Page 22 of Bridesmaid By Chance
“It’s not, and I admit it. Now, back to me.”
Stacey laughs and shakes her head while she plucks a piece of mail from the pile and opens it. “Either way, Hudson’s not getting into that club. It’s for the married folk only.”
“Yeah, he’s not married, or else what I said to him would have been exceedingly more inappropriate.” I groan in frustration. “This is such a mess. I can’t afford to not have a job. What the hell am I going to do?”
“Probably apologize.” She unfolds a letter and starts scanning it. “Apologies can go a long way.”
“Apologize? No way. I’m not about to apologize to him. That would be, for one, humiliating. Two, require maturity, which I think we found out today, I lack. And three, be humiliating.”
“You said humiliating twice.”
“Because it would be double the amount of humiliation, and I can’t take that.” I flick at her paper. “What the hell are you reading? Don’t you see I’m in a crisis?”
“I do, but…” She pauses and her nose scrunches up. “Oh shit.”
“What?” I ask, leaning over just enough so I can see what’s in the letter.
“I think the landlord is selling the house.”
“What house?”
She shoves the paper at me. “Our house, cement head.”
“Hey, I told you not to call me that,” I say, taking the paper in my handand reading through it. “Thirty days?” I mumble. “What the hell, they can’t just sell the house.”
“They can. They own it.”
“Uh, yeah, but we live in it.”
“We rent it. The owners can do anything they want.”
“Well, they can’t,” I say, glancing around the living room of the quaint bungalow that we shared with Jude when he was still living with us. The house that he rented for us when our grandma passed and we needed a place to stay. The house that we formed a strong bond over when we had no family left but ourselves. This house…it was a light during a dark time.
A safe haven.
A place where we felt comfortable shedding tears and showing our emotions. A place that felt so incredibly safe that we started to come into our own. It’s where Stacey came out to us, right here in this living room. It’s where I slipped and fell in the kitchen and broke my wrist, only for Stacey to slide in and do the same exact thing. It’s where Jude first told us that he was in love…and where he told us he was going to ask Haisley to marry him.
This house has been a possession that we’ve never been able to own but that we’ve worked hard at maintaining because it felt like ours either way.
“This is our house,” I say.
“It’s not. We don’t own it, Sloane.”
“I know we don’t own it, but we’ve lived in it. We’ve made it a home. I mean…this is where…where we grew. Where we survived. We can’t just leave because the owner wants to sell it.”
“Well, we can buy it,” she says absentmindedly. “The offer is in the letter.”
“Really?” I ask and pick up the letter again. I scan to the bottom where it says we can rent to buy with a down payment of $40,000. Hope starts dwindling away. “Forty thousand dollars, fuck. Do you have that kind of money?”
Stacey gives me a get-real look. “I write about the dog of the day for a robot who informs pesky children. Do you really think I have forty thousand dollars?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you were stashing cash away.”
“Not so much.”
“Damn it. I have nothing in my bank account. I’m nearly living paycheck to paycheck over here, because of the school loans.”
“Says the girl who works for a billionaire.”
