Addicted(48)

“Tori and I are capable of feeding ourselves, you know.”




“Hey, speak for yourself.” Tori wanders in and grabs an apple from one of the bags. “If a handsome man wants to bring me food, I am more than happy to let him. Oh, and, Ethan, for future reference, Gala apples are my favorite.”

He grins at her. “I’ll remember that.”

“Please do.”

I roll my eyes. “He’s not going to be buying us any more groceries, Tori.”

“Why not? It makes him feel good and it saves us the trouble of going to the store and having to cart a bunch of bags up to the apartment. I say it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”

“You would.”

“So, who wants a smoothie?” Ethan asks, unpacking the new blender and rinsing it out in the sink as Tori wanders back to her spot on the couch.

“Are we seriously going to do this again?” I ask him, wrapping my arms around his waist and pressing kisses between his shoulder blades.

“Do what?” he asks innocently, as if he doesn’t know.

“Fight about this totally extravagant gift that you insist on giving me a second time.”

“Tori, please explain to your roommate that a blender is not an extravagant gift. It’s actually quite practical—a good breakfast is very important.”

“I can have a good breakfast without making it in a very extravagant, four hundred dollar blender!” I tell him, completely exasperated.

“Again. Not extravagant, Chloe. A car is an extravagant gift. A trip to Paris is an extravagant gift. A—”

“Forty thousand dollar platinum and diamond belly chain from Tiffany’s is an extravagant gift,” Tori continues for him.

“But not a blender, Chloe. Geez, you need to chill out.” But the blender is now the least of my worries. “Forty thousand dollars?” I squawk, my hands going to the jewelry I haven’t taken off since the night we had our talk. “My belly chain cost forty thousand dollars?”

Ethan shoots my roommate a dirty look. “Thanks a lot, Tori.”

She shrugs, then takes a bite of her apple. “At least she’s not bitching about the blender anymore. Perspective, man. Perspective.”

“What the hell, Ethan? Are you kidding me with this?”

“I don’t see what the big deal is—”

“Forty thousand dollars is the big deal. My car didn’t cost that much.”

“Believe me, I am well aware of that fact.” His look says he’s far from being impressed by the knowledge.

“Hey! My car is fine.”

“I didn’t say otherwise.” He pulls a large basket of strawberries out of one of the bags and starts washing them carefully.

“You didn’t have to. It’s written all over your face.” I reach over and snatch a strawberry, biting it all the way down to the stem. “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, yeah? What am I supposedly doing?” He’s cleaning a pineapple now, slicing off the thick, spiky skin before cutting the fruit into cubes.

“Picking on my car to distract me from the fact that the cost of this chain is completely insane.”

“Give the guy a break,” Tori tells me from behind the fashion magazine her head has been stuck in for most of the last half an hour. “You had to know it was expensive. It came in a Tiffany’s box, for God’s sake. You can barely get a piece of glass there for under a thousand dollars, let alone what has to be easily five carats in diamonds.”

“Eight,” Ethan interjects as he chops up a couple of bananas and dumps them in the blender.

“Nice. Eight carats definitely makes a statement.”

“What statement?” I demand, my voice still much too shrill. “What statement could eight carats possibly make? Besides that the person who bought it has way too much money?”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure it says taken,” Tori tells me with an eye roll. “Not to mention I-have-more-money-than-you-and-if-you-touch-her-I’ll-wipe-you-off-the-face-of-the-earth.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Actually, that’s exactly the vibe I was going for.” Ethan’s grinning widely, blue eyes sparkling and his cheeks creasing in that way they do when he’s deeply amused by something. “Nice job articulating it, Tori.”