The Devil Wears Black(34)

Maddie: I don’t know. Maybe Brooklyn. What did you have for breakfast?

Chase: I think her name was Tiffany.

Maddie: Dear God, you’re stabbable to a fault.

Chase: Relax. A protein pack.

Chase: Do NOT make a jizz joke.

Maddie: Favorite channel?

Chase: Is that a real question? Is there a right answer other than HBO?

Maddie: Best way to start the day?

Chase: You sitting on my face.

Maddie: Thank you.

Chase: For the riveting visual?

Maddie: For reminding me why we broke up.

Chase: Any-fucking-time.

Maddie:

I shouldn’t have gone to bed with a smile on my face, yet I did.

Chase Black was the devil. A sinister, cold creature that somehow managed to scorch his way into my veins. But whatever he was . . . being next to him made me feel alive.



On Tuesday, I woke up to zero sticky notes from Chase. Considering I’d specifically asked him not to touch my things, I should have felt a lot more cheerful than I did when I glanced at the shelf of my fridge, offended by its stark emptiness.

Not that it mattered. No Post-it Notes from Chase meant I didn’t have to clean up all his mess when I got back to my apartment. It gave me a good chance to bake something and bring it to Ethan’s office. (This was not retaliation against Chase for not leaving me any notes. No sirree. Just me trying to be nice to Ethan.) Wednesday, however, was a game changer. Two days away from the festive engagement dinner, I found a slew of black sticky notes stuck to my fridge. Not the same color as my turquoise ones with the leopard print that I kept on my counter to make supermarket lists. Bastard had brought his own notes. That was why he hadn’t written anything on Tuesday. He’d probably asked his assistant to provide him with the stationery he required to continue our written beef. There was no way his Royal Highness had descended down from Olympus himself and visited Office Depot. The pen he’d used was gold. He had a lot to say, so he’d spread it over a few notes, sticking them one below the other in succession.

M,

What are you wearing Friday night? We need to coordinate, although I doubt I own anything purple and green with patterned smiling pigs. Or sequined, feathery hats with pom-poms and bow ties.

Or anything else completely grotesque, for that matter.

PS:

Daisy seems to be obsessed with the same squirrel. I am afraid they will create a subspecies. Squog. Squirrel dogs.

PPS:

Bull. Shit. What was Pediatric Boy’s emergency? Testosterone transplant?





—C


Frantic, I scrambled to the trash can to retrieve the last notes we’d written to each other to see what he was referring to in the second PS. The trash can was full to the brim. I looked down at it, aghast, before flipping it over, squeezing my eyes shut while breathing through my mouth.

Garbage rained down on the floor. I sifted through it as Daisy sniffed around banana peels and string cheese wrappers, tail wagging, until I found our last notes. I smoothed them on the floor, reading them over. Chase had taunted me that Ethan was still a virgin. I’d told him we’d had crazy sex the night he’d dropped me off from the Hamptons. Obviously, he wasn’t buying it.

I scowled at Daisy, who was licking the inside of a chicken-salad can, making slurping sounds.

“No one can know about this, Daisy. No one.”

She replied with half a bark. I picked up my pen and wrote, pressing it against the paper so hard the words dented the rest of the pages.

C,

Haven’t thought about my attire for the evening. But now that you’re asking, why, yes, I will go for the sequined purple dress with the green jacket (velvet) paired with brown heels. No smiling pigs, but I think I have something with Michael Scott on it.

PS:

Ethan is more of a man than you’d never be. He is honest and loyal and NICE.

PPS:

Yes, the squirrel’s name is Frank. Let them be. They’re dysfunctional but good together.

PPPS:

I’m suspiciously low on orange juice. Please do not help yourself to anything while fulfilling your side of the Daisy bargain.





—M


On Thursday, there was radio silence. I did not analyze the lack of notes while riding the train on my way to work. I didn’t care. Truly, I didn’t. But if I had given it some thought (which, again, I hadn’t), the natural assumption would be that Chase had forgotten to bring his black notes or golden pen or both.

Which meant that continuing this conversation wasn’t something he thought about regularly.

Which, again, was completely okay with me.

The day slogged by painfully slowly. I texted with Ethan back and forth. We weren’t able to see each other for the rest of the week because he was training for a half marathon—the same charity marathon Katie had told me in the Hamptons she was going to do—and had to wake up super early. Sven said I was surprisingly useless that day. I wanted to believe it was because I wasn’t going to be seeing Ethan, but realistically speaking, it was Chase that made my mind drift away from work. When Sven was out of sight, Nina helpfully added I was turning into one of my plants. “A burst of color and inefficiency.” She click-click-clicked her mouth, her eyes glued to her Apple monitor. I had to take the sketch I was currently working on home to finish since it was due the next day.