Page 21 of Ghostlighted
The elevator doors slid open. Ricky gestured me inside. “After you.”
When we stepped out of the car, Greg was standing in his open door in his standard weekend casual chinos and polo shirt.
“This is super inconvenient, Maz. I do have things to do, you know.”
“It’s half a dozen boxes, Greg. It’ll take us twenty minutes to move them out and then you can stop complaining about them taking up your valuable attic space. BT-dub, if you hadn’t blown off the lawyer who was looking for me by telling her I was dead, I’d have removed them three months ago.”
He crossed his arms. “And put them where, exactly?”
I can admit it—I smirked. “In my new house, exactly.”
Greg snorted. “Like you can afford a house. You can’t even maintain your car.”
“That car’s history, anyway,” Ricky said. “He’s getting a new one.”
Greg’s jaw sagged. “Wait. What?”
“Hey.” I poked Ricky’s biceps, which were his best feature. Other than his smile. And his eyes. And his hair. And his butt. Not to mention his heart. “I haven’t agreed to that yet.”
Ricky’s smile was decidedly smug. “You will.”
“Brother,” I muttered. “Everybody needs to get off my case about the car.” I pushed my curls off my forehead. “Greg, this is Ricky Vargas. Ricky, Greg Findler.”
Greg’s left foot in its Bruno Magli loafer began to tap in a cadence I knew all too well: his you’re-wasting-my-time-but-I’m-keeping-my-annoyance-in-check tempo. It was a little slower than his if-you-don’t-do-what-I-want-I’ll-bring-out-my-killer-passive-aggressiveness beat and a little faster than his get-to-the-point-because-I’ve-got-better-things-to-do roll.
Greg’s toe taps had a vocabulary all their own.
“I suppose,” he drawled, “that once more you’ve conned someone into believing you’ll actually return a favor.” He turned his head in Ricky’s direction, but his gaze was focused on the wall behind us. “I should warn you. He’ll never make good on it.”
Ricky never lost his affable expression. “In my family, we don’t keep score that way. But if we did, Maz would have banked about a decade’s worth of credit when he decided to send my godmother and sister to Boston for my cousin’s graduation.”
Greg’s chiseled jaw sagged. “He what? How?” He turned a glare on me. “If you’ve got money, you owe me.”
“Owe you for what?”
“For storing your boxes.”
I sighed. He did have a point. “Was it difficult to move them out of the way for your own things?”
“Not exactly.” His gaze slid away from mine. “The area isn’t easily accessible.”
“Yeah, because it’s anattic. Its purpose is to keep stuff out of the way.” I narrowed my eyes. “You badgered the reno company for weeks so they’d lower the bedroom ceilings and create that space. Have you putanythingup there at all?”
“No,” he mumbled.
“Are youplanningto put anything up there? Ever?”
His nostrils flared. “You know that’s not the point.”
“Look, Greg. When I lived here, I paid my share. I offered to put everything in a storage locker, but you said as long as I moved everything to the attic myself—which I did—that I could leave it there until I found a new place. Well, I’ve found a newplace and I’ve come to get everything out of your hair. We can finally be done.”
Ricky cocked his head. “You know something? I think that’s why he agreed to keep it, Maz. He doesn’twantto be done.”
“This is none of your business,” Greg said hotly.
“Maybe it wasn’t before. But it is now. Are you going to let us in?”
For a minute, I gaped at Ricky. “What?” I croaked.
