Claim Me(45)

I wrap a towel around me, then open the door to our tiny bathroom. A cloud of steam escapes ahead of me, and I follow it out, then jump about a foot when I hear the sharp crash of ceramic shattering against the tile kitchen floor.

For an instant, I’m terrified, imagining intruders and boogey-men and God knows what. But what would have been a scream breaks into a relieved burst of laughter when I hear Jamie’s voice cutting sharply through the apartment. “Oh, f*ck a duck! Nikki! I just killed your favorite coffee mug!”

“I’m right here,” I call, hurrying down the two stairs, my back to our tiny dining area as I face Jamie in the kitchen.

She looks at me oddly, probably because I’m still laughing. She holds up the handle of my Dallas Cowboys mug. The rest of the shattered blue ceramic is scattered on the tile at her feet. “Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” I’m still laughing. I don’t know why. Relief, I guess.

“It was a ridiculous favorite, anyway,” she says, as if I’m giving her grief about the mug. “You don’t even like football.”

“It was big,” I said. “It could hold hot chocolate and marshmallows without the chocolate dribbling over the side when you stick a spoon in.”

“Yeah, but what’s the point of drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows if you’re going to be all prissy about it?”

I can’t argue with that, so I don’t. Instead I shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops that are by the stairs, then step gingerly into the kitchen to get the small broom and dustpan I put under the sink after I moved in.

“Thanks,” she says, then rolls her eyes when I hand the broom to her. “Okay.” She sighs. “Fine.”

As she squats down, much better dressed for the job in jeans than I am in my towel, I ask where she’s been. “I was worried,” I admit. “Did you sleep somewhere else?”

“Shit no.” She brushes the last of the mug splinters into the dustpan, then tilts her head to aim a cat-ate-the-canary grin up at me. “I may have stayed out all night, but I didn’t sleep.” Her dreamy grin fades and she peers hard at me. “And you? Because it seems to me your bed’s not getting all that much action lately. Pretty soon you’re going to have to sign the poor thing up for therapy. Loneliness can lead to depression, you know.”

“I’ll get right on that,” I say dryly. “And as a matter of fact, no. I wasn’t here, either.”

“Uh-huh.”

I hold my hands up in surrender. “I didn’t say a word,” I point out. “But if I were going to say something, it would only be that when I stay out all night it’s with the same guy. You have so many different men you should start a Facebook page just to keep track of them.”

“Not a bad plan, actually. Except that I think this guy might be something special.”

I gape. “Seriously?”

“Totally. He’s not as f*ckalicious as Damien-king-of-the-world-Stark, but I wouldn’t run screaming from a repeat performance. Or even a triple play, for that matter.”

This is as close as I’ve ever heard Jamie get to discussing a relationship. To say I’m bowled over would be an understatement. “You can’t just drop a bomb like that on me when I’m running late. So come on. We can talk while I get dressed.”

She follows me into my bedroom and perches at my desk in front of my laptop. It’s open, and the screensaver is a slideshow of pictures of Damien that I took in Santa Barbara. Damien with so much light and humor in his eyes that I can’t ever look at those photos without smiling. Between that screensaver and the exquisite, original Monet painting Damien gave me that now hangs between my desk and my dresser, I cannot enter this room without feeling cherished. It’s a nice feeling, and one that I am not used to. In college, my apartment was simply a place to live. With my mother, my room was the place I wanted to escape. But here, there is Jamie and my newfound freedom. There is excitement. There is potential.