Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
"Are you insane?" It comes out rougher than his usual unshakeable calm, like I've knocked something loose in there that he'd bolted down on purpose.
"About you? Yes." I keep my hand out there, shameless, grinning, terrified. "That's why I'll take anything that lets me stay in your life. So how about it, big brother?" I wiggle my fingers. "When can I move in?"
I watch the no form. It gets all the way to his mouth, and I know that mouth. That mouth has a doctorate in telling me no.
His lips part.
"Tonight," Mr. H says.
And then he looks like he wants to arrest himself for it.
TONIGHT.
Tonight.
The word kept coming down in him like a gavel, and there was no court on earth where he could overrule it. One word, and he had handed a broke girl in a thrift-store jacket the keys to the one place he had sworn no one would ever get inside again.
He had told her he saw a little sister. It was the cruelest sort of lie, the kind with just enough truth in it to stand up in court because he did not see a little sister. He saw a woman, and she was grown, broke, and blazing, and a good thirteen years too young for the thoughts he had no business having about her. And that was the smaller of the two crimes. The larger one was beating in her chest at that very moment, and it had been his little sister, and the two truths sat down in him side by side and refused, no matter how he arranged them, to be the same size.
Forbidden. There was no gentler word for what she was to him, and Maximo had spent his whole life not needing gentle words.
He would send her away. In the morning, when she was fed and safe, when it could be done cleanly and for good.
He already knew that he wouldn't.
Chapter Four
I OWN TWO SMALL SUITCASES, and I've fit my entire life into them with room left over. I know it sounds tragic to some, but I think it just means I'm efficient.
"Is that everything?" Mr. H is looking at the suitcases with a frown.
"Yup." I set them down in the entryway of a penthouse so big it might have its own weather. "I'm a minimalist. It's very in right now."
"You mean you're penniless."
"That's the aspirational word for it, yes."
He doesn't smile. He has, I'm learning, a whole vocabulary of not-smiling. But he steps back to let me in, and the door closes behind me with the well-oiled sound of a door that's never once been slammed, and just like that, I live here.
For all of a minute. Then the rules start.
"Rule one," he informs me, already walking. "Don't touch the thermostat."
"What if I'm cold?"
"Wear more."
"What if I'm hot?"
"Wear less—"
He pauses, but it's too late. I got him to say what I needed, and I'm grinning as I write those two precious words.
"You know what I mean."
"What's rule #2?" For me, it's to always change the subject when you want to sound agreeable while not actually agreeing at all.
"Don't answer my phone." "Even if it's your girlfriend?"
"I don't have one."
"Gotcha." I try hiding a smile as I write down two more precious words.
He's single.
"Rule two," I crow, "he's single. What's rule three?"
By my count we hit rule eleven before lunch, one of which includes not calling him Mr. H in front of the housekeeper, and I just nod at this because there's no point letting him know this is totally moot. I've already broken his rule when his housekeeper let me in, but she seems quite nice, so maybe it can just be a secret between the two of us.
And anyway—
"Don't you think it's time you tell me your name? I need something to call you—unless of course you're okay with me introducing you as my landlord slash rescuer slash eventual husband slash—"
"It's Maximo."
A few seconds of silence follow—because I need proper time to savor his name.
Maximo.
It totally suits him, and even better it totally suits me.
I'm Jassy, Maximo's wife.
I can't help smiling as I practice saying this in my mind. It sounds really, really good, and so I bet it sounds even better when I say it out loud.
"Maximo."
And so I do, and it immediately makes my future husband's expression turn stoic.
How cute.
And so I say it again and again and again. "Maximo, Maximo—"
He cuts me off, saying coolly, "Shall we move to Rule #12?"
And so it goes on.
Rule after rule after rule, but I don't mind at all because I'm a smart girl, and smart girls are very good at rules the way a river is good at a wall. I go around, I go over, and I find the one crack and make myself at home in it.
By dinner the penthouse doesn't sound like the penthouse anymore. It sounds like a place where someone lives out loud. I sing in the shower and forget rule five, burn the popcorn and set off rule nine, and laugh at my own joke so hard I have to sit down on the floor of a kitchen that has clearly never once had a person sit down on the floor of it. When I look up, he's in the doorway just...watching me like I'm a language he used to speak.