Chapter 6
Rohan
“If I don’t hear typing, I’m going to make you get a shower like a functional adult.” I wasn’t completely sure when he’d had one last, but the way typing immediately started again had me convinced it’d been too long.
Knox didn’t stink and wasn’t visibly dirty, but it seemed like he only remembered to shower when he wanted to jerk off.
“I was thinking.” He tried to sound like a frustrated professional but I knew better than that.
“It’s called fantasizing when you’re thinking about being fucked. Write the scene or I’ll make you shower and sort mail before you get another orgasm.” That clearly sounded like a terrible enough punishment that the typing seemed to go faster.
And the cursing got louder too.
But he was frustrated with me and the people on the page, so I wasn’t offended.
“Naughty authors who want to write more than clean need to actually write.” Mumbling to myself as I carried the bedding to the laundry room, I steadied my nerves before I opened the door.
Yep, just as bad as I’d thought.
Clothes and towels and what seemed to be the other set of sheets to his bed were piled around the room. How he wasn’t naked was beyond me, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like the answer. “I’m not going to ask.”
I was, however, going to do a load of laundry before I started tackling the kitchen. I had reasonable goals, but if I wanted to find a few feet of countertop, I had to get my ass in gear.
“Alright, bedding and towels are going in first.” Clean bed. Clean body. Yep, those were both top of the list. “Then a load of darks because nearly everything he owns seems to be black.”
I approved.
I had a lot of black myself, but I had a feeling he chose it because it was less for him to think about. “He probably thinks it’s less work for his dry cleaner too.”
Shaking my head as I walked out of the laundry room once the washing machine was going, I squared my shoulders and went into the kitchen like it was a room full of truckers who were threatening to strike. “You’ve got this.”
It was just going to take a while.
“How is it this much of a mess if he doesn’t cook?” His honesty about that was showing with the insane number of takeout containers that were stuffed into the trash can and piled on the counter around it. “None of this makes sense.”
Deciding that taking out the trash would be the first step, I studied the dishes around the sink as I worked on corralling the mess. “He eats cereal? Since when?”
Did he even have cereal?
Abandoning the trash, I headed to the pantry and started searching through it, completely unsurprised when none turned up. “He doesn’t like cereal. It was some kind of texture issue.”
Doing my best to remember the details about one particular rant, I had a vague memory of him ordering breakfast to be delivered every day for a week because somehow all he had in the house was Cheerios and that’d triggered an author apocalypse.
“Mushy. It was something about the change in the state of matter and a grocery delivery that had gone spectacularly bad.” It seemed like another one of those Knox hadn’t gotten enough sleep issues, but he had enough of a point that half the group had agreed with him and the other half had told him to take a nap.
“Yep, no cereal.” Then how was there a bowl of what seemed to be the last few bites of Cocoa Puffs in the sink? “Is he on sleeping meds?”
That would make the sleep sex scene more doable, but I’d have thought he’d have mentioned it in his distracted ramblings at the very least.
Knox had written enough about aliens that some kind of weird abduction scenario didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility, but I wasn’t sure it was likely. “They’d have fucked him, not just fucked with him.”
Pushing the questions about cereal to the back of my mind, I focused on the trash issue since getting that under control would make the kitchen look a hundred percent better. But emptying it and the pile of recycling that was taking up one large corner gave me new questions.
“He doesn’t drink Pepsi.” So why were there several empty plastic bottles of it in his recycling? “What the fuck?”
Even on sleep meds, Knox would not drink Pepsi.
Did the aliens drink it?
I hadn’t grown up on the stuff and thought most soda was god-awful, but it was one of Knox’s bribes of choice. I was also pretty sure he had a stockpile of weird Coke merch stashed around the house somewhere based on the pictures he’d posted in the past.
He was a borderline hoarder with some things but not about Pepsi.
Even if they seemed to be the exact same thing with different labels slapped on them.
“Houston, we have a problem.” But I didn’t think Knox would be any help in answering my questions, so I didn’t bother him as I went back to work finding at least part of the kitchen.
One more run to the recycling container in the garage and a load of dishes in the dishwasher made an incredible difference and gave me several more questions I was still going to ignore. Making his kitchen usable and less stressful was the goal.
I’d figure out if he had gremlins later.
When I’d moved the clean laundry to the dryer and put in another load to be washed, I headed toward Knox’s office to see what he was up to. It’d been entirely too quiet, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see him playing naked solitaire with a deck of dirty cards, but he seemed to actually be working.
Hunched over his desk, he was scribbling into a notebook and mumbling to himself about fuckers and something about murder.
Since either that involved an elaborate plot to punish the gremlins in the house or he was working on a book, I headed back to the kitchen and studied the progress I’d made. It wasn’t anywhere near clean, but I could see half the room and knew where I was going to start next.
The random shit all over the house.
I was done with the never-ending dish pile for the moment, partly because dishes were terrible and partly because some of them didn’t seem to belong to Knox.
He wasn’t a roses and vines kind of guy.
He had some kind of stoneware that was in coordinating blue colors, but at least half the dishes in the kitchen didn’t match those in any way.
So it was time to get other things in order and make sure he didn’t have someone living in his attic that he didn’t know about.
I’d always thought those were just urban legends, but I was starting to realize that Knox was just the type of distracted homeowner who wouldn’t notice he had other people living with him.
I should’ve felt stupid searching the house as I randomly picked up shoes and books, but I didn’t. Unfortunately, it felt a bit too reasonable, and I was glad when I found the bottom of the foyer and there didn’t seem to be anyone living in the attic I’d found.
So where were the dishes coming from?
And why were there knickknacks in random places that didn’t look like anything Knox would bring home?
There was everything from knockoff plastic African masks that looked like someone had raided The Dollar Store to odd books on finding his inner goddess.
Knox was a find his inner alien kind of guy...inner demon, if he was drunk...so I started a box of random shit and set it in the corner of the living room once I cleared out the bubble wrap. “We’ll work on that another time.”
Once I’d figured out if he actually read goddess self-help books.
If he did, then I would start tackling the empty bookshelves in the random room upstairs that seemed to have been another guest room at one point. I had a feeling he’d forgotten about that project because the room wasn’t messy and it was almost a blank canvas.
Maybe the gremlins didn’t live upstairs?
Did he have a basement?
Fuck, he might’ve had a basement and had forgotten about it.
Heading back toward the kitchen, I methodically searched that part of the house and made sure to open every random door. I found a lot of closets but no basements and no weird strangers making messes and fucking with my distractible author.
I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or not.
On one hand, I was glad there wasn’t anyone else around—I didn’t want him to end up murdered in his sleep—but on the other, I wasn’t happy that my questions seemed to be growing. But I didn’t think Knox would be able to answer any of them.
He hadn’t even realized that he didn’t eat cereal.
Nope. We were not going to leave the mystery up to Knox to solve. He was busy planning murders and slightly fucked-up love scenes.
“What do you think about people who just won’t die?” Knox’s question didn’t make any sense at all as he rushed through the living room and glared at me like it was my fault he was dealing with the undead.
“That they’re vampires or immortal?” I wasn’t sure what the problem was or if my response was helpful or made me a smart-ass, but the second thing to pop into my head was that he needed a distraction. “Come here. We’re going to put that mouth to good use while you figure out the problem.”
I was not the creative type.
I was the Knox type.
“I...” He blinked, completely derailed from whatever he’d been planning on being a pain in the ass about. “Yes, that might help.”
He was the cutest nut I’d ever met.
And the sexiest when he was thinking about my dick.
“Good boy.” Wrapping one hand around the back of his neck, I steered him toward the couch and sat down, tossing a weird flower pillow I was pretty sure he hadn’t purchased on the floor between my legs. “Kneel.”
Knox barely gave the weird decoration a glance but that seemed to be because I was working on freeing my dick and that was much more entertaining than ugly pillows. “I...I think your help should include distracting me too. I think that’s a wonderful idea. Sometimes my head just gets very busy.”
So sucking dick was a good thing?
I’d remember that.