“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m moving stuff to the new place.”
“You can’t do that. We need to have it decorated first.”
“Mom, look, I don’t want to spend a lot of money—”
“No, no, I don’t expect you to pay for it. Let me do this for you.”
Damn, she had him over a barrel, but he needed to exert his independence. “I really appreciate what you want to do for me, but I don’t want to spend a ton of money decorating an apartment I might not be living in for long. And besides, I need a place of my own. I don’t want to wait to move. I already adopted a cat from Melissa and Jeff, and I bought a mattress and a bed frame. They were delivered earlier this afternoon. So…”
Her face fell, leaving him feeling like a complete jerk. He hated it when Mom’s eyes got all misty like that. He blew out a breath. “Okay, maybe you can help a little. But no professional decorator, okay?”
Her smile reappeared. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I know exactly the look you want.”
Oh boy, that didn’t sound good. Who wanted their mother to decorate their apartment? No one. But instead of arguing, he ground his teeth together and continued hauling boxes of books and crap out to his uncle’s truck. He didn’t relax his jaw until he drove down his parents’ driveway and headed off to the new apartment.
It took exactly two trips hauling stuff up the narrow staircase in the June heat while simultaneously dodging a collection of bikes and kid toys scattered around the building’s front door, to make him wonder if he should have looked at a few more places. The balcony was killer, but so was the staircase and the obstacle course.
On his third trip, the owner of the toys, a scrawny freckled-face kid of about eight whose front teeth were a little too big for his mouth, materialized at his side. “You moving into Mrs. Murphy’s apartment?” he asked.
“Is Mrs. Murphy’s apartment the one on the right at the top of the stairs?”
The boy nodded. “Yup, that’s the one. She died there, you know. The police had to carry her out in a bag.” The kid had the temerity to grin. “That was pretty cool.”
Holy crap. Mom hadn’t told him about that. Did she know?
Despite his surprise, Matt took a seat on one of the steps and maintained his composure for the little kid. “That is kinda cool,” he said, putting on his best fake-’em-out smile. He knew this kid. He was exactly like Matt’s older brother, a gross-out artist who loved to poke at people. Matt had learned early in life never to show any weakness.
The kid’s eyes grew round. “You don’t care that someone died in the apartment?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Mom says Mrs. Murphy’s ghost is still up there.” The kid was clearly making this up. He hoped.
“Cool.” Matthew broadened his smile and held out his hand. “My name’s Matt, and you are?”
“Ethan Riley. I live over there.” He pointed over his shoulder to the larger ground-floor apartment. “I have a little sister, Jessica.”
Matt had already figured this out, since a Dora the Explorer tricycle was blocking the hallway and Ethan didn’t look like the Dora the Explorer type.
“Well, Ethan, it’s been nice talking to you. But I got stuff to haul up to the second floor.”
He went back to work, making two more trips from the truck to the apartment while Ethan chattered at him. Eventually the boy’s mother called him in and apologized profusely for the toys in the hall. She introduced herself as Alyssa, and she had the look of a harried working mother who was keeping it together only through sheer force of will. She yelled at Ethan for his toys and then helped him move the bikes out of the entryway.
After that, the hauling went a little faster, but still, by the time he’d carried up his last load, his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He dropped the box in the middle of his living room just as the thump of footsteps on the stairs reached him through his open door. Damn. Ethan had come back.
“Ethan, didn’t your mother tell you it was time to go home?” he said as he stepped into the hall.
The footsteps on the stairs stopped. “You,” a distinctly female voice said.
Matt’s mouth nearly dropped open at the sound of that voice. Courtney Wallace stood three steps from the top of the staircase with a couple of grocery sacks in her arms and her hair piled on top of her head in a messy knot. Sweat-dampened tendrils fell around her ears, and her breasts swelled above the neckline of her skimpy striped T-shirt. She was delicious, and he was suddenly very, very hungry.
Matt gave her a slow smile. “Me,” he responded.
She finished walking up the stairs and peeked through his open door. “Are you moving into Mrs. Murphy’s apartment?”
“If you mean this apartment”—he pointed at the open door—“then the answer is yes.”
“This is a joke, right?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Did you choose this apartment because you knew I lived here?”
He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms over his chest. “I didn’t know you lived here. But now that I do, I can’t say I’m disappointed.” He would never, ever tell her that his mother had picked this apartment for him.
“But you walked me home once, remember? Back in September?”
“Vaguely,” he lied. Matt remembered the night last fall when he’d walked her home from the Jaybird. It was the same night that Courtney and some of her girlfriends had tried to trash Brandon’s Camaro. Courtney had been more than a little tipsy, but maybe not tipsy enough. Not that he would have taken advantage of her in that state. Even drunk, Courtney had rebuffed his advances. He’d been
