by Sherie Keys
After that, wandering around a bit in the crowd – there were a good forty or fifty people there – she instead took the chance to explore. It was, after all, a party at James’ house (which was more accurately a small mansion, complete with massive chandelier entrance hall), and if she was potentially going to live here, she wanted to know a little more about it.
There weren’t many people in the back areas of the mansion, although James hadn’t barred off any areas of it that she had seen. The bare handful of people Minnie encountered were split into two groups: couples who slipped off to find somewhere more private, and a group of young men playing pool in a game room on the second floor, overlooking the outdoor pool that was still empty due to the late February chill.
Eventually, she found herself alone in one of the smaller bedrooms, where she flopped on her back on the fancy queen-sized bed. It was softer than she expected, and her weight sank a bit into the mattress. She stayed there for a while, looking up at the canopy over the bed – a rich wine-colored fabric hung between dark hardwood poles that matched most of the rest of the room.
Eventually she did get up to explore the rest of the room. The first step was what she thought was the closet door, which turned out to lead instead to a private bathroom that seemed almost too large for the size of the bedroom it was attached to. The bathtub alone, almost large enough for three people and set with massaging jets near the bottom, was almost the same floor space as her bathroom at home. The actual closet was a door off the bathroom, and was a small room in itself; Minnie felt like she could tuck an armchair and a lamp between the empty racks for hanging clothes and no one would ever find her.
She was investigating a mini fridge hidden in a cabinet by the dresser when there was a polite cough behind her. Minnie jerked up, standing straight so quickly her head glanced off the top of the cabinet, which lead to her rubbing hard at the painful spot as she looked to see who had interrupted her.
It was James. His clothes were a little less neat, now, after the party had gone on for an hour or two. The way his shirt was only tucked into his pants on one side made Minnie wonder if he’d actually stripped for some girl over the course of the night. His expression at her reaction was a little amused as he spoke. “This could be your room, if you like it.”
Minnie’s mind took a moment to catch up to the implication. She closed the cupboard door over the mini fridge. “It’s so fancy,” she said. “I’d be scared of breaking something.”
“Don’t worry about it. Most of the stuff in here is replaceable.” He walked over to the cupboard, close to her but not uncomfortably close, and ran his hand along the top edge. “My mother is the one with a weakness for antiques, so I keep them all in her guestroom. Everything else is party-safe.”
That made her feel a little better. “Speaking of the party,” she said, “how’s it going down there? I can’t even hear the music.” The thumping bass had followed her down the hallways at the start of her exploration, but she hadn’t heard it in quite some time. It had added to the feeling of being lost in the mansion’s hallways, even though logically she knew how to find her way back out again.
“People are starting to pair off for the evening, if they’re going to,” he said. She wondered if that was why he’d come to find her, looking a little disheveled; it would certainly make their “relationship” seem less out of the blue. “I imagine someone would probably have disturbed you up here soon, anyway.”
She made a disgusted face. “If I’m going to live in here, you’d better put a lock on the door.” The last thing she wanted was to come in after a party – although hopefully they wouldn’t be as regular, if he was trying to clean up his image – and finding that some couple had already made use of her bed.
“Of course,” James responded. “I do the same with Mother’s room. But I was thinking, now that the floor has cleared out a little, perhaps you would do me the honor of a dance?” He extended a hand towards her with a flourish and a slight bow, as though she were a princess, instead of an under-dressed animation student.
Minnie blushed a little, than took his hand. His grip was gentler than she expected; a lot of the time, it seemed like men were just barely bracing themselves from crushing her fingers.
“I think we can work that out,” she said, and let him lead her back to the party.
*
They danced for quite a while that night, some of it modern, some of it more classical ballroom dancing. Minnie had never waltzed before, but with James showing her the steps. It was easy enough, though, because of the difference in their sizes, she had to take an extra step every so often to keep up with him. The whole time she was down there, he didn’t dance with any of the other girls hanging around the edges of the dance floor, although she danced with a few other guys, including Avery. One of them tried to pinch her butt, and she saw James give him a talk in the corner, a stern look on the tall man’s face. She didn’t see the guy in question the rest of the night, and had the feeling he probably wouldn’t be at the next party, either.
That made her feel a little safer in the decision she was slowly coming to; if James was already looking out for her when they hadn’t done much beyond a little flirting and some dancing, then she could feel confident that he wouldn’t let any other men happen to her, so to speak.
She stayed late, later than she usually would on a Saturday during the semester. Even Avery left about a half an hour before she did. She had one martini, just strong enough to feel it for about an hour or so, but not enough that she couldn’t drive herself home. James walked her out to her car when it was nearing midnight; behind them, though, there was still quite a bit of party going on.
“They’ll go until I kick them out,” he said in response to the question on her face. “And since this is the last time I’m going to be doing this for a while, I might as well let them.”
She nodded. “Well, I have an essay due Monday for Art History, so…” She trailed off, but James picked up the threads of her thought.
“And it’ll be Sunday in half an hour, so you should get home.” His smile was warm as he helped her into her car. He smiled at her a lot, she thought. “Should I expect to see you again?”
She thought about it. “I think so. Probably next weekend.”
By then, she could have her thoughts a little more in order, and it would give her enough time to look at things without the influence that smile had over her objectivity.
“Then I’ll see you soon.” He waved a little as she pulled out down the long driveway, and didn’t turn back towards the house until she was through the gate and gone.
When she got home, Minnie crawled into her bed and fell straight asleep. The next morning, there were four texts from Avery on her phone, all of which boiled down to the same thing:
[Are you going to do it?]
She made a point of ignoring her phone entirely until she was done with her late breakfast (more like lunch) and had at least thrown together an outline for that paper. Then she sent simply, [still thinking about it] and proceeded to not think about it anymore until she was done with the paper. It was only then that she sat down to a dinner of leftover pasta and a cup of coffee, that she turned her thoughts towards James and his deal.
Her mother wouldn’t approve of her moving in with some guy she barely knew, which Minnie found, to her surprise, was more of a point in favor of the deal than against it. Her mother meant well, but there was a level of controlling to her that drove Minnie up the wall; unless it was for school, she made Minnie feel guilty about any time taken for herself. As it was, she didn’t approve much of Minnie going into an art field, either, and kept talking about how much better it would be if Minnie went into the sciences and got a real job. There was always an implication that, if she did so, Minnie would also be able to support her mother as well as herself. Then her mother could go off and retire to do nothing but New Age meditation camps for the rest of her life, like the one she was (thankfully) at that weekend.
It was in thinking about how to announce the decision to her mother that Minnie realized that she had, essentially, already made her choice. That thought made her sit down on her bed for a few minutes, staring at the computer screen where her paper was still pulled up without her really seeing it.
It’ll at least pay for me to finish school, she thought to herself. No more freaking about scholarship deadlines and loans. Most of her classmates were worried about their debts already, except for the few who were like James and had parents rich enough to pay for everything they might ever want to do. It would be something like bliss, to walk out on graduation day and not have to worry about it.
Really, the only thing that was still a concern on her mind was the potential of missing someone ideal because her relationship status was tied up. At that moment, Minnie made the decision: if they couldn’t wait for her to finish out the three years with James, then they weren’t worth spending her life with, anyway. With that resolve in mind, she texted first Avery, then the number that James had given her the day before –
[i’ll do it.]
[05 Moving In - Adjustments]
Minnie arranged to move in the next weekend – as soon as reasonably possible – and spent that week packing her bags with a near-ridiculous intensity. Her mother wasn’t very happy about it, of course, but luckily, Minnie’s things were mostly clothes, bedding, and school stuff like textbooks and her old art class supplies. Even if she had furniture to bring, she didn’t think she would need it, and most of the things she might have needed she didn’t really want anyway.
Her mother could sell it, for all she cared. She probably wouldn’t need half the blankets and pillows, either, but they got wrapped around the decent things to come out of her high school pottery class just in case, then wedged into the space below her passenger seat.
When she got to the mansion, James swung the gate open for her from somewhere inside the building. He was standing at the door when she pulled up to the curb. Minnie killed the engine before getting out. After extracting herself from her mother that day, she couldn’t even pull up the energy to be nervous about this part of the move. Instead, she was bright and cheerful as she greeted James, with a friendly hug for anyone watching. He seemed a little surprised by it, but responded to her bit of improv with an arm around her shoulders as though it was rehearsed.
“Gonna help me haul this stuff in?” she asked as they pulled apart.
James grinned, a bit of teasing in his voice as he replied, “Anything for you, dearest.”
He had to have gotten tips on settling her nerves from Avery or someone. It didn’t matter. Minnie loaded him up with duffels of clothes and grabbed her own basketful to follow him in, leaving the trunk of her car open so they could grab the next load more easily.
(Why worry about someone stealing out of the back of it with all the security James no doubt had in place? It was a weird thing to think about; Minnie just had to be sure that it didn’t turn into a habit of leaving her car open everywhere.)
As it was, getting her things up to the second floor and into her new room proved to be enough of a hassle on its own. Minnie dumped most of the bedding into one of the comfortable armchairs arranged near the end of the bed, and after James left, she set about sorting her clothes into the dresser and massive closet.
It took a surprising amount of time to get her clothes sorted out. She was still hanging coats in her closet when there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” she called.
She wasn’t especially surprised that it was James who nudged the door open; except at the party, she had yet to see anyone else around the manor, although James had said that there was a cleaning company who came by every Tuesday. It made the place feel incredibly empty, although part of that might have been that her first impression of it was at a fairly full party. With the vast majority of those people gone, any size of house would feel unoccupied.
James stepped over the bag she still had out on the floor (full mostly of thick winter socks and the one amusingly-horrific Christmas sweater one of her mother’s friends had given her, the one she was actually fond of) and came over to where she was in the closet. “So are you going to come see the rest of the house?” he asked.
Minnie put the hanger she was holding into the rack before answering. “Why, are you offering a tour?”
“Well,” he answered, “I’d hate for you to go hungry because you couldn’t find the kitchen.”
He was getting good at making her laugh. Minnie let him lead her out of the room and down to the kitchen first, and there she took stock of what was in the fridge. It was a good mix of both fancy things (there were at least three cheeses she’d never even heard of) and more normal, almost junk food items. A container or two of leftover takeout, a bunch of tater tots in the freezer… It was so refreshing, after years of her mother’s health food, that Minnie actually sighed with relief.
James, catching sight of it from over the fridge door, gave her a funny look. “What, were you expecting me to eat caviar for every meal?”
“No, it’s just…” Minnie debated what to tell him, and decided, to hell with it. I signed the contract yesterday, he’s not going to back out now, right? “My mom is one of those health diet nuts. It’s just so nice to see real food, instead of whatever the Diet Book Club has decided is okay to eat this year.”
Rather than being put off by mention of her mom (and really, after Avery’s comment that first day they met, she was trying hard not to complain, to not even think about it), James looked sympathetic. “Okay, yeah, I can see why you’d relish junk food. There’s chips in this cupboard.” He reached over the counter to rap his knuckles slightly on the cupboard door in question.
Minnie could hardly contain her enthusiasm. “What kind?”
“There’s like four, they’re left over from the party.”
She didn’t wait for an invitation. She didn’t even grab a bowl, just slid past him and reached up to the cupboard, grabbing a half-full sack of barbeque chips that was barely within her shorter reach.
“These are mine now,” she said, wrapping her arms around the bag as though it were a baby or wiggly small animal she had to keep a hold of. The bag crinkled loudly as she spoke. “I’m not sharing.”
James just shook his head and chuckled a bit, as she carried the sack of chips around for the rest of the tour, once in a while reaching in to munch on a small handful.
So far, life seemed pretty good.
*
Two months later, it still seemed pretty good.
For the most part, James left her the space to do her own thing, which was a luxury Minnie hadn’t even expected, and one she was coming to appreciate more than anything else. She was far too used to her mother constantly interrupting, especially when she was doing her school work, and so she was realizing that she had always been on edge about it, expecting every set of footsteps down the hall to come in and bother her.
That wasn’t the case, for the most part, and she was finally starting to relax. If James needed her for something, he usually sent a text message rather than coming in and bothering her; Minnie realized by the end of the second week that it was because it was nearly impossible to know whether she was in the house or not, when it was so large, and James spent a lot of the time that he wasn’t in meetings in the garage. (He had the expensive hobby of rebuilding old cars, giving them a new paint job, and selling them off, usually at a loss; he told her the only reason he sold them at all was because he needed the space in his garage for the next project.)
Her sch
ool work was much easier without all the interruptions; her grades were fairly good, but she was surprised to see them go up across the board by at least a point or two, even though she was actually spending less time on assignments because her concentration wasn’t broken nearly as frequently.
Of course, it wasn’t all good – there were several times when she woke up late for class because she’d stayed up too long working on a project or watching Netflix the night before, and so for the first time since her early high school mornings, Minnie had to get acquainted with the alarm clock function on her phone.
She’d met James’ mother, who came over about once a month to have a day with her son, and was already beginning to grow fond of the woman, something that she thought was mutual. At the very least, Florence Marie – Flor, she insisted Minnie call her the first time they met – seemed glad her son was settling down a bit, although she told Minnie to not let him get too comfortable. “He’s always had everything,” she said as she was preparing to leave. “Don’t give it to him easy.”
Then she’d left to get ready to go white-water rafting with some of her friends for the weekend. Minnie wasn’t quite sure what kind of person Flor was, but “intense” was definitely the word that sprang to mind first. She had yet to meet James’ father, since he was busy with work, but James told her not to worry about it, that his dad would work until the day he died, and insist on taking some paperwork with him into the grave.