every time I flinch, I tell myself off for being irrational and get angry. And the angrier I get, the more on edge I am, which makes me flinch at even more unexpected noises.
It’s an endless cycle of misery. Which is just what my life is now.
My legs can only handle so much pacing so I’m lying on the bed again, staring at the ceiling. There’s a weird dark patch up there, only noticeable if you’re mapping every single inch of it. I can’t believe it would be water damage or mold, not in an upmarket development like this. The painter or plasterer must have done a bad job.
Then again, our apartment was pretty new too, and we had one hell of a weekend when the shower exploded all over the bathroom. I wonder whose money Mariana used to pay the plumber.
I roll over to bury my face in the pillow. It smells fresh yet with that slight mustiness that comes when something hasn’t been used in a long while. Doesn’t Ben have any friends? I know he’s always busy with work, but I thought he hung out with his college friends all the time. Like Joel. Maybe I just assumed that. It’s not like we talk often.
The next conversation I’m going to have with him is going to end in an argument. A wholewhy are you in my house?kind of charade. I can just hear it now, that voice he does when he’s disappointed, the furrowed brow, the high horse he always rides around on.
I groan into the pillow and roll onto my side to pull out my phone.
