2
Milo
Packing my entire life takes eleven minutes, which is either impressive or deeply embarrassing, depending on how you want to look at it.
I’ve decided to go with impressive, mostly because the alternative involves thinking too hard about how a twenty-two-year-old man can fit everything he owns into one duffel bag and two milk crates, and I don’t have time for that today.
The shoebox-sized studio doesn’t help. I’ve never minded it much, because it was the first apartment I ever signed a lease on by myself.
But it came with rent that ate my last paycheck whole and would’ve eaten next month’s too, if next month’s still existed, which it doesn’t.
So Spencer’s offer is lucky timing, the kind you grab with both hands before it disappears.
I fold the last of my shirts into the duffel and zero in on the outfit hanging on the back of my closet door, the one I picked out last night.
Cream cropped knit polo, high-waisted pleated shorts, white crew socks, and the vintage Adidas I thrifted two summers ago and have been babying ever since.
It’s my best outfit. It is also, I know with total clarity, completely wrong for whatever a personal assistant is supposed to wear on day one.
But a proper PA wardrobe costs actual money, the kind you get after a first paycheck, and I refuse to show up to my new gazillionaire boss’s house looking like I don’t know how to dress myself.
If I have to choose between wrong-but-confident and right-but-broke, I’m always taking wrong-but-confident.
My phone rings while I’m wrapping the knife roll, my mother’s contact photo lighting up the screen. It’s a picture I took of her at Easter three years ago, mid-laugh, flour on her cheek. I answer and wedge the phone between my ear and shoulder so I can keep working.
“Milo, honey, he’s saying the water heater thing is my fault,” she says, straight into the crisis.
“What water heater thing?”
“The one that flooded the hallway. He’s saying I should’ve reported the noise sooner, like I’m supposed to know what a bad water heater sounds like versus a good one, and now he wants to take it out of the deposit—”
“Ma. Breathe. You didn’t do anything.” I set the phone on speaker, freeing both hands for the knife roll.
It’s the one expensive thing I own, six pieces of German steel I bought with three months of saved tips back when I still thought I was going to cook for a living instead of just wanting to.
It goes into a hoodie, sleeves wrapped around the blade end, tucked dead center of the duffel where nothing can crush it.
“You call him back, you tell him you want it in writing, from him, what he’s claiming caused it.
Landlords hate putting things in writing.
He’ll drop it or he won’t, but either way you’re covered. ”
“In writing,” she repeats, like she’s taking notes. “Okay. Okay, I can do that.”
I zip the duffel a third of the way and glance at the clock. “Mom, I gotta run. I’ve got the new job today, remember? I told you about it.”
“The football player.” The smile creeps back into her voice, which is the whole reason I described the job to her that way instead of anything more specific. “My son, working for a football player.”
“It’s not that exciting, Ma. Just calendar stuff and errands.”
“I know, I know. Go, go. Call me tonight.” She hangs up before I can, which is very her, and I’m smiling at the phone when it buzzes again, this time with a text instead of a call. But the smile doesn’t survive contact with my brother’s name.
Dean: hey. u around? need 200, last time swear
I look at that for a second. Then I open my banking app because I already know the balance is bad.
I want to confirm exactly how bad before I decide anything.
And there it is: enough to survive, barely, if nothing goes wrong between now and whenever Spencer’s first paycheck lands.
I do the math three different ways. All three come out the same, which is that I cannot send Dean two hundred dollars and still be a person with a working phone plan.
I send him a hundred and fifty.
Me: last time you said last time. consider this me buying stock in your promise
He sends back a laughing emoji and a ur the best, and no acknowledgment of the fifty-dollar gap, which tells me he either didn’t notice or noticed and decided not to make it weird, and either way I let it go. There’s no room to think about it.
I zip my duffel bag the rest of the way, hoist it onto one shoulder, and stack the two milk crates so I can take everything in one trip, because if two years of waiting tables gave me one skill, it’s carrying more than any reasonable person should in a single pass.
I stand in the doorway a moment and look back at the empty studio. It looks smaller empty than it ever did full, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible, but there it is.
I’ve got a car coming and a new job I don’t understand yet on the other side of it.
***
The gate swings open before the driver even finishes rolling to a stop.
The driveway alone is longer than my old block.
Then the house itself comes into view, pale and expensive and spotless, and I can’t picture anyone ever leaving a coffee cup out in it.
I sit with my duffel on my knees, doing quiet math on how many of my old studios would fit inside.
Spencer opens the door before I’ve made it up the steps, shoulders set high and square, weight forward, like a man bracing for impact. It’s not aimed at me, I don’t think. It just lives in him. And a tense man is a man who needs teasing. That’s just science.
“You look like you’re expecting bad news,” I say, hefting the milk crates onto my hip.
“I’m expecting a conference call.” He looks at me then, one long sweep, chin to sneakers and back. “That’s not exactly office attire.”
“This,” I say, gesturing down at myself with my free hand, “is the good outfit. You should see the alternative. Tiny shorts, no sleeves, honestly borderline illegal in several counties. You’re getting one or the other until my first paycheck clears.
Then I promise I’ll invest in something boring and gray that says I file expense reports instead of I DJ on weekends. ”
He doesn’t answer that, but a muscle ticks once at the corner of his jaw, and I file it away as the single most interesting thing that’s happened to me all week.
He takes one of my milk crates without asking and leads me in.
Inside, everything is quiet and clean. My studio smelled like radiator dust and whatever I cooked last. This smells like nothing at all.
“So who forced you to hire a PA?” I ask, trailing him down a giant hallway. “Blink twice if it’s the scary lady from the restaurant.”
“My agent thinks I take on too much,” he says flatly, without looking back.
“So that’s a yes on the scary lady.”
He doesn’t confirm it, which I decide is basically a yes.
He carries my crate up a wide staircase and opens the first door at the top. “Guest suite.”
It’s bigger than my studio, with a window wall pulling in real daylight, a regular bed, no futon mechanism required, and through an open door I can see a bathroom with a freestanding tub deep enough to drown a smaller man.
It is, by a distance I am not saying out loud, the nicest place I have ever been asked to sleep.
“I’m gonna need to see the fine print on this,” I manage. “Feels like there’s a catch. Is there, like, a hidden camera or something?”
Sadly, he doesn’t laugh, just moves on. I decide to add does not respond to jokes to the growing file labeled Spencer.
After I dump my things in the guest room, the tour keeps going on the same floor: his bedroom, gray walls and a huge bed, and his home office, lined with supplement mockups for the nutrition brand.
Back downstairs, he shows me the home gym, which is bigger than the one I used to pay for, then the pool out back lying flat and blue and untouched, and then the kitchen, which stops me cold: six-burner range, double oven, marble that’s never seen a knife mark.
Every appliance I’ve ever coveted from a catalog, sitting there gleaming.
After the tour, we return to his office, where Spencer walks me through the job in four minutes flat: calendar, meetings, errands.
Groceries on his dime, mine included, and that one I clock as an unreasonably sweet deal.
Pool and gym are mine to use, long as I work around his schedule.
I get up the nerve to ask about the kitchen, and he tells me I can use it however I please, which sends a thrill through me.
But then I realize I’m about to know this man very intimately, in the unglamorous sense, his coffee order and his moods and probably his laundry, and the thought makes me fidgety.
He’s enormous and stupidly good-looking, and I already know that’s going to be a problem.
I’ve seen his social media, the parade of women, the ex-girlfriend from last spring who looked like she stepped out of a skincare ad, so I know exactly which lane I’m not in.
Not that I was planning to be in any lane other than the PA one.
I sign the paperwork he slides across the desk, having skimmed it enough to know it’s fine, and then he tells me the conference call he mentioned at the door is about to start.
“Should I sit in? Take notes?”
“Not now.” He’s already reaching for his laptop. “Settle in first.”
So I leave him to it and wander, ending up back in that gorgeous, unused kitchen, where I open the fridge expecting, I don’t know, something.
What I find is a shelf of identical shrink-wrapped meals, chicken and rice, chicken and something green, a drawer full of energy drinks in colors that don’t occur in nature, and nothing that resembles food a person would actually want to eat.
I stand there with the door open, cold air on my shins, and decide that groceries are the first order of business.
I came here to be his PA, and even though I don’t know yet what that’s going to mean, day to day, I know what it’s not going to mean.
I’m not going to be some rescue project because I looked pitiful in a parking lot.
I’ve been taking care of people, one way or another, for about as long as I can remember, and I’m good at earning my keep.
I plan on proving it.