The Roommate Agreement

It was his grandmother.

Betsy Cooper was a delight. She stood at exactly five-foot-tall, but she wore three-inch heels to the grocery store and the butchers, had a violet streak in her otherwise bright-white hair, and wore the brightest pink lipstick you could imagine.

She could also drink a military guy under the table.

I wanted to be her when I was old.

Two knocks on my door pulled me out of my reverie. “Shelbs? You ready?”

I did a double-take at the gruff sound of Jay’s voice. “Yeah. Two seconds. I just need to tie up my hair.” I shut my laptop and got off my bed, moving toward my dresser. I grabbed two hairbands from the pot on the top and used the mirror to tame my dry-shampooed-to-fuck hair into a messy bun on top of my head.

I looked perfectly presentable in every other way, so I tugged up the waistband of my light-blue, ripped jeans, and readjusted my lemon-yellow shirt so it sat properly again. The jeans weren’t so tight that they put pressure on my sore hip. Honestly, they were more like jeggings than anything.

And since I was a fan of leggings, jeggings were the next best thing.

I unlocked my bedroom door and stepped outside. Jay was leaning against the wall that divided the hall from the main living area, focused on his phone while he waited. His legs were crossed at his ankles, and his chin was almost at his chest as he typed furiously on his phone.

His black t-shirt hugged his lean, toned torso perfectly, and the dark-gray jeans he wore were just tight enough that they wrapped around his upper thighs without giving too much away.

It was unfair that he looked so fucking hot for a family dinner.

I hovered, clutching both my wallet and my phone in my hands until he looked up.

“Sorry. Sean’s been texting me. I’m ready to kill him.” He pocketed his phone and pushed off the wall. “You ready to go?”

“Yep.” I followed him into the main room and pulled a light jacket off the hooks by the front door. “What’s up with Sean?”

“Still fighting with Brie,” he said, locking the door behind me and tossing his keys into the air only to catch them again. “I thought they’d made up this morning, but I guess something happened because he bitched his entire shift until I sent his whiny little ass home two hours early.”

“Why was he bitching? She hasn’t said anything to me. She said they were fine today.”

Jay shrugged. “Maybe he was just bitching, then. I don’t know. I think I tuned out around the time where he told me why women were the worst.”

“Ugh. Women are the worst.” I pulled open the door to his truck and climbed in.

“What?”

“Women are the worst,” I repeated, grabbing my seatbelt and buckling in before I looked at her. “We’re hard to live with, hard to understand, and even harder to get along with. We like to pretend that we support each other, but the fact is, most of us would sooner bitch about another woman and drag her down.”

“That’s some deep talk before a family dinner, Shelbs.”

“It’s true. And men aren’t exactly great. We all have our faults. We could all do better as human beings.”

“Great. You’ve gone from best friend to philosopher. Are you sure you write fiction and not those phony self-help books that are full of quotes pulled from random memes on the internet?”

“I don’t spend any time on the internet,” I said, staring out of the window.

“Liar. Last week, you told me you were writing, then when I checked in with you, you were taking a quiz on Buzzfeed to find out which Disney Princess you were.”

I opened my mouth and closed it a couple times before my response came. “We all need a break when we work. I like to take stupid quizzes on the internet. You can’t judge me.”

“Oh, I can judge you, and I am.” He laughed, hitting the stick so his blinker came on. “It’s why I work with people. I like to judge them.”

“I know. I’ve seen you watch Big Brother. You judge every single person on their walk into the house before you’ve even seen a real episode.”

“Shelbs, if you go on reality television, you’re literally inviting people to judge the fuck out of you. Kind of like when you’re in deadline mode and open the door in last week’s tank top, two-day-old sweats with a coffee stain on, no shoes, and pizza sauce around your mouth.” He paused, changing gears. “And that’s before anyone looks at your lack of washed hair.”

“Look, personal hygiene isn’t always a thing when I’m finishing books, okay? The voices can be loud. Kind of like a room full of toddlers.”

“All right, but it wouldn’t kill you to use a wet-wipe now and then.”