Rebecca blinked at him. Unsure of what to make of this man who apparently cared about whether or not the way he introduced his female friends was sexist.
“I think they’re gonna get married soon. That’s gonna be so cool. Sequence, my brother, was the first person I really knew who got married. But it seems like it’s all love in the air these days. And Cedric and Elena are totally in love. I’ll bet they get married soon. I wonder if he’ll take off work for a honeymoon.”
He said the last part to himself. For her part, Rebecca was just trying to keep up. This man’s mind seemed to have no problem going wherever it wanted to.
“Do you work with Cedric?” She could see no other reason why Atlas would care when his honeymoon was.
“Yeah. We’re both bodyguards at this firm called Rook Security.”
A bodyguard? Rebecca had no idea if that made her more or less comfortable in his presence. So she just went quiet and allowed him to fill the silence the rest of the way to her first job of the day.
And boy did he. Apparently this man could chat about absolutely nothing. And she had the forty-minute drive to Astoria to prove it.
He chatted all the way up to the fourth floor apartment, her cart in his brawny arms. She was grateful to close the door in his face, to clean the apartment in blissful silence. But, two hours later, when she opened the door to find him sitting on the floor in the hallway, reading on his phone, something in her fizzled happily at the sight of him.
She didn’t want to be happy to see him. But she was kind of happy to see him. Go figure.
He carried her cart down to the car and up to the next place out in Far Rockaway where he again waited in the hallway.
It was at the third place that she finally invited him inside. Only because the hallway was hotter than hell, even in April, and he was liable to melt into a puddle if she left him out in the hall like an errant puppy. Besides, she happened to know that these residents were vacationing in Florida for the month, so there was no chance of her getting caught inviting someone into their home.
“Don’t touch anything,” she told him.
He made a big show of placing his hands into his pockets. “You got it, Lauren.”
She wrinkled her nose and turned away from his chuckle.
It wasn’t three minutes later, as she was dusting bookshelves, that something caught her eye. She blinked hard at what she was seeing. He was two bookshelves down, a rag in his own hand, dusting.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice husky and confused.
“Come on,” he said, with a grin and a shrug. “I’ve been on my ass all day. Lemme help.”
So they dusted the shelves, slowly working their way toward one another. When they were almost shoulder to shoulder, him getting the highest shelves and her getting the lower ones, she couldn’t hold her question in a moment longer.
“Are you gay?” she blurted out and then went bright pink immediately after. It was absolutely none of her business in the first place and in the second place, she’d gotten punished for asking much less invasive questions than that in the past.
“Nah,” he answered easily, not seeming to think twice of her question. Then he turned to her, his head cocked to one side, leaning on one of the shelves. “But we can pretend I am, if that makes it easier for you to be around me.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that and left him to finish the shelves. Together, they worked their way through the apartment. He often waited, watching over her shoulder when they came to a new task. But he was a fast learner. He was actually really helpful. Except for the folding. She learned quickly that even folding a simple square was way beyond the scope of his skills.
“There’s no point in folding a blanket,” he’d insisted, tossing one of the afghans across the room so that she could do it. “You just yank it down and use it in, like, twenty seconds anyways.”
She sucked her lips to keep from smiling. “Are you saying that you don’t want me to fold your afghans into swans anymore?”
He froze. “I’m not saying that at all. You know that’s my favorite thing ever.”
She did, in fact, know that that was his favorite thing ever. It was one of the first notes he’d ever left her. Asking if she could fold his afghan the way that she’d folded the washcloths in the bathroom. She’d never tried before, but sure enough, it had looked cool. So she’d done it every time for him.
They finished early. To a normal person, Rebecca reflected, that would have been good news. People loved having free time. But for a person who had nowhere to go but back to the shelter, she would have given anything to have one more place to clean.
Atlas loaded her cart into the back of his car and made it jump as he loaded himself into the driver’s seat. “Chinese or Italian?”
“Hmm?” she pulled herself out of her reverie and buckled her seatbelt.
“For dinner. You want Chinese or Italian?”
“Atlas…”
He slid his tattooed hands in a smooth circle around the steering wheel, leaning his head back onto the headrest and just watching her. “Ashley…”
She wrinkled her nose and he grinned.
“You don’t need to buy me another meal.”
“Come on, Sunshine. I’m tired, I’m sure you are too. We’ve got cold drinks and HBO waiting for us. Let’s order some food and kick back. Whaddaya say? Two friends at the end of the long day? Let’s just go home.”
Home.
She didn’t respond. How could she have? He hadn’t meant to gut-punch her. But she could barely breathe.
“How about this,” he said after a while. “I’m just gonna start driving home. If at any point you want me to change directions, you just say the word, hummingbird. Deal?”
She nodded and he merged with traffic. They made it back to his building in record time.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next day was very similar to the last and so was the next one after that. Atlas drove her around the city, helping her out when he could and waiting patiently when he wasn’t allowed in. As usual, he was good natured and smiley and sweet the entire time.
On the fourth day, something new happened.
He guessed her name.
They were back at his house after a day of work and they were eating Mexican food again. She sat at the breakfast bar and he sat on the counter across the kitchen from her. He’d noticed that if they weren’t in the car, she had about a four-foot radius of a personal bubble. Any closer and she started to get a look in her eye that he didn’t care to see one bit. Like a deer that knows it’s being hunted.
So, he kept his distance.
Realizing that he’d left the hot sauce packets over by her, though, Atlas had lifted one hand in the air. “Toss me that hot sauce, will you, Rebecca?” he’d called to her.
It was a flippant comment, as nonchalant as every other name he’d ever called her. But he knew, instantly, that he’d guessed her name. She jolted like he’d slapped her and her eyes instantly slid to the doorway of the kitchen, like she was looking for a way out.
Out of instinct he froze as well. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he was going to say her name aloud again, he might as well have just Avada Kedavra’ed her. But he sure as hell ran that name through his head a few more times. Rebecca. He liked it. It was definitively a girl’s name. Classic and romantic. She had such a boyish look that he’d automatically assumed that her name was probably something that could be either a boy or a girl’s name. Like Alex or Andy, Cameron maybe.
But no. She was definitely named Rebecca. And she had the ashen white expression to prove it.
Which also proved to him that this woman was dead set on hiding her identity. From him for sure, but most likely from her employers at the cleaning service as well. He wondered how long it had been since she’d gone by her real name.
She didn’t seem to care for it one bit.
“I—” she stuttered. “No one can know—You can’t—”
“Easy, Bex,” he said, holding one hand up. “I’m not going to spill the beans on your royal secret.”
She hadn’t gotten her color back, but she’d kept eating those little, secret bites of hers. And thus her nickname was born. He wasn’t willing to call her by the name she so obviously wanted to keep a secret. But he also didn’t want to go on calling her by other women’s names. So Bex it was. It was both not her name and her name all at once. And apparently it suited both of them just fine. Because she didn’t object to it.
That night before she locked herself into the guest room, the way she had the other two nights, Atlas caught up with her in the hallway.
“You can mess that room up, you know,” he told her.
She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you don’t have to re-fold the towels and run the wash all the time. It doesn’t need to look cleaning-service fresh every time you leave the room.”
“But—”
“That’s your room, Bex. As long as you want it, okay? Doesn’t have to be clean for anybody but you.”
She shrank back from him. “I’m not living here,” she whispered defiantly. “I’m just staying here.”
He shrugged easily. “All right. I’m just saying. Clean it up when you leave, if it’s important to you. But you don’t have to do it every day.”
She nodded and closed herself into her room.
He was through his shower, a towel tied around his waist, when an unholy banging on his bedroom door had him swinging it open. “You all right?” he asked.
She blinked at his nakedness, the water chasing itself down his chest. “Oh. Sorry.” She stepped back and then seemed to remember why she’d come in the first place. She stepped forward again, her eyes focused on some point over his shoulder. “Are you asking or telling?”
“What?” The look in her eyes was telling him that he needed to tread carefully, but he didn’t have the dimmest clue of where this was heading.
“Are you asking me to live here?” she clarified.
“Oh.” He leaned against the doorjamb and thought about it for a second. He hadn’t anticipated ever having a roommate. And he didn’t need one. But… “Sure. Yeah. You should live here.”
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he realized how right they felt. He liked Bex. As a person, he still needed to get to know her, but as a roommate, who could ask for more? She was quiet and respectful and neat. Couldn’t beat that.
Besides, he knew she was in trouble of some kind and it didn’t bother him to have her around, so why not? Why not have her here and safe at the same time?
She lifted her chin in a defiant little pose and it was the first time that Atlas really noticed the shape of her face. She had sharp, fox-like features, but that chin of hers was actually quite rounded. And sweet. It was a sweet little chin.
“If I’m living here, I’ll help you pay rent.”
Atlas knew a thing or two about pride, but he was, in no way, taking Bex’s money. “I don’t pay rent. I own this place.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. He got that a lot. People saw the big beard and the tattoos and didn’t exactly think fiscally responsible.
She recovered quickly. “Well, you’ll have a mortgage payment, then. I’ll help you pay that.”
He raised one eyebrow. “You start helping me pay the mortgage then that makes you part owner.”
“Oh.” Stymied, her face fell a little bit, but she rallied. “I won’t live here for free.”
“All right. We’ll figure something out. That we’re both comfortable with.”
She nodded, but he could see that she’d be a lot more comfortable if he just charged her rent already.
“If you’re living here,” he said, scratching a hand over his beard. “You’re gonna need your stuff.”
She looked confused for a moment.
“You know,” he clarified. “All your things from your old place. Your clothes and stuff.”
Her expression cleared but it didn’t express relief of any kind. “I’ll… leave it behind,” she eventually said.
“Bex, I’ll go with you to get it, of course. I’d never let you go back there by yourself. Especially not to move out on your own.” She hadn’t been back to the place she’d gotten beaten up since he’d first seen the bruises. And he wanted to make sure she never had to again. “Or better yet, just give me the address and I’ll handle it all on my own. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
She blanched at his words and Atlas ground his teeth together wondering just how bad her situation had been. She was white as a sheet just thinking about him going there.
“No. Really. There’s nothing there I want. And… it’s probably already thrown out anyways. When I didn’t come back for it.”
She’d only been gone for like, three days. Did she really think her things were gone already?
“All right, then. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
She turned on her heel and marched off to bed.
***
At the end of Atlas’s week off, he was having trouble with the idea of returning to work. But not for the usual reasons.
“Atlas,” Bex mumbled as she started tossing his stray clothes into a laundry basket. “Go to work already.”
He was following her around like a puppy. He knew he was, but he couldn’t seem to stop. “You swear you’ll be here when I get back, Bex?”’
She turned around and pursed her lips. “Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know!” He threw his hands up in the air and then jumped over the back of the couch to get in her way again as she skirted toward the laundry room. “I don’t know a damn thing about you, other than the fact that you prefer orange chicken to sesame chicken and you take the longest showers known to man. The end. That’s all I know! So just promise me that you’re not gonna freak out while I’m gone and split. Okay?”
“How do you know about my showers?” she asked quietly, a hand on one hip and the laundry basket on the other.
“The hot water makes creaky sounds in the walls. You haven’t noticed? And you don’t have to do this, by the way.” He tried to yank the laundry basket out from her grip but she held fast. “You’re my roommate, not the cleaning lady!”
“Atlas, I clean your house on Mondays. That hasn’t changed, all right? It’s Monday. I’m cleaning!”
“I’m just saying that you don’t have to do that.”
“You’re not letting me pay rent. Let me at least clean the house.”
He eyed her with irritation, shaping his beard with one hand. “Oh. Fine. Whatever makes you comfortable, your highness.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Only you would accuse someone of acting like royalty when they’re volunteering to be the cleaning lady.”
She slipped around him and he followed her to the laundry closet. “Gimme your digits then.”
She didn’t respond until all the laundry was in the wash, then she turned around with a very suspicious look on her face. “My what?”
“Your digits. Your phone number.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You want to be able to check on me.”
“Duh.”
She had that look on her face again, the one that said that she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.
“Bex, friends check on one another when they’re in the middle of a huge life transition, like moving to a new place. Just let me be your dang friend already!”
He just barely resisted the urge to stamp his foot like a kid, figuring he was pushing his luck as it was.
“Friend,” she said skeptically, her eyebrows lifting up into her shaggy hairline.
“Friend,” he repeated, and then, in a move that surprised both of them, he leaned forward and gently flicked at her forehead. “I’m a good person. If I could put my heart under a microscope so that you could see for yourself, I’d do it. But I can’t. So take my word for it, already.”
“Did y
ou just flick me?”
“It’s something else that friends do. They tease one another.”
“I can’t believe you flicked me.”
“Get over it. And gimme your number.”
She rolled her eyes but before she could turn away fully, he caught just the barest hint of a smile on her face. He did a quick victory two-step dance move that he stopped doing the second she turned back around to eye him suspiciously, as if she’d sensed that he was prematurely celebrating a victory.
He followed her to the doorway of her room and paused there as she went to the nightstand and pulled out her ancient flip phone. Well, the technology was ancient, but the phone actually looked new. “I can’t remember the number off the top of my head,” she admitted, and it made Atlas’s heart sink to hear it.
A brand new phone with a brand new number wasn’t exactly incriminating evidence. But add it to the fact that she didn’t want anyone to know her name and it just gave him the creepy crawlies. Bex was doing her dang best to disappear and he didn’t like it. It made his connection to her feel tenuous and fragile. He didn’t do well with either of those things.
He gave her his number and she called it, so they both had one another’s info.
Then, there was nothing else to do except go to work. She practically had to shove him out the door. But he wouldn’t go until he got one last thing.
“Pinky swear you’ll be here when I get back.”
“Excuse me?” She looked at him like he was nuts on wheels.
“I said pinky swear that you’re not gonna leave.” He stared at her and she stared at him. “It’s the only way you’re gonna get me out of this door.”
He lifted one pinky in the air.
“What are you, six years old?”
He wiggled the pinky.
Sighing, Bex hooked her pinky around his and looked him in the eye. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Atlas grinned, relief swamping him. And then, to his own confusion, he had to fight the urge to lean forward and kiss her on the cheek. He could only imagine how fast she’d jet if he ever did anything like that. She was just barely comfortable touching pinkies together. If his lips made it anywhere near her, she’d launch off the face of the planet, like a spaceship.
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