Page 54 of Roommate Wars
It was incrediblyodd to rely on someone for help who wasn’t a person I paid. When Elise offered to visit my dad, I’d automatically refused, but then she reminded me that she was my girlfriend.
My girlfriend.I’d had them before, but those relationships were different. Max would say I chose the wrong women. In truth, I’d chosen the right women: people who were superficial and allowed me to keep things surface level.
Elise wasn’t anything like the women I’d dated in the past, and she reminded me of it this morning by insisting on visiting my father, when none of my exes had known his name. My dad liked Elise, and she had been kind to him. Letting her go made sense.
I shook my head and made my way to my next meeting. This was how you got attached—little kindnesses and building trust—but I couldn’t seem to push Elise away.
Max was already on the scene when my mother died, so he’d been grandfathered in, but anyone else? For over a decade, I’d managed to keep people out. And yet, with Elise, I couldn’t. Mostly because she wouldn’t let me, but also because I didn’t want to keep her away. What I wanted was to hold her close. What the fuck was happening to me?
“Jack?”
I looked up, and Thalia was standing in the meeting room, staring at me staring off at nothing. “Yes?”
“Our new clients arrived. Are you—okay?”
I pulled out a seat at the table and set my laptop down. “Yes, call them in.”
I had tech support and engineers who could go over the technical aspects of this project, but if I handled it, I knew it would get done right. My need to control this aspect of the job drove Thalia crazy. She said it made for bad optics to have the owner doing menial tasks.
I didn’t care.
The clients walked in, and the meeting went well. We were amassing more investors than anticipated and had the ear of government agencies and a few foreign entities, who wanted to know where and how climate hazards would impact their communities and bottom line. Environ was growing faster than our team of fifteen could handle, and Thalia had left the meeting with a directive to hire experts in other fields to bulk up the program.
This was all good news, but now it was ten at night, and I still hadn’t gone to check on my dad.
The doctors were hopeful they’d rid my dad of cancer, but I didn’t trust doctors and I didn’t trust cancer. The medical staff had said my mom was in remission too, and then the cancer came back a year later and killed her within weeks. Nature could fuck you in a heartbeat and take everything.
I pulled up to the parking space I paid a fortune to reserve a short walk from my dad’s apartment and hurried up the stairs to his place, checking the time. It was closer to eleven than I would like.
Elise had stopped by, because she’d texted me when she was on her way to drop off the prescriptions, so at least one person had touched base with him. Even so, my dad hadn’t called or replied to my text messages over the last few hours, and I would feel better confirming he was okay.
I let myself into the apartment, expecting things to be quiet and the lights to be dimmed, but that wasn’t the case.
“Yes!” came a shout from my dad’s mancave, followed by the sound of feminine laughter.
Elise couldn’t still be here…
But apparently she was, because a second later she rushed out of my old bedroom, her hair pulled into a low ponytail tilting on one side and mussed. She was wearing a sweatshirt of mine she must have found in one of the closets.
Her eyes widened. “Jackson! Hurry back. The climax is about to begin.” She whipped past me and into the kitchen. “I’m getting more popcorn.”
Climax? The direction my brain went was obviously not what she was referring to. She must be talking about a TV show.
She dumped kernels into an ancient popcorn maker I didn’t know we still had, then grabbed half a stick of butter and placed it in the microwave. She looked over, her brow pinched in frustration. “It’s starting—what are you waiting for?”
This was weird. My dad wasn’t in distress, my new girlfriend was at my childhood home, and they were—hanging out?
I walked to the TV room, following orders.
The same show I’d watched with my dad was on the screen, about the couples introducing their parents on the first date. In this episode, one family was Mormon, and one was Muslim.
My dad looked up, but only briefly—his eyes glued to the television. “Where’s Elise? She’s about to miss it. Elise!” He fumbled with the remote and paused the show while I sank onto the couch.
Elise came in like a hurricane and half sat on my lap—which I didn’t mind—to catch the “climax,” spilling popcorn over the side of the bowl as she handed it to my dad.
My dad proceeded to give her a quick recap. “The Muslim mother-in-law’s eyes went wide when the Mormon family wore shoes inside their home, but they got over it quickly. The one thing the two families agree on is no sex before marriage. They might have more in common than they think.”
Strangely, the show was engaging, particularly while listening to my dad and Elise’s commentary.
