Chapter Four
I OWN TWO SMALL SUITCASES, and I've fit my entire life into them with room left over. I know it sounds tragic to some, but I think it just means I'm efficient.
"Is that everything?" Mr. H is looking at the suitcases with a frown.
"Yup." I set them down in the entryway of a penthouse so big it might have its own weather. "I'm a minimalist. It's very in right now."
"You mean you're penniless."
"That's the aspirational word for it, yes."
He doesn't smile. He has, I'm learning, a whole vocabulary of not-smiling. But he steps back to let me in, and the door closes behind me with the well-oiled sound of a door that's never once been slammed, and just like that, I live here.
For all of a minute. Then the rules start.
"Rule one," he informs me, already walking. "Don't touch the thermostat."
"What if I'm cold?"
"Wear more."
"What if I'm hot?"
"Wear less—"
He pauses, but it's too late. I got him to say what I needed, and I'm grinning as I write those two precious words.
"You know what I mean."
"What's rule #2?" For me, it's to always change the subject when you want to sound agreeable while not actually agreeing at all.
"Don't answer my phone." "Even if it's your girlfriend?"
"I don't have one."
"Gotcha." I try hiding a smile as I write down two more precious words.
He's single.
"Rule two," I crow, "he's single. What's rule three?"
By my count we hit rule eleven before lunch, one of which includes not calling him Mr. H in front of the housekeeper, and I just nod at this because there's no point letting him know this is totally moot.
I've already broken his rule when his housekeeper let me in, but she seems quite nice, so maybe it can just be a secret between the two of us.
And anyway—
"Don't you think it's time you tell me your name? I need something to call you—unless of course you're okay with me introducing you as my landlord slash rescuer slash eventual husband slash—"
"It's Maximo."
A few seconds of silence follow—because I need proper time to savor his name.
Maximo.
It totally suits him, and even better it totally suits me.
I'm Jassy, Maximo's wife.
I can't help smiling as I practice saying this in my mind. It sounds really, really good, and so I bet it sounds even better when I say it out loud.
"Maximo."
And so I do, and it immediately makes my future husband's expression turn stoic.
How cute.
And so I say it again and again and again. "Maximo, Maximo—"
He cuts me off, saying coolly, "Shall we move to Rule #12?"
And so it goes on.
Rule after rule after rule, but I don't mind at all because I'm a smart girl, and smart girls are very good at rules the way a river is good at a wall. I go around, I go over, and I find the one crack and make myself at home in it.
By dinner the penthouse doesn't sound like the penthouse anymore.
It sounds like a place where someone lives out loud.
I sing in the shower and forget rule five, burn the popcorn and set off rule nine, and laugh at my own joke so hard I have to sit down on the floor of a kitchen that has clearly never once had a person sit down on the floor of it.
When I look up, he's in the doorway just...
watching me like I'm a language he used to speak.
MAXIMO WROTE THE RULES down.
He'd never written a rule in his life. He gave orders and they were obeyed; that was the whole shape of his days.
But that evening he sat at the desk that'd been his father's and he wrote them out by hand, one after another, in a column that kept growing, and he understood, distantly, that he wasn't building a list.
He was building a wall.
Because two years ago this apartment had gone silent in a single afternoon, and he'd learned to live inside the silence the way you learn to live with a limp.
And now there was a girl on his kitchen floor laughing until she cried, and the sound went straight through him to a room he had bricked up on purpose, and every rule was one more brick, set back in place with hands that weren't entirely happy about the job.
He looked at the list. Twelve rules. It wasn't going to be enough. He already knew it wasn't going to be enough.
At the bottom, under all of them, he didn't write the real rule. He only thought it, once, and then he turned the page so he'd not have to see it.
Don't let her matter. Too late, the apartment told him.
Everything about his place had changed the moment she set foot in it.
She made everything hers just by being herself, and if he wasn't too careful...
It would be the same for Maximo.
All it would take was one mistake. One lapse, one fatal moment in which he would allow himself to forget whose heart was beating behind her chest—
That was all it would take.
And then he, too, would be hers.