Sleeping with the Enemy (An Enemies to Lovers Collection)

I rip the blankets back with a swift flourish and leap back myself.

Sure as shit, the hair motherfu…uh…hairy mother of bacon bits is in my bed. My. Freaking. Bed. He doesn’t move. Clearly, he thinks he’s the master of this domain. Well, fu…bacon bits that! I’ll show him who’s boss by running upstairs and pounding on Esme’s door for her to come and capture the terrifying creature. Bacon bits my balls right now. I don’t care if they shrivel right up because I can’t touch that spider.

I take one more look at Hector, just to prove to myself I can do it. Okay, maybe it’s actually to help my balls feel better about this whole thing, and I realize something’s off. Hector looks different. He looks…dead.

Oh shit, oh god, oh fuck. Oh, bacon bits. Did I kill it by accident?

There aren’t any squish marks around it, so I edge closer. Something’s definitely wrong. Maybe he crawled into bed and died of old age or something. Don’t animals try and go away to die? Maybe he shed his skin, and this isn’t Hector at all. It could just be the old version of himself. Disgusting. Epically disgusting. I get brave when, after a few minutes, the spider doesn’t move, and I can’t see it breathing. Do spiders breathe? I mean, of course, they breathe, but can you see it breathing?

I grab my shoe from the floor by the bed and carefully poke Hector.

Nothing.

I seriously think he’s dead.

I poke him again—still nothing.

After a minute, I realize something is seriously wrong, so I hold my breath, bite my tongue, and reach out a finger. I poke it slightly before jumping back—still nothing.

No. She wouldn’t have.

I like to think of myself as a semi-intelligent person, and I can tell when I’m being played. I think. I also develop toys for a living, so it dawns on me that this might have been done intentionally. I reach out, unafraid now, and grab the lifeless spider. I shake it hard, and sure as shit, it’s PLASTIC.

Disgusted, I throw the very real, very lifelike, indeed still fake spider into the trash can beside the desk.

I can’t believe Esme would do that—plant a fake spider in my bed. Does she think she can get rid of me that easily? When I think about it, yeah, she probably does. She’s probably tried it before with her other roommates.

If that’s her declaration of war, then let it be war. I guess she wasn’t very interested in my truce and offer of friendship, so time to step up my game. I’m not running, and not just because I want Silas’s freaking car for my collection. I’m not running because this is a clear challenge, and I have something against backing down from one. No matter how beautiful, gorgeous, or alluring Esme might be, she’s going down.

Don’t worry. I’m not evil, and I’m not into bad retaliation. Ask my sisters. Growing up, they got away with everything short of murder, but even then, I wasn’t a bad brother. I didn’t cut their doll’s hair or ruin their things or play pranks on them. They were the ones who wrecked my shit, stole my shit—oh sorry, I guess it’s supposed to be borrowed and never returned—filled my car up with condoms when I graduated, and on and on. They were the worst. Now, I know a thing or two about pranks, but that’s not what I’m going to do. No, Esme is going to get the one thing she doesn’t want.

A roommate who is nice to her—the kill-her-with-kindness kind of nice.

I’m going to be the roommate who sticks around.

I mean, really, I don’t have any other choice.

CHAPTER 8

Wilder

I get my chance the next morning to practice my killing with kindness. It sounds like a new horror movie, a really bad one, like D-grade or lower, but I promise it’s not. My kind of killing will be perfect. With kindness, I mean. Obviously, with kindness. J Murphy and freshly plucked drumsticks.

Esme is an early riser. I’ve learned this about her in the week I’ve been in the house. She must get up early with all those cats to feed. I sometimes hear the dog racing around the house, and the meowing upstairs starts around five. I tune it out and go back to sleep, but I know Esme doesn’t because there are always soft steps and whispered words after that in the minutes I spend groggily trying to fall back to sleep.

Anyway, this morning it’s just past seven, and I can hear the quiet whirring of her machine groaning away upstairs. I can also hear a few other things, and it sounds kind of like this:

Whir, whir, whir, whir, clunk, clunk, bang.

“I hate you, you stupid, evil, freaking piece of shit. You have no idea how much I hate you. I swear, I could just throw you out the window.”