by Daisy Jane
I knew it would be stupid to pursue her, but when I closed my eyes and thought about her intoxicating scent, it was as if I didn’t have a choice.
7
Britta
By the time I got out of the hospital, it was nearing midnight and all I had to show for the time lost was another $1,246.90 added to my debt. Well, that and six stitches. Even though Melody was probably asleep, I’d promised to pop my head in after I got home so, though my legs felt dead after the first flight of stairs, I made my way to the third floor and knocked gently against the dilapidated apartment door.
Donny was almost always awake, or so it seemed, and when I heard footsteps coming to the door, I prepared myself for it to be him.
Melody, dressed in a tank top and pajama shorts, pulled open the door, her dark hair in a tangled heap on one side of her head, eye makeup smeared to her temple.
“Hey, sorry if I’m interrupting anything,” I said coyly, winking, but she immediately yawned and I knew I’d woken her up from the couch, not from a round of sex with Donny.
“There’s nothing to interrupt these days girl,” she yawned again, this time pulling the door in for me to come inside.
“I’m exhausted, Mel, I just wanted to tell you I’m okay. I’m broker now than when I started the day, but I’m okay. Just going to head downstairs and heat up a cup of noodles then go to bed,” and as I said it, I wondered if I could even keep my eyes open long enough to eat the three-minute cup of salt.
“Can you work like that?” she nodded to my hand, yawning again, Donny snoring from inside the apartment.
“Yeah, the hospital gave me these extra bandages and a glove, so I can still work,” I held up the brown paper bag of supplies that the nurse had given me. I didn’t know if she was supposed to give me all that, but I had emotionally dumped on her in a big way. Poor lady was just trying to do her job.
“How’d you manage a gash right in the center of your hand sweetheart? Usually these don’t run in the middle of your palm like that,” the kind nurse said, peering down at my wound while pulling open a sealed medical package of something. I turned my head away, having seen enough blood for the day.
“I broke a glass then I held a broken shard, very tightly, accidentally,” I said, relieving the thrill that rippled through me when I let myself lay eyes on him. I never knew brow-line glasses could be a turn on but I didn’t know poetry, the smell of amber cologne and the sight of a house could turn me on, either, but they did.
The nurse paused, hovering over my hand. “Now, tell me dear, how does one hold a piece of broken glass both tightly and accidentally?”
She returned to my wound with a cold piece of cotton, or so it felt. I still couldn’t look.
I sighed. “Well, I’m a maid. For very wealthy people. And I’ve been working in this house for a couple of months,” I said, kicking off my shoes as she continued to blot away the moisture from my palm. “Wait, how long is this going to take?” I glanced back at her and she titled her head a few times, sizing up my wound.
“Five or six stitches, bandages, I’d say we have at least ten minutes.”
“Okay, so my mom was an alcoholic her whole life. Shitty mom, but she tried, she just, you know, couldn’t get it together. Anyway, liver and kidney failure for a couple years, she passed away three months ago. I was taking care of her on my own. Drained my college savings on everything that insurance didn’t cover. Then once she passed, I was left with her debt. And I mean, you’re a nurse, you know. Dying isn’t cheap.” We both paused for a moment as she gave me an empathetic glance before I continued. “I moved here because my cousin is a maid for this agency that just services fancy schmancy rich people.” I leaned over to her, and added, “I had to sign an NDA about the people’s houses I clean.” Her lips curved down in interest as she nodded for me to continue. “Okay so I was cleaning the office at this one house. You should see this house. It’s so beautiful. Every week when we get past the gate and the house comes into view, I swear I get excited. Tingly. It’s, it’s breathtaking, seriously.”
“I bet,” she added, “little sting here in three, two, one,” she warned before putting the anesthetic in my palm.
“I came across this crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Like he’d missed the bin. And I didn’t want to read it but it was like, just a few sentences and the paper was face up.”
“Your brain just reads things when they’re short like that,” she said, pulling a stitch through my hand. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew that’s what she was doing. I’d seen my mom get stitches plenty of times. The stitches come after the little sting, always.
“Exactly!” I said, “that’s what I told my cousin. Anyway, it was just a short poem, I think, But… it hit me, you know?”
“What did it say?” she asked.
Nervously, I recited his poem to her, staring her down, trying to capture her first reaction. She paused, her hands hovering over mine, her eyes straight forward to the wall.
“Mmm,” she said, before getting back to work on me. “A lonely soul. I see how that’d get your interest going. Especially if you’d never met him.”
“Exactly! Geez, you get me. That’s exactly it. I’d never met him, seen him, heard him, nothing. Then I read this, whatever this is, and I’m in this beautiful house and, I don’t know.”
“It did a number on you, did it? Wait—if you read that three months ago, catch me up to how you cut your hand.”
“Well, I was washing his whiskey glass in the kitchen today and he came home from work early for some reason. He’s never done that. Even my cousin who’s worked there for four years has only seen him once before. Anyway, I was washing the glass at the sink and I was thinking about those words. And I said them out loud, you know, like talking to myself.”
She gasped and looked up at me with wide eyes, fully invested in the story. “And he was behind you! Oh no!” she shrieked, pulling the last stitch through my palm.
“Yep. And I dropped the glass and I said things and begged him to not fire me and the most important part of this is obviously that he was undeniably the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.” I exhaled, my head throbbing, my hand now tingling with slight discomfort.
“How old are you, dear?” she asked, not looking up.
“Twenty.”
“He lives in that great big old house, drinking whiskey, working all the time. Something tells me he’s not twenty-five years old and a perfect match for you,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist.
“I don’t know how old he is but yeah, I mean, he’s rich and could have anyone he wants. He doesn’t want the maid who breaks his stuff and gets blood on his floor.” Reaching out, I held the end of the bandage as she began rolling it around my hand, finally pinning it closed. She filled a bag with more supplies and handed it to me.
“Good luck with the hand. And just because you’re a housecleaner doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy of a great person’s love. You just don’t know who can make you happy yet, dear, you’re still so young. Have fun.” She hugged me and I think I hugged her back too. It felt tight, too long, but it felt so nice to be cared about.
I knew she was being paid to care about me but still, it felt good to be listened to and hugged.
“Okay,” Melody said, not even glancing at the bag. “But wait here,” she paced to the tiny kitchenette and grabbed a business card from underneath the magnet on the fridge and held it out to me as she walked back to the door.
“If you tell me I got fired and this is a lead to a new job I’m going to cry,” I admitted, realizing I couldn’t make this kind of money doing anything else but stripping. Or selling my non-essential organs on the black market, maybe.
“Brooks,” she said, as she slipped the card into my hand. “That’s the house on the hill guy,” she nodded down to the card and I pulled it up to the light outside her apartment door so I could see it.
“How’d you get this?” I said, unable to read t
he rest of the card in front of me, the outdoor light flickering, leaving the unread portions of the card in darkness.
“He came here, looking for you,” she whispered, glancing over her shoulder. I peered over her into the apartment where Donny was passed out in front of the TV on the apartment floor, a small pillow under his head. “I don’t know where he got your address from but he wants to pay for the bill, for your hand.”
I wanted to ask what else he said, what he was wearing, the exact verbiage he used and if he asked about me, but judging by the annoyed look on Melody’s face, she wasn’t into it. And on the drive home earlier, she was right. I needed to be realistic, I told myself. Just because he had reached out to pay my bill didn’t mean he was interested in me. Maybe he just felt bad and knew, after I begged for my job, that I was broke. He was just trying to help out a member of his staff.
That was all.
In the span of a minute, I’d felt a rush of excitement—he came here? —then, with Melody’s words in the back of my mind, I realized he was just being kind and perhaps even protecting his image. I’d been so lonely and alone for the last few years, taking care of mom, that any attention or kind gestures now felt far more powerful than it should.
After all, I’m just a freaking maid and he is… wait, who the hell was he?
I looked down at the card under the single light in my kitchen once I returned to my apartment, eager to devour the information I’d been given.
Brooks Bennett
Partner
Bennett and Barrow Investments, LLC
Below that was his email address, a phone number that appeared to be a land line and his cell phone number. For no particular reason I couldn’t put it down, I stared at the card.
“Brooks,” I said out loud, to see how it sounded. It sounded the same way he looked. Really fucking good.
He wanted me to have his card and he wanted to pay for my stitches, even though I’d read something of his that I wasn’t supposed to read. I’d breached the trust between an employee and an employer and, to make matters worse, I then broke his glass, bloodied his towel and basically ran out of his house like a scared child. Cringing, I vowed to apologize again, this time without the intensity between us. I could control that, since it was all one-sided. He was a very handsome man but he was most definitely ogled and flirted with by beautiful women much smarter than me all the time.
I decided then, to keep my job and salvage my dignity, I’d apologize as soon as possible and pay him for the glass I broke, put it all behind me and move on.
Moving on meant no more thinking about him, which would be significantly harder now that I knew he was an absolutely and utterly delicious fox. But I could do it.
It should be easy to stop thinking about him, looks or not, because really, I didn’t know him at all. My fingers on my temples, I attempted to rub away the growing lascivious thoughts in my brain. I needed to stop thinking about him.
It should be easy.
I’d turn to my hobby, my anxiety-shielding, worry-thwarting, mind and hand occupying hobby of baking.
After I got paid my first paycheck from cleaning houses, I did something I didn’t usually do. Instead of rushing to the consolidators to make my massive payment or paying my rent straight away, I went to the grocery store. And not just any grocery store—the expensive one with whole and natural foods. The one where everything was organic, premium, new, improved—the one where ladies had dogs in purses and wore patent pumps to buy their milk. I perused the aisles and dreamt of the day where my cupboards would be full of the best ingredients—not what was on sale or dented. And, though I should’ve put every extra cent to my debt, I purchased the biggest, best bag of blanched almond flour that I could find. It wasn’t on sale; it was fancy and it was mine. And then I bought myself fresh hazelnuts from the per-pound nut silos—none of the bagged and salted stuff. After a few other ingredients, I proudly handed over a crisp $100 bill to the cashier and took my ingredients back to my tiny hole in the wall and made, for the first time since my mom died, a fresh batch of perfect French macarons with fresh hazelnut butter filling. The smell that filled the apartment was finally something that brought me happiness and peace.
I’d wrapped up a couple in some cellophane I’d picked up at the market and taken them with me to make my payment. It was the first time I’d gone to the consolidator in the city—I made my payments back home to a friendly little woman in an older office building that was adjoined to a shady dentist. This was New York City though, and even debt consolidators wore suits and worked out of high-rises. The Uber to the office was the hardest—paying money so that you can go pay more money is a hard pill to swallow when you’re broke. Another jagged pill? Holding a bi-weekly paycheck for $4,000 and knowing that if I didn’t have the debt, I’d easily be building a nest egg for a new, perfect life.
“Hi,” I greeted the man behind the metal desk, one of six, three on each side of the room. There were no privacy partitions, no white noise—not a lot of discretion is afforded to you when you’re a financial deviant. “I called last week. My account was transferred here by your sister company in Connecticut.” My hands worked on the edges of the envelope, folding them and unfolding them, the most cash I’d ever had at once all in my hands, ready to turn over to a complete stranger.
“Last name,” he said flatly, his eyes never leaving the old rear-projection computer screen.
“Moore,” I said, “Britta Moore.” He typed two letters then scrolled, clicked and turned to me. Whistling, he shook his head a few times. “That’s a lot of debt for a young girl like yourself. Tell me sweetheart, you like to play cards or chase the high?” I stared at him for a moment, his thin mustache wiggled on his lip as he smiled, a trickle of irritation making its way into my hands. I gripped the envelope tight.
“Medical debt. My mom was sick and our insurance fell through.” As if I needed to explain it to him.
“That’s a shame,” he said, outstretching his hand to me, palm up. “You know the drill. Payment minimum is $200, but the more you pay, the faster you’re done.” As if he needed to say that. I’m sure he could see I’d been making these payments for some time. Taking out my rent in cash, I shoved the bills into my coat pocket and put the envelope in his hand without making contact. He lifted it, thumbing through the bills quickly. “$2,500 this month?” his eyebrow quirked slightly before he typed the number and hit enter, before I had a chance to verify. “See ya next month sweetheart,” he said, without looking, handing me a receipt printed off of a printer that I think was in existence when dinosaurs were around. I knew it was collecting debt but still, with that amount of cash I’d have thought there would at least be coffee, or a mint. Instead, the interaction took less than two minutes and I was being shooed away to free up space for some other poor broke soul.
“Okay,” I rose and walked slowly to the elevator and rode it down, eating my own macarons that I’d brought for him, before finding my way back out into the city streets. It would never get easier making payments like that but I reminded myself of the big moment, walking into that shitty office and slapping down the last and final wad of cash and being able to say “see ya later, suckers!”. I dreamed of that moment; it kept me moving, back to the subway, back to my side of the city, where the smell of macarons had been replaced with egg rolls and fresh garbage.
Macarons helped me with my first payment here, a few months ago. They’d help again with this confusing feeling in my head, around my heart. With my hand bandaged and a plastic bag wrapped tightly over the top, I stood in my microscopic kitchenette and made French macarons until 2am, willing myself to forget about Brooks.
As soon as I apologized, I’d forget him. Now that I had something to avoid, I’d be baking a lot more.
I’d need to add macaron ingredients to my budget.
8
Brooks
Sun poured in through the glass wall of my bedroom, crawling across my legs and chest like fire, and I squinted awa
y from it. I grumbled, reaching across the pillow to the remote on the nightstand. I hated being woken up by the sun forcing my eyes awake, why the hell did I build a house of glass? With one eye closed and one grumpily open, I fumbled with the plastic rectangle until ah, the ceiling opened and the curtain descended, slowly but surely covering me in shade and darkness. Just how I liked it.
Rolling onto my back, I stretched my legs and rolled my neck, forcing my eyes open to another day. Just as I was about to roll out of bed and get on with it all, again, I remembered.
Britta.
All that thick, golden hair woven in a tight braid down her back, those full pink lips and bright green eyes. And the freckles. I never knew I liked freckles until I saw her, how they got darker on the bridge of her nose. The way her cheeks went flush under my gaze. That body, too. Closing my eyes, I could see her full breasts straining under that white cotton top, the little peaks of her nipples. I bet she’d never had them licked or bitten, or at least I hoped she hadn’t. I wanted to taste them, taste her, and be the only one. She was a natural beauty, radiating some genuine kindness and warmth that I’d not yet discovered in my forty-eight years. Unique and kind, tutoring a mere stranger’s kid for nothing in return. She said she’d needed this job, too, which led me to believe things hadn’t been easy for her. With an alcoholic mom and her obvious sense of responsibility, something told me she’d yet to do anything enjoyable for herself in life, she’d been too busy thinking of others.
I’d love to give her an enjoyable time.