Tall, Tatted and Tempting(29)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the apartment when it wasn’t full of testosterone and male bodies. It’s a mess, like usual. I pour myself f a cup of coffee and load the dishwasher, and then clean the countertops. I can’t help it. They might not even want me to do it. But I do it anyway. My life is such a mess, and what I want most in the world is to tidy it up. Since I can’t tidy my own life, I’ll tidy their apartment instead. I remove a rubber band from a stack of mail and twist my hair up out of my face. If I’m going to clean, I’m going to do it right.

I start a load of laundry, and fold what’s in the dryer. I don’t know which shirt goes to which man, since they’re all big boys. So, I just make a neat pile of them and stack them on the kitchen table. The pile grows as the day goes on, and by the end of the afternoon, the house is still empty and quiet, and it’s clean from top to bottom. I didn’t clean any of their bedrooms, because that would be an invasion of their privacy, and my cleaning at all might be, now that I think of it. I bite my fingernails and look around. They won’t be mad, will they?

I go into the bathroom and look beneath the sink. There were cleaning supplies there the other day, and it could use refreshing. I lift a bucket of baby toys out of the way and then I stop. I shuffle through them. There are tiny boats, bath crayons, and a rubber ducky. I give it a squeeze and it goes flat, a hiss of air escaping it. Why do they have baby toys?

The curiosity is killing me. Do they have a little sister? They couldn’t possibly. Logan said he lived with four brothers the day I met him. He didn’t say anything about a sister. I put the bucket back under the sink, and keep cleaning.

The timer on the dryer goes off, and I fold the last load of laundry, blowing a lock of hair out of my eyes. I look toward the window, and see that the day is nearly gone. So much for busking in the subway. And Fridays are usually my best days, since people just got paid and they’re feeling generous. I have wasted the whole day cleaning Logan’s apartment, but I feel good about it. I put my hands on my hips and look around the room. I did a good job. I’ve mopped, and vacuumed, dusted, and put things away. Of course, I had to guess where a lot of stuff goes. The stuff I’m not sure about, I’ve been putting on the kitchen table with the stacked laundry.

I open a kitchen drawer and stumble back when I see that it’s full of condoms. Nothing but condoms. They’re in every shape, every size and every color. And every flavor, if the banana on the front of one is any indication. My face fills with heat. Why on earth do they have a drawer filled with condoms? I slam it shut, and walk away. It’s none of my business.

I carry the mop bucked toward the sink so that I can dump it. I pick it up, and just as I’m walking across the kitchen floor, the door of the apartment opens, and Logan walks through. Only he’s not alone. On his shoulders, there’s a blonde with two squiggly pony tails. He ducks to get through the door, and she giggles when he wiggles her feet and pretends to dump her off his shoulders.

He stops in front of the closed door and freezes when he sees me standing there. He must not have expected me to still be there. And I certainly didn’t expect for him to have a child. He starts toward me, one hand holding on to her feet tightly at the base of his neck. And the other reaches for me. But I’m so startled by the girl that the bucket of sudsy water slips from my hands.

“Stop!” I warn, because I don’t want him to slip with his daughter on his shoulders.

Logan



I’m so damn happy to see Kit that I want to run to her and pick her and spin her around. I wonder if she’d giggle like Hayley does when I jostle her. Probably not. I wasn’t sure Kit would still be here, and I was really worried she’d vanished when she didn’t come to see me at the tattoo parlor.

Water crashes over the toes of my boots, and Kit rushes to right the bucket. She slumps, looking down at the mess. But her dejection only lasts for a second. She gets herself together and rushes to the table, where there are piles of folded laundry and she grabs towels, throwing them down over the spill.

She’s saying something but I can’t read her lips. I walk toward her and she warns me to stop, holding up her hands. Her eyes dart to Hayley, and then back to my face, and she doesn’t look too happy with me. I set Hayley on the counter and put a cookie in her hands, and she settles there to watch us, her mouth full of chocolate chips. Hayley’s three, and she’s a cool kid.

I move the towels around with my boots, and Kit drops to her knees to mop up all the water. She pushes the towels around frantically, until it’s all cleaned up. Then she throws the wet towels in the mop bucket and starts a load of wash with them in it. She comes back to the kitchen and looks at Hayley, who’s still perched on the counter, happily munching on her cookie. Paul’s going to have my ass when he finds out I gave her chocolate, but I needed to entertain her for a second.

Kit blows her hair out her eyes with a frustrated breath and glares at me. “You’re home,” she says. Her hands are on her hips, and she’s not wearing any make up and her hair’s a mess and she has a line of dirt streaked across her forehead. But she’s never looked prettier.

I nod. The knees of Kit’s jeans are wet, and her shirt’s damp now, too. “What have you been doing?” I ask. I look around. The apartment is clean. And I don’t just mean “straighten it up because Grandma’s coming over” clean. I mean spotlessly clean. Like showroom floor clean. But better. It smells nice. And it looks nice. And she’s here. God, I’m so happy she’s here.