He was so tall. My drunken memory had apparently blotted out that information. That didn’t seem like something I’d forget about; being a very tall person myself, I tended to notice it in other people. He was so, so tall. And broad. It was like he took up the entire room by just standing there.
For a second, I didn’t know what was going on. My brain couldn’t comprehend this reality. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
He looked sheepish. “Your grandpa let me in and said I could come up here.”
A heads-up would have been nice. My grandpa probably thought he was helping me, sending a strange man upstairs while I was in my jammies, sporting a face mask and covered in Sun Chips crumbs.
Catalina said, “Anna, you are freaking me out. What’s happening? Did Wolfgang Duck throw up a bunch of caterpillars again?”
“Marco’s here,” I said faintly. “I have to go.”
She made an unintelligible, high-pitched noise. “Holy duck! You better call me back right away,” she said. “I want every ducking detail and for you to explain why the CEO of Minx Cosmetics is standing in your bedroom! Anna, do you hear me? I’m being serious! Or you could just leave your phone on so that I can listen to what’s going on. Don’t hang up. Just set the phone down and—”
“’Kay, bye,” I said and then hung up the phone with her still giving me commands. I shoved my cell into my pocket. Marco stood near the door, as if he were afraid of what he was seeing and might bolt at any second.
Not that I could blame him. Everything around him was probably fairly terrifying. It was easy to forget what your house looked like to an outsider. I was accustomed to the mess and the smell and how old everything was. Then some obnoxiously attractive, rich, seemingly nice dude came over and suddenly I had to be embarrassed by the fact that I was poor and a slob. It made me uncomfortable, but strangely enough, I didn’t feel like Marco was judging me. Just taking everything in.
I was judging myself enough for the both of us.
A voice inside me whispered, And what would Craig think about your room? That made the uncomfortable feeling about a thousand times worse.
I tried to suppress that emotion while studying the man in front of me. Seeing him here in daylight, he was honestly more handsome than I’d imagined him to be in what had felt like an alcohol-induced fever dream.
My pulse raced, and I couldn’t explain why exactly. Or why my stomach flitted with delight when he smiled at me.
I was in love with Craig. None of this made any sense.
While I was trying to sort out my strange reactions, he gestured toward me. “Pajamas in the middle of the day?”
That insult/joke jolted my system, especially given my body’s strange response to his arrival. “I know what time it is, and I can do without the judgment. I am having a well-deserved me day and I am comfortable.”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a self-deprecating grin that made him look . . . endearing. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m a bit nervous.”
Marco was nervous? What could be bad enough that it would make someone like Marco Kimball, CEO of Minx Cosmetics, nervous?
That in and of itself was anxiety inducing, and a sense of foreboding flooded my nervous system.
I had the feeling that this was not going to be good.
CHAPTER SIX
He was about to say that Craig had eloped. He had come to my messy bedroom to personally wreck my life. I just knew it. “Are you here to tell me that Craig’s married now?” I asked in a small voice.
Marco frowned slightly and said, “No. He just announced his engagement last night. He’s not married yet.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Marco was looking around, almost like he was taking an inventory, and I wanted to ask him if I could help him find something.
Before I could, he cleared his throat and said something obvious. “So this is your room?”
Uh-huh, the place you entered in my house where I sleep is my bedroom, I thought sarcastically. I kept that part to myself and said, “Yes, this is where the tragic happens.” We stood there staring at each other until I realized my mistake. “Magic! This is where the magic . . . you know what? Never mind. You’ve seen that I live with my grandparents and their birds and witnessed me in my natural habitat. Tragic was right.”
“Freudian slip?” he asked.
“Freudian truth.”
His glance flicked over my face, and I remembered my mask. “I just need to wash this off,” I said. I’d forgotten to set a timer and didn’t know how long I’d had it on. Twenty minutes? Thirty? “You can have a seat.”
He looked around. “Where?”
It was very polite, still personally humiliating, but a good question to ask. I jumped off my bed and cleared a path for him on the floor. I grabbed a pile of clothes off the chair. “I’ve heard there’s an armchair under here,” I told him, trying to joke but failing. I handed the pile to him. “You can throw those in the closet.” I’d sort them out later.
I mean, probably not, but he didn’t need to know that.
The closet door squeaked open and he asked, “What’s that?”
I had been so focused on Marco being here and the mess that I’d forgotten my closet secrets. Maybe he didn’t have very good peripheral vision and hadn’t seen anything humiliating. “To what are you referring?”
“The TV big enough to use in a movie theater and the life-size cutout of Legolas. Either one.”
The actor who’d played Legolas in Lord of the Rings was practically old enough to be my father now, but back in the day? He was delicious. “I think the cutout is self-explanatory. Big Legolas fan. It was a present for my sixteenth birthday from my grandpa.”
Marco raised one eyebrow at me and looked like he was trying not to laugh. “Blond and blue-eyed. I think you have a type.”
“Craig doesn’t have pointy ears.”
“He kind of does.”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t—” I cut myself off as I pulled up a mental image. Maybe he did, just a little. Huh. “That’s not the point. Craig’s not an elf and he doesn’t shoot arrows.” I knew the difference between reality and fantasy.
“He does. Did. We both trained in competitive archery when we were younger.”
Why did that make him hotter?
By him I meant Craig. Not Marco.
Right?
“And the TV?” he prompted as I took the clothes from his arms and threw them on the closet floor.
“My grandmother doesn’t believe in television.”
“Oh, it’s a real thing,” he assured me. “I’ve seen it.”
“Ha ha. I mean she thinks it rots your brain and didn’t want me to watch it. The black-and-white set she has downstairs barely even works.”
“I saw that—the one that looked like it was built during the Eisenhower administration.”
“They bought it at a garage sale before I was born, so possibly.” I got the rest of the clothes off the armchair and threw them in the closet, too, pushing them over with my foot so that I could get the doors shut. “I got a part-time job in high school, and as soon as I’d saved up enough, I bought that TV and hid it in my room. I love watching movies, and they’re so much better in high definition.”