AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” I say woodenly, my mind hitched on that image of her painting her lips that bright shade of red without a mirror. “It’s great. Perfect.”
“Ah.” She grins. “We’re back to the monosyllabic words.”
“Perfect has two syllables.” Damn my inability to let a logical fallacy slide.
“And there’s my grump.” Her eyes are dancing with amusement—amusement at me—but for some reason I find myself smiling.
“Maybe I like to keep people guessing.”
“That’s one of us, then,” she says. She gives her lips another tap, then says, “Living with Bryon made me realize that he was a shallow, dumb dick on legs.I’mthe one who broke up withhim.”
“Oh,” I say, which is as much intelligence as I’m capable of at the moment.
Then she heads toward the stairs. She goes down ahead of me, and it would take the will of a man who’s had sex more recently than a year and nine months ago to avoid watching her swaying ass as she descends the steps.
When we get to the bottom, there’s a gigantic box waiting outside the plate glass door of the building—and no deliveryman in sight.
“Are you kidding me?” Mira mutters as she opens the door and glances left and right. “Someone could have stolen my baby.”
“I thought you said this was a record table?” I ask. Because it looks big enough to build a dining room table for the army of men who apparently follow her around.
She shrugs. “I have a lot of records, and I also took a lot of Byron’s.”
“Let’s get it inside,” I say, grabbing one end of the box.
She picks up the other, and we back it through the door.
“Elevator,” I say, nodding to the elevator at the other end of the lobby, past the mailboxes. It’s an old claptrap kind of thing, with a heavy door you need to pull open yourself, and an accordion style door beyond it that opens when you press the button. It’s charming in the way old things are—and every time I see it, I think about the people who lived here forty years ago. Fifty.
“No way.” She shakes her head for emphasis. “That thing wigs me out. Getting stuck on an elevator is my idea of hell.”
“Why don’t you let me take it up, then?” I say. “I like the elevator.”
“Of course you do,” she scoffs, but there’s some merriment in her eyes. “It’s a fossil.”
“I can’t be much older than you,” I comment, hoisting my end of the box a little higher, because dammit if it’s not starting to seem like we’ll be carrying it up a few flights of stairs.
“I may be thirty, but I have the soul of a much younger person. You have the soul of an old guy whose balls are hanging down to his knees.”
Her eyes are glimmering as she says it, and it’s obvious she’s having fun, or near enough.
“I’ll go at the bottom,” I volunteer, because the weight will settle on whoever’s in that position. I’m taller and bigger, and therefore the weight should settle on me.
“No, I will,” she insists. “I don’t like walking backward. That wigs me out too.”
“So no elevators and no moonwalking. Got it.”
“See!” she says, her voice louder than it has any reason to be. “You’re so old.”
In my head I can hear another woman telling me something similar.
We don’t fit together anymore, Danny. You’re too…well…basic. Shit. I didn’t mean that. I guess it’s just that we want different things. You want…this life. I want something more.
It was my ex-girlfriend Daphne who said that, and it still burns. Daphne, who fate is flinging back at me like a boomerang after all these years. She works at Big Bear Games, the company that’s interested in buying the computer game that my buddy Drew and I made over the last several years in our free time. I have a meeting there in a few weeks. I’ll be seeing her again. I’ll finally have a chance to—
“Come on, dude, this is heavy!” Mira says, jostling the box.
“I strongly object to you taking the bottom position.”
