“He wants to have dinner tonight,” Connor said, tapping his long fingers over his phone nervously. “We can do it here. I want him to see us together before the cameraman comes tomorrow.”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I told him, tugging on my shoes by the door. “I’ll be on my best behavior with your father if you help me win this thing. I know you don’t want to, but I also don’t want to be best buddies with the man who wants to take my brother’s livelihood. Deal?”
Connor stood in front of me, staring into the distance as if mulling it over in his head. “Yeah, alright. It should be easy anyway. At least we don’t hate each other now. Maybe we can even be friends by the end of it.”
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” I smirked, echoing his sentiment from earlier.
I grabbed my coat and headed down to the warmly-furnished lobby with its three brightly decorated Christmas trees, waiting for Nora to appear in her shiny black car. I sat on the round, plush sofa in the middle of the lobby and sighed, tucking my legs beneath me. There was an outdated magazine on the polished coffee table, and I grabbed it, flipping idly through the pages while I waited. Someone cleared their throat and I turned, raising an eyebrow at the intrusion.
“Are you the new girl-of-the-month, then?” Questioned a snide female voice from right behind me.
The desk in the lobby was round and polished darkly. It curved into the back wall beside the rows of silvery mail slots. There was a woman standing behind the desk who looked a little older than me, with her curly red hair braided into long pigtails and garish Christmas ornament earrings dangling from her ears. Round brown eyes squinted at me and there was a downturned smirk of disappointment on her thin red lips. She had the air of someone who always wanted to be the center of attention and from the look of her, she usually got it. She grabbed her cup of coffee and took a long drink, staring at me.
I realized she was waiting for me to answer and I cleared my throat, reading the name Lilah on her name tag. “I’m his girlfriend, yeah,” I said, trying to sound confident. I hoped she wouldn't ask me any personal questions that I didn't have the answers to.
Lilah raised her eyebrows at my announcement, looking suspicious. “For how long? I’ve never seen you here before.”
I nodded in a way that I hoped looked reassuring and confident to her, but most likely just made me look constipated. “Oh yeah, we’ve been keeping it pretty private. He spends time at my place mostly.”
Lilah sneered into her coffee cup and then looked back at me with that same disgruntled frown. “Connor doesn’t have girlfriends; he just has girls. No woman is ever good enough for him, no matter how they help him or call cabs for him or bring him coffee—”
“Well, there’s my ride.” I pointed a thumb sharply over my shoulder, cutting off what was most certainly going to be a long monologue leading almost definitely to her telling me that Connor should have dated her and not me. I wondered how many times she had offered herself to him, or how many times she been one of his “girls.”
“I should probably get going now. I have to get back before tonight. I’m moving into his apartment and we’re going to live together from now on.”
At that, Lilah’s pretty face grew red and contorted into a shocked rage. As she opened her mouth to most likely scream at me, I skittered out of the door quickly, hurrying across the street as if she was going to chase after me like some tacky rom-com character. Yeah, I didn’t have to tell her that, but I was sure that she would bother me otherwise.
I laughed a little as I jumped into Nora’s car, sliding into the back seat.
She looked at me in an amused sort of way. “What happened in there? You met our dear Lilah, I’m assuming.”
I snorted, nodding in assent. “Is she always like that? If she is, why?”
“She’s, well…” Nora paused for a moment, letting out a disbelieving laugh as she pulled the car onto the street and drove away into the city. “She’s something, all right. She’s been after Connor since he moved into the building. It’s his father’s apartment complex so I think she’s looking for a way into the family.”
“Yeah, I caught that about her,” I said, nodding and writing down the directions to my apartment building. I handed them to her. Nora took them with a nod and turned back to the road, reading them out loud to keep them in her mind.
It seemed only mere moments before we arrived at my apartment building. As I opened the car door, Emily, the girl from the show who I’d had a beer with, texted me. She asked what we were doing for our living situation and whether we would be in the studio apartments or not. I texted back that I was moving into his place today.