The Roommate Agreement(2)

It was hard to do that with judgey-ass gym-rats all over your living room.

Not that I cared. If there was anything better than chips and queso on the sofa, it was chips and queso in bed without pants on.

Now there was a quote for a t-shirt.

Still, I was tired of it. I wanted my apartment back. I wanted to not find socks in the bathtub and empty bottles under the sofa. I wasn’t a freaking mom yet. I didn’t need another person leaving shit everywhere, thank you very much.

Jay stood up and held up his hands. “All right, I’ll pick it all up.”

I folded my arms across my chest and eyed him. “Then you can vacuum the crumbs up from the carpet.”

He paused.

He didn’t know where I kept the vacuum cleaner. I bet he didn’t even know where I kept the damn dishcloth.

I leveled my gaze on him. He knew that I knew he didn’t know, but I also knew that he didn’t want to admit it.

Jay was, if nothing else, a bit of an alpha male. If he were a character in a book, he’d be a werewolf alpha without a doubt.

He stood at over six-foot-tall, and his muscles were the perfect mix of toned and bulky at the same time. He wasn’t going to be entering a bodybuilding competition any time soon, but he was the guy that made girls look once, twice, at least three times on the beach or, hell, on the street.

His hair was unfairly dark and thick, cut close to the sides of his head. The top was longer and swept over to the side. Coupled with a square jaw that was dotted with yesterday’s stubble and startlingly green eyes, he was impossibly handsome.

But none of those looks would work on me.

I met him when he was missing his two front teeth and he’d punched a boy in fourth grade for being mean to me.

We’d been in first grade.

He’d taken a suspension, and I’d found myself a new best friend.

Nobody had ever bullied me since that day.

“You can look at me like that all you like, Jay Cooper. I’m not going to tell you where I keep the vacuum cleaner. Just like I’m not going to tell you where I keep the pods for the washer.”

He groaned, grabbing an empty plastic bag from the cupboard to pick up his trash. “Come on, Shelbs, help me out here.”

“No. If you want to keep living here, things have to change. You have to start picking up your fair share of the chores and you have to be more respectful of me.” I gripped the edge of the island and leaned forward. “I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having my Sundays interrupted by your couch coaching. I’m sick of doing your laundry like I’m your mom and I’m sure as shit fed up of you eating all my damn Oreos.”

“Always with the Oreos,” he muttered, shaking the bag out with a noise that went right through me. “All right, all right. I get it. I’ll pick up my shit now and make it up to you, okay?”

I grunted an unintelligible noise and pushed off from the counter. Storming into my bedroom—the only room in the apartment untouched by Jay—I slammed the door behind me for dramatic effect.

I did enjoy a good dose of drama—as long as I was the one dishing it out.

I had no time for it from someone else. Unless it was on Facebook and I could go down the rabbit hole of comments. Then I had time for it.

The fact was, my drama was warranted.

Three months ago, Jay had turned up on my doorstep the day before his apartment building was sold and begged to stay with me. His loose-tongued, Fireball-loving grandma had just moved into his old room at his parents’ place, and he had nowhere to go.

I had a spare room and as a writer staring into the black hole that was my bank account, needed a roommate.

It had seemed perfect. He promised he’d be out by three months. That he was actively looking for a new place and he swore it wouldn’t be too long.

I’d believed him. We’d been best friends for over a decade when we’d started high school, and he’d been the hot football star who needed tutoring.

And no, it didn’t go the way most romance books did.

Instead of the book-loving girl making the hottest guy fall in love with her, we became best friends.

Now, that asshole was in my spare room, still not on the tenancy officially, and was eating all my goddamn Oreos.

Things had to change.

I had to face the facts: Jay wasn’t going to move out anytime soon.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I still needed help with the rent, so I’d just end up having to find a new roommate anyway. Keeping the pain in the ass one I already had seemed like less of a risk than trying to find someone else.

Besides, I had Jay’s mom’s phone number if he annoyed me too much, and I wasn’t afraid to use it. Not to mention that the woman loved me; she often referred to me as the daughter she never had.

I wasn’t sure if that was because she wanted me to actually be her daughter or if she liked having somebody else be ‘bad cop’ when she didn’t like his girlfriends.

As the best friend, that was my job. Right? Weed out the weak and all that.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact I had a minor crush on him. Nope. Not at all.

Okay, maybe it did. But in my defense, the crush was relatively new. There’s only so many times you can see your best friend wandering around in a towel, still wet from the shower before it starts to do things to you.

Namely, turn your clitoris into a little heathen.