It turned out that her walk of shame wasn’t shameful at all.
CHAPTER 13
Noemi
After a shower and a much needed stop at the coffee shop down the block- the same one where she’d first seen Cason- Noemi settled back in on her bed at the hotel, her laptop open in front of her. Her brain felt scrambled, like literally, someone had cracked open the shell and dipped in there with a flipper and messed everything up into jumbled white and yellow fluffy goo.
She was beyond tired, but she felt wired, like she was still buzzed from those few shots of whisky the night before. She knew sleep would pretty much be an impossibility after the night she’d just had.
She also knew that she had to call her dad. Soon. Cason opening up and sharing was like a kick in her motivational butt. She’d run from home and she knew her dad must be worried. God, she could have just done the adult, rational thing and sat down and talked with him. Instead, she’d done the twelve year old thing and ran.
Noemi sipped at her coffee. It still wasn’t very good, even though it was a different barista working. He’d been just as casually rude as the other one. She thought the night her dad told her about Byron so and so and his shoe empire and how it would help their own shoe empire, blah, blah, blah. She’d tune out and checked out for most of it, as she usually did when her dad talked shop. He could go on for hours. She did care, but shoes got a little boring after a while. He’d dropped the big M out of nowhere and that caught her attention, but she’d gone into immediate panic mode and checked out on that too.
Maybe it wasn’t even the whole marriage thing. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house and experience life on her own for the first time ever.
She downed the rest of her nearly cold coffee and set the paper cup on the nightstand. Her dad’s face flooded her memory when she closed her eyes. He had a nice face. A kind face. No matter how busy he was, she was always right up there for him, a major priority, even if he had a hundred other things going on. No matter how stressed he got, no matter how shitty things were after her mom died, it had always been them.
And she’d left without even telling him.
Her chest squeezed and clenched, as jumbled up and messy as her brain was at the moment. It felt a little like someone dipped a spatula in there too and turned her heart, stomach, and other internal organs into a full body stew.
She realized she was being ridiculous and swiped her finger over the trackpad on the laptop to turn the screen back on. Step one in independence, if she really didn’t want her dad to drag her home when she told him where she was- find a place to live.
The sooner she got out of the hotel, the better. It was expensive and renting out an apartment or even a condo would be a heck of a lot cheaper. She browsed dizzily through a few pages of apartments, but there really wasn’t much on the market and the prices were terrible for what they were. One of the places even had a report about bed bugs. Bed. Bugs. It made a shiver rip up her spine and her skin feel crawly at the thought of bugs taking over her house.
She flipped through three different condo rental websites with only a few prospects, which she wrote down on the hotel notepad. Money wasn’t tight. She had her savings and she had a Business Degree, even though she’d literally just graduated. It was always the plan that she work at her dad’s company. So, what if she didn’t have any experience. She could get a job somewhere. She could make a better cup of coffee than anyone at that shop could, she’d say that for herself.
Still. She didn’t want to just rent something and put her name down on a year lease when she felt so unsettled. Was this really where she wanted to be? Was leaving New York and staying away the right thing?
Noemi was about to close her laptop when she thought about houses for rent. Maybe someone out there needed a shorter term roommate. It would give her time to decide what she was going to do with herself without needing to make a long-term commitment to a lease and it would save her some money getting out of the hotel and not being in an expensive condo.
The idea gave her an energy boost, like an espresso shot, only that little glass was filled with straight up inspiration. She did a quick search and came up with a classifieds site that had all sorts of rentals on it.