18. 18
18
Barrett’s truck rumbled into the driveway. Sherri Nussbaum’s long legs carried her briskly toward him as he killed the engine and grabbed a bag containing the same pleather Roman gladiator costume he’d cleaned a home in just a few hours before.
“Oh, thank God, you’re here.” Sherri placed an icy hand on his forearm and pulled him toward her home, cleavage bouncing above her oval neckline.
“I assume you’re Mrs. Nussbaum?”
The woman nodded. At the door, she released him. “Start wherever you want and do me a favor. Don’t wear any silly costumes right now. My dip-shit son is in there somewhere, and I don’t need him using it as some weird form of blackmail against me down the line.”
“I’m relieved to hear you say that. I wore it this afternoon. It hasn’t been laundered yet.”
“Well, at least one of us is relieved.” She rolled her eyes.
“With all due respect, why call for me, then?”
“Excuse me? I don’t follow.” She crossed her bony arms across her silicone bosom.
“I just meant, Man Maid charges more than most because of the costumes? Why not just hire a regular cleaning service and save the money?”
She stepped toward him threateningly despite her calmer tone. “Will Jessup has been cleaning this house for a year-and-a-half now, and he does a damn fine job, a lot better than any service we’ve hired before. We used to hire some Mexicans to do it. Caught one of them robbing our DVD shelves blind, helping herself to a couple of movies every time. When we fired them, they went to the Tribune and made up a nasty bit of news about my husband.”
“I see,” Barrett rubbed his bottom lip.
“Will has a business founded on discretion . It’s a huge part of the whole schtick. So, I called him, and he sent you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have this place spic-and-span right away, Mrs. Nussbaum.”
“I know you will. I’ll throw in a cash tip if you keep the volume down. I got a splitting headache from screaming at those damned kids.”
She started to walk past the pool table, looked down at a stain on the felt, and winced. She turned back to Barrett. “If you see any stragglers, tell them not to let that front door hit ’em where the good Lord split ’em on their way out.”
“Sure thing.”
“ God , my head is pounding ,” Sherri muttered again.
“Here,” he said, digging in his bag and pulling two pills from a small container. “Will keeps an emergency stash of ibuprofen in the bags for our aches and pains. Being on your knees a lot can be painful.”
She took the pills and motioned all around, scoffing. “I know. How do you think I ended up with all of this?”
He tossed the pills in her mouth and winked. Barrett was relieved to see she actually had a sense of humor, after all.
She threw her head back violently and attempted to dry-swallow. She winced hard and fanned herself, frantically looking around for a drink to help the pills go down. Panicked, she looked at one of the solo cups on the edge of her billiard table, sniffed it, and took a swig out of the mysterious liquid with reluctance.
“Oh God, I hate when that happens! Ugh.” She looked down at the stranger’s cup and feigned gagging. Then, she turned back to Barrett.
“There’s a box of trash bags on the bottom of the stairs for all this garbage. Mops are in the kitchen pantry. Sponges are under the sink. I’ll be in my studio if you need anything, although I doubt yoga is going to undo all of this.” She motioned to her head and disappeared through an archway.
Barrett stood for a moment, struggling to take it all in. The Nussbaum’s massive mansion screamed decadence behind all of the fraternity-esque trash.
Artwork covered the walls, pieces that Barrett was certain he could have finger-painted himself. A winding staircase with a gigantic chandelier above it swirled up to a second floor with maroon walls and bronze fixtures. Hanging from a golden wall sconce was a woman’s lace bra. The black walnut floor was littered with various spilled liquids and empty cups. Beer and liquor bottles sat on nearly every flat surface. Cigar butts littered ashtrays, filling the area with the stench of ash and tobacco.
He returned to his Jeep, tossing his bag inside and trading it for his pail of cleaning supplies.
Once in the house, he decided to start upstairs and work his way back down, assessing the extent of the mess as he toured the mammoth building. There, the bathrooms were in disarray, but the majority of the guest rooms were still in order. He turned down the bed in one room, fluffing and chopping the throw pillows and doing a quick pass for stray trash.
The next one was easier still as the bed was still made.
As he approached the third room, he heard the rustle of covers. He rolled his shoulders back, eager to assert dominance right off the bat to get the errant party people inside to kick rocks. He burst in through the door, and a lump beneath the silken comforter writhed, squirming at the noise of the intrusion.
“Hey, you. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. Out,” his voice boomed.
“Barrett?” a muffled female voice called from beneath the covers.
The mention of his name made him curiously quirk an eyebrow. “Yessss, blanket goblin. And you are?”
The comforter pulled back, and the instant her mess of rainbow-colored hair came into sight, he froze.
Chastity’s cheeks rose, her left sporting a smudge of neon green paint, and on the right, there was a smear of deep purple. The look on her face was one of embarrassment, with a smile that said, ‘ What are the odds ?’
Her shoulders were bare, and the way she clutched the blanket to her chest and the presence of a torn condom wrapper on the floor by a large pair of men’s running shoes told him that she was naked beneath the sheets.
Part of him was thrilled by her sudden presence, especially in a state of undress. Seeing her always felt like being on the crest of a roller coaster and watching the death-defying drop below shoot toward his face.
“Fancy meeting you here.” He smiled a little. “Three times in one week. That’s gotta be some kind of a sign.”
His excitement dissipated the moment a man darted past Barrett into the room, a kid in his twenties with no muscle mass and large globs of green and purple on his own cheeks.
“’Scuse me.” He scrambled to pick his shoes up off the floor and held them up as if to say ‘ Found them ’ before slipping past Barrett again and barreling down the staircase.
The sight of the kid, the condom, and Chastity’s bare shoulders wrenched Barrett’s gut with jealousy.
“I’ll leave you to get dressed,” he said, closing the door.
“Wait. Barrett, please don’t make me go home.” She looked like she was going to cry. “It’s fucking disgusting there.”
“Chastity, I’ve been to your home. It’s nicer than any I’ve ever lived in.”
“No,” she groaned into the air and threw her head back on the pillow. “I moved out. I got a new place. Literally, today. It’s… I can’t even talk about it.”
Barrett thought for a moment, still annoyed by the boy’s intrusion and the thought of his Aphrodite being sullied by some loser who didn’t even have the balls to kiss her beautiful lips goodbye before he bolted. He thought about how, if she were his , she would never leave the house without knowing how wild she made him.
“Please,” she begged, the sound of the word like music to his ears.
“Tell you what,” he sighed and spoke quietly as if Sherry Nussbaum was eavesdropping. “I’m tired. I’ve been on my knees scrubbing ladies’ houses all day. If you wanna get dressed and help me tidy this place up, you can crash at my place.”
His eyes focused on the condom on the floor. “My couch is weirdly comfy.”
“I know.” Chastity smiled a little.
“Hope you like cats because Smoky’s crashing at my place right now, too.”
“Smoky?” she asked, but Barrett had already started down the hall.
Shoving another fire-engine-red cup into a trash bag, Barrett snickered.
“What?” Chastity asked, wobbling on the tiptoes of her untied, checkered Vans, trying to reach a discarded bottle of Jack Daniels lying on its side atop a fanciful grandfather clock. When she couldn’t quite reach it, she looked around and spotted an ottoman, dragging it over to the ornate timepiece and climbing on it.
As she reached again, Barrett’s eyes skimmed up from her once-again mismatched socks to her trim legs, settling on the smooth, creamy thighs displayed beneath the hem of her short, tight, spandex dress. He bit his lower lip and shook his head at the perfect, round curvature of her ass.
“You could’ve just asked me to grab it for you instead of struggling like that. You’re stubborn.”
“Always have been.” She finally managed to get the bottle down. “And clever . See?” She shook the remnants in the bottom comically before tossing it to him.
He caught it, barely, fumbling it twice before finally gaining possession. He frowned and tossed it into the black sack in his hands.
She climbed down and kicked the ottoman back into place, dusting the fabric where her shoes had been. “Not all of us are six-four giants like you.”
“What are you? Four-eleven?”
She made a face at him and set her fists on her hips. “Ha-ha. You gonna make a Hobbit joke next?”
He chuckled. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I’m five-five. That’s still a respectable height. You’re acting like I’m some kind of munchkin. I’m actually the perfect height to scrunch down and box someone in the balls for making fun of me,” she threatened.
“Why are you little people so aggressive? Geez. Don’t take it out on me just because you’re vertically challenged. I’m devastatingly handsome, and you don’t hear me complaining about it. Cougars love me. I can’t go to any gathering of women over forty where I’m not getting numbers shoved at me, so, hey, we all have our crosses to bear.”
She laughed. “Oh, you fucking poor, gorgeous sap. That must be just awful .”
“You kiss your mother with that sassy-ass mouth?”
His retort changed the mood of the room in an instant. Chastity’s playful banter halted at the mere reference to Maggie.
“She and I are not on speaking terms right now. I moved out, and I’m pretty sure neither of my parents give two shits.”
“Sorry to hear that. Wanna talk about it?”
“With you?” She snorted. “No.”
Barrett reeled back, furrowing his eyebrows. “Why not? I’m not just a pretty face. I can be a good listener, too. Lay it on me. What’d you do, say ‘shit’ at the dinner table?”
She placed a shredded throw pillow in his bag, packing it down. Barrett tied it closed, their faces only feet from each other, heat radiating through the air between them.
Tossing the bag to the side, Barrett grabbed the next empty from the roll and draped it over the arm of Nussbaum’s antique tufted camelback sofa.
Chastity kneeled, pressing her face to the carpet to look beneath the couch. She spotted an empty beer can and reached for it.
Barrett watched as her firm ass hoisted high into the air, wishing she was at his apartment, stark naked, in the same readied position so that he could be inside of her again, watching her mop of colorful hair bounce forward with every pounding thrust of his hips from behind. He struggled to keep his cock from stiffening.
She spoke, shaking him from his fantasy. “When people know you’re the pastor’s kid, you’re supposed to act like a saint day and night. You’re under this, like, constant scrutiny. It leaves no room to be human. You’re bound to be a disappointment no matter what.”
She sat back on her heels and tossed the dented can into his bag.
“You’re anything but a letdown, Aphrodite.”
She smiled at the mention of the fake name. Barrett held out a hand, and she rose to her feet without his help.
“See? Stubborn.”
She pointed at the trash bag in his clutches. “You maids get paid well to do this?”
“Maybe most don’t, but usually, I’d be doing this in tiny Flash Gordon underwear. The hourly rate is a little better than my last job hauling heavy-ass furniture all around, but if you do well, my buddy says the tips are sometimes incredible. It’s true, too. Had a chick tip me like two hundred bucks yesterday for a four-hour gig.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, and all I did was clean her office and scrub fly shit off her chandelier.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I mean, of course, the tip was surely because of my sparkling wit and stellar conversation.”
“Of course.” She laughed. “Wasn’t the washboard abs at all .”
He smirked, popping a few Lysol wipes out of a barrel-shaped plastic container on the glass coffee table and wiping neon body paint off of the upright piano. He tossed the sheet in his bag and grabbed a fresh one.
“Come here for a second.” He waved her over.
She stepped toward him, unable to take her eyes off of his.
“Hold still.” He dabbed softly at her cheeks, wiping away the face paint smeared on them, a visual reminder that she’d recently been face-to-face kissing someone else.
Her amber eyes glinted from the light of a wall sconce with someone’s tank top looped around it. “Oh my God, did my mother hire you to come clean our house in your underwear? Was that why you were at my house?”
Barrett laughed and released her, her cheeks now paint-free.
“No! Oh, God, no. My grandmother’s friend, Susan, volunteered me at church to come over and clean. She heard I was a maid but didn’t know… you know, the rest . But, I had just botched my first gig… hard… so your mom kinda took me under her wing. She and the ladies from the Bible study ended up giving me all kinds of tips and shit.”
“Huh.” Chastity felt slightly dazed by her mother’s confusing display of kindness.
“I think we’re good in here. Let’s hit the hallway next and then go attack the foyer and that billiard area. I think that’s all we have left.”
She nodded and followed behind with the full bag and the barrel of wipes. Barrett grabbed any trash along the way, chuckling to himself about how this felt the way court-ordered highway cleanup looked in the movies for people in trouble with the law.
“Do you sleep with any of your clients? Do some of them pay extra for that?”
“No. Apparently , that’s a huge no-no.”
“Yeah, I mean, technically, I think that counts as prostitution, right?”
“So they say.” Barrett turned to her. “They’re usually not my type, though, and I do have a bit of a type.”
“Oh yeah? What type is that?”
“Short, feisty, stubborn trouble-makers with dyed hair.” He winked and turned back around. “Oh, and nothing gets me harder than a pair of mismatched socks.”
“You should talk to a therapist about that,” she joked. “Sounds like you have terrible taste.”
“Well,” he said, turning again and whispering in her ear. “You could always kiss me and learn all about my taste firsthand .”
His words sent ripples of gooseflesh down her body, metal-studded nipples stiffening through the spandex.
“Been there. Done that.” Her teeth dug into the side of her pouty bottom lip, and she made a checkmark in the air with her finger.
Just then, Sherri Nussbaum stumbled into the foyer, grinning from ear to ear, landing on the spiral staircase with a dull thud .
Barrett approached. “Mrs. Nussbaum, are you alright?”
Sherri laughed, seemingly delighted by the fall. Barrett looked around, confused. Sherri’s broken heels were off, and there had seemingly been nothing on the floor to trip her.
“Who are you ?” Sherri laughed, eyeing Chastity up and down.
Embarrassed, Chastity panicked, opening her mouth to speak and closing it again.
“She was a straggler. She offered to help. Figured you’d want us out of your hair as fast as possible, so I put her to work.”
Barrett pulled the woman back onto her feet, and Sherri erupted into full-blown honks of laughter.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, alarmed by her complete change in demeanor from his arrival. “Have you… been drinking, Mrs. Nussbaum?”
“Sssssssherri! Please. For God’s ssssake,” she cackled, ready to piss her pants with laughter, “Call me Sherri. And no…” She laughed so hard she wheezed. “I haven’t… had anything.”
Her laughter grew so intense she was no longer even making any noise beyond a quiet hiss. Her face grew red.
Chastity pulled Barrett to the side a few feet. “She’s high,” she said confidently.
“On what?” Barrett felt out of his element, unsure what to do.
“Fuck, if I had to wager a guess, I’d say ketamine or weed. Even LSD, maybe.”
“Ketamine?!” Sherri laughed, having overheard their not-so-subtle conversation. “How the hell…” She laughed again, smacking the wall with her forearm and doubling over.
Chastity pointed to the pool table. “There was a guy hanging out down here who offered me some when I got here. I turned him down. I played around with party drugs in college. I don’t really mess with that stuff anymore.”
“Fuck. Ketamine?” Barrett muttered. “What do I do? Do I call an ambulance?”
“No,” both women said in unison.
Sherri jovially added, “I don’t… need this… kind of thing in the papers.”
“She’ll probably be fine.” Chastity addressed Barrett. “When I tried it, it made me feel really happy, real euphoric. Manic , even.” The word felt rotten on her tongue. “Then, later, it made me drowsy, and the next day, my roommate said I had been slurring a bit.”
“So, she should be okay?” Barrett ran his hands through his hair.
“Yeah, I mean, it depends on how much she took. If it was just a little, her high will be really short. If she took a lot …”
“Jesus Christ. How could this have happened?” Barrett looked around.
“If she didn’t take it willingly, she could have gotten dosed.”
Barrett suddenly recalled the image of Sherri earlier in the evening, washing down the stuck ibuprofen tablets with the unknown contents of a solo cup seated on the edge of the pool table. All of the pieces clicked into place.
Barrett rushed over to the cup, lifted it, and pointed at it. “It was this. She only took a sip. I watched her. She had a headache, and I gave her some ibuprofen, and they got hung up in her throat.”
“Oh, if it was just a sip, Sherri, you’re gonna be fine. You just gotta ride it out, Honey, okay?”
Sherri giggled. “My headache is gone, at least.”
Chastity laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet nothin’ hurts right now, does it?”
Sherri shook her head. “Noooooope!”
Chastity shrugged. “That’s why I took it. People told me it would make me feel happy and relax me a bit.” She smoothed Sherri’s hair softly, nurturing the woman. “I got just the thing for you. I saw you got that big ol’ TV in your room.” She took Sherri by the hand.
“Yeah?” Mrs. Nussbaum snickered, trying not to crack up again as she clutched Chastity’s arm.
“You got streaming channels on that baby?”
“Yeah.” Sherri snorted, face magenta from all the laughter.
“Let’s get you nestled in where you’re nice and safe and turn on some Summer Love . You ever seen it?”
“The reality show? God, no.” Sherri shook her head and laughed as if the question was absolutely ridiculous. “My son watches all that garbage. I don’t watch much TV.”
“Oh, Sherri, trust me on this, you’re gonna hate that you love it.”
“That’s a great idea.” Barrett smiled, surprised by the new, caring side of Chastity he’d never seen before. “The two of you, go watch some trash TV. I’ll finish up here and pop in to check on you when I’m finished.”
“ Okayyyyyyy, ” Sherri sang, pressing against the wall for stability. Chastity tugged her away just in time for Sherri to miss a large, expensive-looking painting with her grabby hands.
Chastity looked over her shoulder at Barrett and smiled.
Barrett mouthed a grateful ‘ Thank you. ’
Three episodes of reality TV and one greasy, frozen pizza later, Sherri Nussbaum was sleeping off the last of the drugs in the Supima cotton sheets on her California king.
Barrett had scrubbed the lower level of the mansion spotless, leaving every conceivable surface disinfected and sparkling anew.
Quietly, he waved Chastity out of Sherri’s chambers.
She followed Barrett back to his apartment, and they made their way upstairs. Barrett gathered bedding, and Chastity made up the couch with it.
“You killed it tonight,” he said weakly, holding up his hand for a high-five.
Chastity beamed, excited to finally feel like she had genuinely done something right for a change. “Thanks. I didn’t do much. Kinda just laid around and watched TV for the majority of it.”
“You stayed calm when I wasn’t. You took care of her. Probably showed her more kindness in one night than her family has in years.”
“I don’t know about all that.”
“You were really sweet.” He shrugged. “You’d make an amazing mom one day, I think.” He quickly added, “I mean, if that was even something you ever wanted.”
She smiled a little, but it was a sad one. She pounded the pillow against the armrest. “Yeah, maybe.”
“I’m dead tired.”
“Me too.” She yawned, tucking herself in.
“I have tomorrow off. Get some shut-eye. We’ll grab some breakfast and hit your place hard in the morning.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
He padded off toward his bed and turned back for a moment. “Oh, and Aphrodite?”
“Yeah?” She sat up for a moment, cold nipples tenting the front of an oversized T-shirt that Barrett’s grandmother bought as a show of support that read, ‘ I came. I saw. I cleaned. ’
“You make that lame-ass shirt look really damn good.”
She blushed and slunk down beneath the covers. “Night, Adonis.”
“Sleep well, Aphrodite.”