Maid for Each Other(53)

“You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Don’t push me,” he said, but I knew he wouldn’t. “You don’t want to find out.”

“Okay, well, back to my point. I’m super excited to sleep in this monster bed again. Is this thing custom-built? For a princess? Because I never dreamed a bed could be this comfortable.”

“No, I ordered it from CrashPad. You’re forgetting my family did furniture. It would be a travesty if my beds weren’t the most comfortable, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess I forgot about that,” I said, rolling over and snuggling into the pillow. “Does that mean everything in this apartment is from CrashPad?”

“Of course it does—as if I could buy furniture from anywhere else. My furniture here in New York was purchased at CrashPad, too.”

“Man, Nana Marian would freak out if she saw the particleboard coffee table that I bought at Target. And my entire bedroom set came from Amazon. She would hate me even more if she saw those things.”

“You’ve got her all wrong,” he said. “She snapped at you because she gets pissed when she forgets things. Trust me—Nana Marian is a brilliant, sweet lady who knows more about furniture than I’ll ever learn.”

I pictured her face and didn’t believe him. “I still stand by my previous answer that she would hate my furniture.”

“Well, she absolutely would,” he said. “But not because she’s a snob. It’s just because she appreciates the value of good-quality, handcrafted furniture. She was actually the one to come up with the scratch-and-dent center, where people can get good-quality furniture for half off. She wanted that. She made that happen.”

“That’s nice,” I said, wondering why I suddenly wished she liked me. Maybe it was because Declan thought she was sweet and brilliant. Obviously there was more to her than I’d seen, and it felt like a rejection, somehow, that I’d yet to see that side of her. “I’m going to bed now.”

“Yeah, same,” he agreed, and I heard him yawn. “Good night, Abi Mariano.”

“Good night, Declan Powell,” I said, my heart pinching just a little as I ended the call.

After we hung up, I burrowed my head into the big pillow, but now I even had questions about that.

Was I sleeping on his actual pillow, the one he slept on every night?

And why in God’s name did the thought of that make me happy?

24

The Invitation

Declan

I spent the entire next day playing catch-up in the office, responding to emails I’d ignored and accepting meeting invites I’d been putting off.

It was time to go back to real life.

I didn’t hate the fact that throughout the course of the day, nearly everyone I came into contact with mentioned Abi. It seemed the entire company had accepted our lie as truth, and the general consensus appeared to be that we were steps away from the altar.

Perfect.

On the other side of that coin, I didn’t text Abi at all, mostly because I knew I should probably start getting out of that habit. Besides, I knew she had class, and Benny’s, and was cleaning an apartment later. Our lives couldn’t be more different, so it probably didn’t even make sense to keep chatting.

But when I got back to my apartment after work, I got a text from her. It was short and sweet.

Hope you had a good day.

And God help me, I was glad to hear from her. I slipped off my shoes and went into the kitchen, wondering what the fuck was happening to me.

I texted: How was class?

Abi: GREAT. We mapped out my short story collection and it WORKS, Declan.

I replied: That’s fantastic.

I wished I could read them all.

Abi: So what New York things are you doing tonight? I still want to live vicariously through you.

I texted: I’m actually doing nothing tonight because I’m tired.

Abi: But you’re in the city that never sleeps. How can you just be sitting inside?

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and replied: I’m not a tourist, remember?

I hopped up onto the counter, still dressed in slacks and a dress shirt—I was so tired that I was unwilling to walk all the way to my bedroom to change.

Abi: You have no idea how jealous I am right now. NYC is seriously the one place in the world I’d go if I were given a free trip anywhere.

Curious, I texted: What would you want to do if you magically showed up here right now?

Abi: Walk. I think I would be happy walking the streets of New York for days. I’d walk to Central Park and go write by those famous turtles near the big rock. I’d walk to the grocery store from You’ve Got Mail. And maybe go to a flea market in Brooklyn.

I texted: What about the Empire State Building? Statue of Liberty? Do you want to do all the touristy things?

Abi: Nope. I see those on TV and I’m sure they’re fantastic, but my goal would be to visit everything that made me feel like I lived there. Give me all the bodegas, let me roll around in honking horns. And I’d want to walk by all the publishing houses, just to manifest writing something that someday might show up in print.

It was so on-brand for Abi to want to visit “the city that never sleeps” but do something absolutely not exciting.

I texted: That’s a very low-maintenance visit to the city. You don’t even want to go to a show?