by Maggie Riley
“Shane Garrett,” he said. “I’m the landlord.”
Dammit. “You own the building?” Brooklyn apartment buildings didn’t come cheap, and he didn’t appear to be that much older than I was. But if he was rich, why was he staying here? “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.” He smiled at me. It was a really nice smile. “And you are?”
“Twenty-five.”
“I’m actually more interested in your name,” he said gently, and I blushed at my misunderstanding. I felt flustered and out of my element and I hated it.
“I’m Allison Lawson. Allie,” I said quickly. “Liz told me I could stay here while she was in Hartford.”
“Yeah, I got a similar offer,” he said.
Suddenly, I was exhausted. The whole crappy day was catching up to me and what I needed right now was a plan. A list. And sleep. And not in that order. I yawned before I could stop myself.
Shane gave me an assessing look, and I realized then that he looked pretty tired too.
“Look,” he said gently, clearly sensing my exhaustion. “What if we tried to tackle this problem after a few hours of sleep?”
I quickly nodded.
“That sounds like a good idea,” I told him, belatedly realizing that there was only one bedroom and one bed. I reached for my bag. “Just let me change in the bathroom and I’ll take the couch.”
But Shane shook his head. “I couldn’t let you do that. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
I gave him a look. He was a good inch or so over six feet and the couch would be a miserable place for someone of his size to sleep. “It’s way too small for you.”
He shrugged. “I’ve slept on worse.”
“So have I,” I retorted. And I had. Working for a touring company meant that sometimes you had to catch up on sleep wherever you could. I’d slept in buses, hotel lobbies, on the floor backstage. I was a pro at sleeping in weird places. A lumpy old couch wouldn’t be a problem. Grabbing my bag, I dropped it onto the couch as if to claim it.
Shane lifted his eyebrow, clearly not backing down. “Megan wouldn’t let me hear the end of it if I let you sleep out here.”
“Megan?” Did he have a girlfriend?
“My sister,” he clarified, and I told myself not to be relieved. I didn’t care if he was single. Right? Right.
“I promise not to tell her.”
He crossed his arms, regarding me. “You know I’m just going to pick you up and move you into the bedroom the second you fall asleep,”
My mouth dropped open. “You wouldn’t dare.” And I hated that I immediately pictured it. His warm, firm hands around me, picking me up in his chiseled arms . . .
“Try me.”
And how I wanted to. But that would be a bad idea. A very bad idea. And considering how terribly my day had already gone in spite of all my good ideas, I really couldn’t risk any potential bad ideas. Instead, I snatched up my bag and went into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me.
Chapter 3
ALLIE
I tried to be mad at Shane, but it was hard to be annoyed at a virtual stranger who had insisted on giving me the more comfortable place to sleep. Instead I decided to be annoyed at him for being too damn attractive. A guy who was nice and cute? How dare he.
Call me, I texted Liz before tossing my towel across the room, and I dug through my bag for the few clean clothes I had left. Luckily, since I was a planner, I had set aside a clean pair of pajamas, knowing that I wouldn’t have time to do laundry right away. Pulling my PJs on, I crawled into the bed.
A bed that smelled like sawdust and soap. Like Shane had. I had gotten a good whiff of that incredible scent when I had stormed past him into the bedroom. It only confirmed my assumption that he’d gotten his amazing body through something other than lifting weights. But what? And who smelled like sawdust in Brooklyn? Pizza? Sure. Hot garbage? In the summer, you bet. But sawdust? This wasn’t the Wild West. Still, I resisted the urge to pull one of the pillows up against my face and take a deep breath.
That ache between my legs grew. I tried to think about hot garbage again. It didn’t work.
I lifted up the covers. “I know what you want, you slut,” I hissed to the traitorous body part. “But you have terrible taste in men.”
Not that my body seemed to care. Good thing my brain always maintained the upper hand when it came to matters of sex and dating. My body was greedy and eager, and if it had been in charge, I might have done more than just climb into bed next to Shane. I remembered how gentle his touch had been, how the rough edges of his callouses made my skin tingle. Oh yeah, if my body was calling the shots, I would have been all over that boy like chocolate sauce on an ice cream sundae.
Which would have been awkward. Because guys who looked like Shane didn’t go for girls like me. Not that there was anything wrong with me. I just had the unfortunate luck to be average. Like, literally average. When you looked up the measurements for the average woman in America you got my statistics. Average height, average weight, average shoe size, average breast size, etc., etc., etc.
Most of the time I didn’t mind it. Average was fine until you came into close contact with someone like Shane who made a girl wish she was something more. Something enticing.
I gave myself a mental slap.
I hadn’t come to New York to sleep with attractive men. I came to get a job. One that would keep me in the same place for more than a few days and make my career.
My phone rang and I grabbed it. I assumed it was Liz so I answered without looking at the caller ID. That was a mistake.
“Did something happen?” My mother’s voice was frantic. “Did you get mugged?”
I sighed and leaned my head back against the wall. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I spoke to my parents, but ever since they found out I was moving back to New York, they had been panicked about my safety, calling even more often than they usually did. It didn’t help that they were panicked in the irrational, over-the-top way Midwestern parents without any experience in big cities could be.
“Hi, Mom.” I tried to make my voice sound upbeat.
“You sound terrible.”
There was a reason I wasn’t an actress.
“I’m fine,” I reassured her. “Just tired.”
“I read that living in New York makes people 25 percent more tired,” she told me. “And you die earlier, too.”
“You have to stop getting your information from Facebook memes.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “New York is not that different from Nebraska.”
An obvious lie, but my parents had never visited New York. And had no intention to.
“I heard there are drugs everywhere,” my mom continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “That there are vending machines full of them. Full of that LDS stuff.”
Oh boy.
“Mom, I highly doubt there are vending machines full of Mormons here.”
“You know what I mean. We’re just worried about you,” she said, and I knew at least that was the truth.
“I’m fine, Mom. I know how to take care of myself.”
“There are jobs here.” She tried a different tactic. “The local theatre is doing The Phantoms of the Operas. You like that show, don’t you?”
“It’s The Phantom of the Opera,” I corrected her. “One phantom, one opera.”
“Well, I talked to Susie who volunteers at the concession stand—her daughter takes classes after school—and she said that they were looking for people to help out backstage. Building sets and getting the curtain up and down. That would be perfect for you. She said she’d talk to someone about it.” My mom sounded so pleased with herself. “See, you already have connections.”
I gently banged my head on the wall behind me.
“Mom. I’m a stage manager. I don’t build sets or operate the curtain.”
“Well, if you’re not going to be flexible—”
“I have to go,” I interrupted her. “I’m getting another ca
ll.” Another lie, but it was better that I got off the phone before she started in on why I wasn’t married and how men in New York just wanted to marry models and singers. Ones that were skinny. Not like Nebraska men, she kept telling me. Men in the Midwest appreciated a woman with some heft.
I could really do without another conversation about my “heft”, aka boobs and hips, of which I had in spades. My mom didn’t understand that I just didn’t have time for a relationship. Of any kind. That I had priorities, and men were on the bottom of that list. And there was an actual list. Of course.
“Before you go, honey, I just wanted to tell you one more thing,” my mom said quickly.
“What is it?” I asked, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice and just barely succeeding.
“I just wanted to let you know that Kevin is back in town.”
Great. Even worse than a conversation about my heft was a conversation about Kevin Thomas, my high-school boyfriend, aka the guy my parents wished I had married. Kevin Thomas, the guy who always told me I was “like, so OCD”—and not in a cute, complimentary way. Kevin Thomas, the guy who broke up with me the day before prom.
I did not want to talk about him.
“I really have to go, Mom,” I told her, and the annoyance slipped through in my tone.
“Oh, OK,” she said, a little quietly, and then I felt guilty.
I hung up, feeling even more exhausted. I knew my parents were still hoping that I would move back to Nebraska and marry someone I had gone to high school with exactly like my two older sisters had done. Why they were still pining over Kevin was beyond me. They seemed to think the break-up had been my fault, and if I had tried harder, we could have stayed together. Stayed together, stayed in Nebraska, and had two point five children. Until that happened, I was pretty sure they would think I was wasting my life.
It wasn’t that they didn’t believe in me. They loved and supported me, they just wanted me to be close by, where they could know for sure that I was safe and gainfully employed. Married with kids would be a bonus. Every few weeks I’d get an email with a link to a Facebook profile of a single guy they thought I should contact. They were convinced the right guy would get me to move home.
At least the distance kept the worried lectures to a minimum. My older brother, Josh, wasn’t so lucky. He still lived in Nebraska, but had no intention to settle down, which drove my parents crazy. Even though they already had five grandkids between my two sisters, they were already pushing for more, and he was next in line.
It probably didn’t help that my brother was great with kids, especially our niece, Emily. The two of them were practically joined at the hip, which made sense because my brother was my best friend, and Emily was basically my soulmate in an eight-year-old’s body. We called ourselves the three mustard-teers, since Emily had been unable to pronounce musketeers when she was little. We were kindred spirits, and I loved my weekly calls with her.
Still, that wasn’t enough to keep me in Nebraska. I loved my job and I was good at it. I wasn’t going to give up on it just because my parents didn’t understand.
But steady stage management jobs were hard to come by. Getting a position with a touring company had been hard enough right out of college, but I had worked hard and quickly moved up from assistant stage managing. But life on the move was exhausting. I had been living out of a suitcase for years now and I longed for a place were I could settle down a little. Put art on the walls. Get a plant. Sleep somewhere that was mine instead of those hard hotel mattresses with their stiff, scratchy sheets. I had a list for that too.
Snuggling into Liz’s bed, I tried to recall the last time I had been in a real bed with real blankets and pillows. I lay there, searching through my memories, the scent of sawdust in my nose, and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.
It was another call that woke me several hours later. Making sure to check the screen this time, I managed to make out Liz’s name and the time. Two a.m. My stomach growled as I accepted the call.
“Sugar, I’m so sorry!” Liz’s sweet Southern lilt came through the speaker. “My mama always said I was dumber than a bucket of rocks.”
Liz’s debutante mother was not exactly the kindest woman I’d ever met. Any time I found my parents frustrating, I just remembered how horrible Liz’s mother was, and most of my complaints went out the window.
“Liz, you’re not dumb,” I told her. “Just disorganized.”
“I suppose you’re right, sugar.” She clicked her tongue. “I just plum forgot that I told Shane he could stay there.”
I sighed and leaned back on the pillow. Liz always had a slight Southern accent that made it really hard to be mad at her. However, the play she was doing required her to really lay it on thick, so she was going full Scarlett O’Hara over the phone.
Liz and I had gone to NYU together; I worked behind the scenes, she stole them. She was a good friend, generous and kind, but she’d forget her boobs if they weren’t attached to her.
We made a good pair when we were together—my obsessive organizing helped keep her on track, while her bubbly, easy-going personality kept me from taking things too seriously. And because of that, it was nearly impossible to stay mad at her for very long.
“It’s OK,” I told her. “I’ll figure something out.”
Before falling asleep I had already started putting together a list of things that I could do to fix my current situation. Basically, I just needed to find a new place. It couldn’t be that difficult. I would just make another list of requirements. Surely I could find a studio that I could afford. And everything I owned was in my duffel and my backpack, which made moving to a new place extremely easy.
I’d research neighborhoods, checking out the nearest subway lines and trying out nearby restaurants. Then I remembered that I had five job interviews tomorrow. All lined up perfectly. Without the time I needed to search for a new place.
I felt a trickle of panic. I did everything in my power to avoid this kind of feeling. Because it was the kind of panic I felt when I couldn’t fix something with a plan or a to-do list. The kind of panic I got when I had done everything I could to make sure everything would run smoothly and it hadn’t. Because I had expected that I would have time to find a place—that was the whole point of staying at Liz’s place, to be able to use it as a home base while I found the perfect place. Now I would be rushed. I hated being rushed. I hated feeling out of control.
And I didn’t have a lot of money. I had savings, but I had moved to New York without a job, and nothing ate through a bank account like living expenses in a city like this. I had hoped to be employed and have an idea of my budget before I found my own place.
Plus, I had to worry about all of this when I should have been reading and re-reading the notes I had made for my interviews tomorrow. There was nothing worse than a failed plan. Unless it was a failed plan that began affecting other plans. It was a domino effect I couldn’t afford to deal with right now.
“Aw, honey, don’t get your britches in a twist,” Liz’s voice came through, soft and soothing, and I realized that I had been wheezing into the phone, my panic slowly taking over.
“I just need a plan,” I told her, forcing myself to breathe. “I need to make a list.”
She sighed. “I know you got the short end of a stick with this, but maybe you could just see what happens.”
“No, I can’t,” I said firmly, the mere thought of doing that raising my heart rate again. “You know I can’t.”
“Maybe you and Shane can work something out,” Liz said hopefully. “He’s a real good ole boy, as my daddy would have said.”
“I don’t think that’s a possibility.” I bit my lip, thinking. Unless there was somewhere else he could stay. My mind started racing. He owned the building, didn’t he? Maybe I could convince him to stay somewhere else.
“He’s a real catch.” I was barely listening to what Liz was saying. “And Lordy, the things that boy can do with his hands.”
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That got my attention. “What?”
“He’s pretty handy,” she clarified, no implication that her comment had any of the sexual connotations I immediately imagined. “You know, comes around and fixes things. I’ve never had a landlord that did that.” Liz let out an apologetic sigh. “I’m real sorry about this, sugar. I just got overwhelmed with everything.”
“I know,” I told her. None of this had been intentional on her part, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Getting mad at her wouldn’t solve my problem. “How’s Hartford?” I asked.
“It’s wonderful!” Liz said. “I’m having more fun than a pig in mud.”
Liz had been cast as the lead in a new musical that was premiering in a few months, with the hopes of it eventually moving to Broadway. Her years of toiling in the chorus were finally paying off. Especially since most people who looked at her saw a dumb, Southern blonde and didn’t bother to look beyond the hair and the accent to the extremely talented actress underneath.
“I’m really proud of you,” I told her, meaning every word.
“Awww.” Liz’s voice got all teary as it always did whenever things got a little mushy. “Thanks, sugar.”
My stomach growled again. I hadn’t eaten since my layover in Denver and I was starving. I would have killed for a grandma pizza. A whole one. Maybe even two. Take that, heft.
“Well, honey, you’re running with the big dogs now,” Liz was saying. “All you gotta do is keep up the pace.”
“From your lips to Shakespeare’s ears,” I told her, and she giggled at the expression we’d been using since we met during a production of Taming of the Shrew seven years ago.
We said goodbye, and I hung up and leaned back against the pillows, my hand over my stomach, going over my options. It was late. I could try to go back to sleep, but a loud grumble seemed to indicate that attempting that would be fruitless. Or I could see if Liz had left anything in her fridge or cabinets. But that meant I’d have to leave the bedroom and risk waking Shane on the couch.