Chapter 3
?
TV dinner for one.
Morana
It’s cold in my house now that Maelin lives with her husband in the Bachelor palace.
Given that we moved out here with the intention that Maelin would marry her fiancé at the time and live happily ever after in the lavish, safe utopia that is Sunset, West Virginia, I had no presumptions that I wouldn’t be on my own eventually.
I suppose, after things blew up with her ex, I tricked myself into assuming I could stay with her for a little while longer, though.
I never would have expected her to fall madly in love and be married within a few weeks.
I never expected that our place would become mine so quickly.
I’d anticipated a transition period while helping to plan her wedding. At least.
Instead, I got one week of I like him, one week of I love him, and one week of we’re getting married. That’s it. The end. They practically eloped in their backyard, and then four giant men were carting all her things out of our house.
And that?
That barely took an afternoon.
Dumping my purse off in my room, I keep myself from glancing toward the closed door that used to be hers in the hall when I head to the kitchen to make myself a TV dinner.
Even though I’m always welcome at the Bachelor house, I try not to always act like I live there when I don’t.
I could.
I know I could.
Maelin’s invited me to. Kaleb’s mentioned it at least once.
Zakery has offered to take me shopping for whatever my heart desires so I can make one of those massive rooms mine.
But I’ve refused because I don’t even want to picture being around Kyran for prolonged hours after dark.
The winter months are bad enough to manage with the sun setting so early.
I’m not entirely sure how I survived the worst of them. Thankfully, February is giving me just a little more time with navy skies to get my tasks done before I flee…but December? December, with its holiday cheer and events and such and so forth? Yeah. December was rough.
Feelings…are weird after dark.
I don’t know how much strength I’d have to deny Kyran if his propositions came at my bedroom door in the middle of the night.
With how often I intrude on him in his bedroom, I wouldn’t have a single point to stand on concerning him not doing the same, and the idea of Kyran in my bedroom after a late-night stream is bad.
For multiple reasons.
Reason one: my bedroom is a mess. Always.
I collect everything. Literally everything.
I have a labeled collection of plastic silverware from fast food places under my bed because they are memories of the meals I’ve shared with people—my sister, friends I no longer talk to, high school classmates I only see on my Leopard feed these days.
I’m painfully sentimental. So, I have a long, red Dairy Queen spoon sitting merrily beside the infamous—and since outdated—Taco Bell spork.
The last thing I need is for Kyran to learn my dark messy secrets. With how often I get on him about keeping things tidy, there’s no way he’d pass up the opportunity to torment me over my hypocrisy.
Reason two…
After retrieving my microwaved, not-Clara-delicious meal, I tiptoe my way back through the clutter covering my floors, sit on my unmade bed—AKA the only free space in the entire square footage—and let my lips pinch after I stuff a bite of macaroni in my maw.
Directly ahead, taking up an amount of wall space I am ashamed to have delegated for it, is my…signed FrostPlays poster.
Which is surrounded.
By smaller, but still embarrassing, FrostPlays posters as well as other assorted FrostPlays merch.
Yes, I’d say that bringing my shrine into a new home where the object of said shrine lives is a bad idea.
Swallowing the heart beating in my throat, I take in FrostPlays’s cool gaze peering directly back at me from the largest poster. Done up in blues that meld ice imagery with electronic, Frost holds a cordless mouse against his lips and—
My head explodes with a flush, and I fall back against my pillows, scoop more food, shovel it in.
Rabid fangirl, I am not. I’m not out here reading smutty fanfiction at 3:00 a.m. as though it wasn’t written about a real person. In case you have to ask, I’m not writing it, either. Because, again, I’ve no creative talents to speak of.
I’m very invisible in my interests.
I don’t comment on any videos. I do not participate in the stream chats. I do not like or heart anything on any platform. I take the pang of guilt that hits me when he asks for us to like the video if we liked the video, and I move on to the next recommendation in spite of it.
I say: Ooh, is that a new Enigma upload?
Do not mind if I do.
Click.
And then I move on with my life, completely and entirely a background character.
I blame my general nonchalance for the fact Maelin hasn’t yet outed me as a massive nerd for FrostPlays.
The sheer quantity of stuff I possess lackadaisical interest in makes no one thing mean anything more than the fifty others.
Yeah, I watch Frost and have Frost merch.
So what? I also watch this girl who does makeup videos, CapyZahra, and a dozen Minecraft YouTubers—including Enigma, Endeavor, StoneRogue, Dracon48, Legendary613, and…
yeah, well. You get the point. I also have a coin collection…
somewhere. And my shelves are lined with shiny rocks.
And the array of tokidokis and enamel pins beside my barbies and stuffed animals really draw the attention off any one specific thing.
Maelin knows I like things, but I don’t really talk about any one particular thing.
It’s just everything. All the time. Forever.
She’s come into my room while I’ve been sniffing my collection of unused candles just as often as she’s seen me watching Frost.
So what is there to mention?
Nothing, that’s what.
Absolutely nothing.
Kyran cannot possibly know I would give him a kidney if he needed it because I adore him that much.
Also, if anyone ever asks, no. That is not a FrostPlays made-to-order plushie in my system’s reward store. I do not plan to purchase a several-hundred-dollar doll of a man I know personally, and I do not desperately want to cuddle his likeness either. Not one tiny bit.
That’s weird, weird behavior.
Almost, yet not quite, as weird as that very man looking me in the eye in a public space and telling me he’s been a bad boy.
A pitiful whimper escapes my poor body, which suffered greatly today beneath a heart rate of, I suspect, at least three hundred.
Fine.
Fine.
I admit it.
I’m not that fangirl, but I am a fangirl.
Kyran is unhinged in the best ways. I can never predict what he’s going to come up with next. My clearly starved-for-stimulation brain begs for his off-the-cuff dry humor in ways I cannot put into words.
He’s funny. He’s hot. He keeps looking at me with those striking blue eyes. He keeps blessing me with rare sights of his smile…
He’s just so much fun, and everything about him warms something in my chest.
It’s pitiful, but I can still feel the blazing sensation of his leg against my knee under the table.
It has been hours since we were at Brew Tea, but it’s still there, lingering. For all his inappropriate jokes and comments, the man rarely—if ever—touches me. He’s respectful. Kind. Considerate. And would leave me in peace—if I only ask.
The issue is: I don’t want him to leave. Ever.
But I also don’t want him to be mine.
Not like he keeps suggesting he’d like me to be his.
All I want is for him to stay in my life, not grow bored of me, and not realize that I’m very much an unassuming, uninteresting maid. Zero ambitions. Zero hobbies I’m good at—unless you count crow collector as a hobby. Zero romantic appeal.
I’m average. Average weight. Average height. Average interests. Average skills.
Anyone can do anything I can do, which is why I’m a maid. Cleaning is easy to do well when there’s nothing at all you can manage exceptionally.
I’m not interested in letting Kyran close enough for him to understand I’m not all that worth pursuing. It would hurt too much if I let my feelings go somewhere right around the time he figures it out. So I’d really rather him drop the pursuing part and come to think of me as a sister.
If I’ve learned anything in twenty-two years, it’s that family stays, even when you’re nothing special. But friends and lovers?
They don’t.