Saved by Brother's Best Friend (Marianna and Duane) novel Chapter 11

Marianna.

I've been living in Duane Richter's apartment for five days, and I've seen him exactly twice.

Once at 2 AM on Wednesday, when I got up to pee and found him standing in the kitchen in the dark, drinking water straight from a bottle like some kind of nocturnal cryptid. We made eye contact. Neither of us said anything. I shuffled back to the guest room like the gremlin I am, and by morning he was gone.

Once on Friday, when I was eating peanut butter straight from the jar—don't judge me, I'm in survival mode—and heard the elevator ding. I dove behind the kitchen island like I was dodging sniper fire, crouching there with my spoon clutched to my chest while his footsteps passed through the living room and disappeared down the hall. He never even knew I was there.

I've become a cockroach. A peanut-butter-eating, hoodie-stealing, furniture-hiding cockroach who's too embarrassed to face her host and too broke to leave.

I know he's still here—the evidence is everywhere, if you know how to look. Protein powder that rearranges itself overnight. Gym equipment that migrates across the room. The faint trail of his cologne in hallways, lingering like a threat. But the man himself has become nocturnal, or maybe just allergic to me. He leaves before I wake up. Returns after I've given up waiting for the sound of the elevator. Race week, I've learned from obsessive Googling, swallows drivers whole. They belong to the track, to the team, to a thousand cameras and engineers and fans. Not to the random woman squatting in their guest room.

Which is fine. Good, even. The less I see him, the less I have to confront... whatever it is I'm trying not to confront.

Meanwhile, my life continues its slow-motion collapse.

The airline finally called—my luggage is "unrecoverable," which is corporate speak for "we lost your entire life and here's $200 to go fuck yourself." Two hundred dollars. For a suitcase containing my laptop, my favorite jeans, three years of carefully curated professional clothes, and my grandmother's necklace. The one she gave me before she died. The one I was supposed to wear at my wedding someday, assuming I ever find someone willing to marry a wooden board. Gone. Dissolved into the void of American airline incompetence like it never existed at all.

My landlord sent a passive-aggressive email about rent. I transferred the $847 and watched my bank account flatline into double digits. Ate peanut butter sandwiches for three dinners in a row. Refreshed my inbox approximately seven hundred times waiting for responses to job applications that never came. Got one rejection out of twelve—one, singular, the others not even bothering to acknowledge my existence—and tried not to read it as a sign.

Alina hasn't come back. Marco called once, and I lied, and he believed me because he was too busy with his Monte Carlo crisis to notice I was drowning.

And now it's Sunday morning. Day six of my glamorous new life as a professional freeloader.

I'm lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating whether it's possible to die of embarrassment when I finally—finally—think to check my spam folder.

I don't know why I do it. Boredom, probably. The desperate hope that maybe one of my job applications got filtered wrong, that somewhere in between the Nigerian prince scams and the erectile dysfunction ads, there's an email telling me my life isn't completely over.

And there is.

Sort of.

From: [email protected] Subject: Interview Invitation - Sports Performance Specialist PositionDate: Friday, May 3rd, 2024, 9:47 AM

Two days ago. This email arrived two days ago, and I didn't see it because my phone decided that a legitimate job opportunity belonged in the same category as "CONGRATULATIONS YOU'VE WON A FREE IPHONE."

I'm going to murder this phone. I'm going to take it apart piece by piece and—

Dear Ms. Reyes,

"Fuck."

I say it out loud, to no one, in the middle of Duane Richter's empty grey apartment.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—"

I'm still in his hoodie. I haven't showered. My hair looks like it's been through a war. I don't have professional clothes—they're all in a suitcase somewhere in the airline void—I don't have printed copies of my resume, I don't have my certification on me, I don't have—

Okay. Okay. Calm down. Think.

Three hours. I have three hours to transform myself from "goblin creature who's been subsisting on peanut butter and self-loathing" into "competent professional worthy of a $55,000 salary."

I can do this.

Probably.

Maybe.