Page 36 of The Boyfriend Goal

He curls his hand around the little terracotta pot, shaking his head. “Prick is perfect.”

He sets it gently on the floor of the backseat, then holds my door open for me. Once inside, a new reality hits me as he starts the car and eases into traffic. “I don’t have anything besides my clothes and books. You said you had sheets, but do I need to get anything else? Towels? Toilet paper? Hangers?” I wave a hand. “I’ll just go to Target tomorrow. I can take the bus.”

As he buckles in, he smiles, the confident, in-control kind of grin he gave me the other night. “Josie, it’s furnished. And I have all those things already.”

Of course it is. “Right, right,” I say. “The decorator. You mentioned a decorator.”

He scratches his jaw. “Decorating’s not my thing.”

What is your thing? Besides saving half-naked women with clothes and now saving fully-clothed women with homes?

“Well, I’m excited to see it,” I say, playing the Super Roomie role perfectly, since he’s clearly a Super Landlord. Which brings me to another point—something I should have asked Christian. “What is the rent?”

Wesley scoffs.

I wait for his answer.

But he’s silent.

“Seriously? What is it?” I ask again, hoping it’s affordable. I’m sure it is—that was the point of me asking Christian for help. Still, I want to know.

“Josie, I’m not charging you rent.”

“I can pay. I have a job. It’s only for three months, but still, I have one. How about I pay whatever I was going to pay for the short-term rental?”

He shoots me a quick look before he changes lanes. “How about you don’t?”

“Wesley,” I plead. This man is so generous. But I can’t keep taking from him. “I want to pay. Something.”

“Josie,” he says, his voice as stern as it was when he told me to bend over the bed. “I own my home. Outright. I only want you to be a guest.”

Now is clearly not the time to argue with this bossy and generous man—and that’s a lethal combo. Lethal to my panties. “I’ll find a way,” I say, and maybe I can plant some seeds for the next time this comes up. “I can cook, I can make coffee, I can water plants, I can help…and I can shelve books according to the Dewey Decimal System.”

“How about you do your own dishes and keep things neat, and we’ll call it good?”

I can tell that’s as far as I’m getting, so I drop the topic, saying, “I won’t miss the spring on Maeve’s couch.”

He tosses me a look as he slows at the lights on Fillmore. “The one that was going to stab you in the ass?”

I groan privately. I told him about the evil spring the night we slept together. Way to move on, Josie. “Yes. That one. And it definitely attacked me. I have the bruise on my butt to prove it,” I say, and that probably doesn’t help either—all this butt talk. I quickly pivot. “So, if you don’t have black sheets, are they…Sea Dogs colors?”

“They’re navy.”

“That’s in the same family as Sea Dogs colors,” I point out as he drives.

“The Sea Dogs color is royal blue,” he says.

Okaaaay. This isn’t awkward at all, discussing the precise hue of his team colors instead of the attack spring. “Right. Of course,” I say, then hunt around for safe topics. Not hockey. Not Sea Dogs. Not the other night. What do roomies discuss? House stuff. “So you have a room under the stairs? Is it like a cupboard?”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s a room. It sort of extends past the staircase. It even has a window. And a nook.”

My mouth waters. “A reading nook?”

“I guess you could use it for that.”

“What else would someone use it for?”

He shrugs as he drives past shops I’ll want to check out soon, like An Open Book and Bling and Baubles. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t use it. Honestly, no one has even stayed there since I moved in. Guess it’s a virgin room.”

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