I pick the shirt up and inhale it.
And fuck me, but it smells good. Damn it, too.
With that aroma in my lungs, I leave the room and step back into my own. I cross the threshold looking around as if through his eyes to see what I might think if I were him, snooping in my room.
He’d think it’s strange that I’m trashing the apartment while my room is tidy. No, not strange – he’ll know I’m trying to piss him off. But it’s not like I’m trying to hide that.
In truth, before I had to leave my old life, I wasn’t all that tidy. I was pretty messy, actually. Oh, I’d clean up in a mad dash if I knew company was coming over, but most of the time I lived in a state of semi-chaos with clothes and makeup and multiple handbags on the go with my stuff scattered. If I needed a certain wallet or purse or was looking for a specific piece of ID or certain credit card I’d have to leaf through four or five bags. Jonah used to tease me for it, though not in a mean way, like he thought it was a cute quirk.
I was disorganized, but I liked things that matched. I would never dream of dyeing my hair an unusual color or of wearing a different colored nail polish on every finger.
I do miss that awesome purse and shoe collection I left behind in a storage unit that I prepaid for a year.
When I embraced the act of trying to change everything about myself, I turned uber-organized. An anti-Alyssa thing would be to make my bed every day and keep my clothes, makeup, and shoes organized. So that’s what I’ve done. Every day. Having nothing out of place helps me see if anything is amiss. I feel like it keeps my old life from colliding with my new one. Until Operation Shitty Roommate of course.
If he looked in this room, he’d see a tidy person lives here with a whole lot of fun mismatched clothes, silly accessories, and a penchant for neon colors. I’ve got colorful scarves and pillows, a couple custom bobbleheads with my different hairstyles on my dresser that Carly bought me for fun with the irony that there are versions with hairstyles she hasn’t seen, one a long blonde one which is way too close to home because that bobblehead looks like I used to.
I’ve also got around three dozen pairs of shoes in my closet in every color of the rainbow, not to mention my vast collection of colorful tights and hair barrettes.
I’ve lived fairly lean with very little of the Steele brothers’ stash of money spent, though it has cost money for each job contract and I’ve paid Tori for her services and advice. But I make good money at CC and don’t have any real bills to pay with my apartment being paid for and cabs covered to work, so I have plenty of disposable income for funky accessories, fancy coffees, and trips to get my manis and my pedis and new hairstyles.
Opening and closing all my drawers finds everything arranged neatly and organized. Inside my nightstand: three vibrators. A purple rabbit, a pink clit-sucky thing, and the big green hulk-ish dildo. Even those are organized. I mean, it works well because I like to reach in during the dead of night and not have to fish around for the one I’ve got a hankering for.
Under my bed: some cobwebs and empty suitcase, plus six pairs of boots. My closet: colorful clothes. A lot of vintage. A whole shelf of about forty nail polish bottles even though I’ve probably spent a chunk of change on my nails in the past few months with appointments. It hasn’t stopped me from amassing a big nail polish collection. Sonia’s girls love coming over and digging into that collection.
My bookcase… books on tarot card reading, sets of tarot cards, books on dream analysis, a set of encyclopedias, a shelf of a dozen books about design and art. Two shelves of romance novels and a whack of arts and craft and jewelry-making supplies.
Houseplants. Crystals. Dreamcatchers.
Despite everything out on display in my room, it’s my secret nook that would say the most about me, the things I don’t want said, but I keep that locked up. I fetch the key from the hiding place in a pocket of a patchwork hippie cardigan in my regular closet and open it up.
This is Alyssa and Ally. This is who I used to be blended with who I am now. The colors: yes. The fun: yes. But also the secret place with a handful of things from my old life, my fuzzy bunny, my sketchbook and art easel with some drawings of places and people from my old life, though nothing overt in case anyone stumbles upon anything. My favorite hairbrush and embellished mirror that I’ve had since I was six. My little tea set, set up with a few of my stuffies on a miniature table and chairs set. Some of that stuff is new, but some of it Mom had sent to a forwarding service that Tori arranged, which sent it to two more forwarding services to get to me without being easily traceable. It was all so stressful that we decided to never ever do that again.