Independent Braylee Mitchells faces the prospect of falling in love with her new roomie: self-proclaimed player and long-time friend, Dominick Mulder, when a damaged apartment and old vows force them together... and make them possibly confront and d...
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Chapter 6
DOM
An astringent odour assaulted my nostrils.
Astringent is a big word for me. The only reason I know it is because I recently heard my mom use it to describe my youngest brother's room when I paid them a visit over the weekend.
And currently, I know exactly what she meant by it.
I paused where I stood on a ladder in my room, drilling holes in the wall while I installed various Ethernet cables.
Wouldn't you know it? The source of the odour waltzed into my room a moment later, brandishing what looked like a shrivelled body part in her fist. It was smoking, though, with plumes of it invading my space.
"What the fuck is that?"
Braylee glanced up at me, her ponytail swinging. Holy hell, she looked cute in a pair of black tights and a baggy pink tank top that hung over her thighs. A pair of mismatched socks covered her feet, completing the look. Though much of the shape of her body was indiscernible, she looked appealing nonetheless.
"It's a smudge stick," she explained in a tone that suggested she thought I would know what the fuck that was. "You know," she went on, probably coaxed by the confused expression on my face, "to get rid of negative energies. Cleansing the space."
I set the drill atop the step of the ladder I was leaning against. "You believe in that stuff?"
She shrugged, continuing her smoke-spritzing of my room. "It can't hurt, can it?" She tossed me a smile over her shoulder- a bare shoulder that had little daisy tattoos going up it. "I didn't smudge my apartment before I moved in and look how that turned out."
"Yeah, and you haven't exactly told me what happened there, either."
She came by me, almost directly under me, and waved that smoke stick around me with vigour. It prompted her breasts to jiggle tantalisingly under that tank and I was rewarded with a nice view of her cleavage from this angle.
Payment for putting up with the smoke that was making my nostrils twitch.
"Fire damage." She shrugged, moving back towards the door of my bedroom. "Enough that six months of saving still isn't enough to get a contractor in to fix it. What's more to say?"
I made a noncommittal sound and descended. "I have a guy. I can ask him to look into it for you if you want. Was it caused by an overzealous amount of smudging, by the way?"
From her own bedroom, she called, "Sure, we can discuss that when we've settled in here. And very funny."
I felt that she was being evasive. Even if I didn't want to, I let the matter drop- for now. I was the type of guy to stay in my own lane, unless someone else's lane wanted to merge with mine. Braylee seemed to want to keep our lanes separate, which was fine by me. So I gathered my tools and ambled into Bray's room. "I'm going to set up your room- holy shit."
