* * *
Stephanie had brought with her only what would fit in her small car, and the rest of her stuff would be sent from Riverside in waves after her mom found the time to box it all up and make a few trips to the post office. What she had with her was just two suitcases of clothes, one box of personal items, and a particularly heavy box that was labeled, “Hard Drives!”
That was the one I carried in for her that very same afternoon seeing as she said she could start her job as Will’s new nanny right away.
“Good God,” I said, bringing the box into the guest bedroom and bending down to put it gingerly on the floor. “How many hard drives do you have?”
She smiled shyly and dropped one of the two suitcases full of clothes on the floor next to the bed. “Just a couple. But my old laptop is in there too. It’s a real clunker, the only one we could afford when I was in college and I wasn’t able to get all my files transferred off it so I have to lug it around with me.”
“You can’t just email the files to yourself?”
“I could. There are just a lot of them. One of these days I’ll boot that thing back up and go through everything on there, see what’s actually worth keeping and what I can finally move on from.”
“It’s just school stuff?” I raised a brow. “I don’t think I kept any of my notebooks or essays or things from college. I guess I’m just not sentimental like that.”
“Some of it is school stuff,” she said. “But there’s other things saved on there as well.” Before I could ask a follow up question, she walked over and took the box in her hands and tried to lift it herself. “For now, I’ll just put this out of the way in the closet.” The box didn’t budge and I stifled a laugh.
“Let me help you.”
“I can do it,” she said, her voice revealing just how much of a strain this was on her skinny arms. “I lifted it into the car when I came from Riverside.”
“Apparently you’ve lost some muscle mass since then,” I joked. I put my hand on her shoulder and gently moved her out of the way. “Seriously, it’s no problem. Let me.” She stepped aside and allowed me to carry the box into the closet for her, where I placed it carefully in the back corner. Then I straightened up and walked out. “So, I bought you a new set of towels which are folded up in the bathroom. I already washed them and everything.” I slapped some of the dust from the box off my hands and grinned at her. “You are welcome to eat anything you want from the kitchen, obviously. Just—act like this house is your house, you know?”
She laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll try.”
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just that thishouse—I mean, it’s really more like a castle.”
“A castle?”
“The style isn’t castle-esq but the size sure as hell is. It’s huge!”
I shrugged. “It’s not that big. I’ve definitely been in houses way bigger than this. I grew up in a house bigger than this.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Then it’s no wonder you don’t understand just how massive this house is. I grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with my mom. We had one bathroom and I slept on the pull-out couch until I was a teenager. Trust me, this is a castle of a house. Like, for example, how many bathrooms do you have?”
I winced. “I’m not sure I want to answer that question now.”
“I’m guessing… four and a half?”
“Five,” I said. “When I bought it, the bathroom next to the kitchen was just a half-bath but I decided I wanted a shower in there as well, so I knocked out the hall closet and expanded it.”
“Why did you need a fifth shower?” She laughed at me.
“What can I say?” I laughed along with her a little. “I always wanted there to be enough showers so that anyone living here or staying here could have a shower if they wanted. Plus, I really like taking showers myself and I wanted to have options.”
“Doesn’t everyone? Like taking showers I mean.”
“Sure.” I slipped my hands in my pockets. “But unlike everyone, I really appreciate a good shower. I love standing in the hot water, comforted by the knowledge that even if I wanted to be working right then, I couldn’t be. It’s so… relaxing.”
“What’s going to happen to your relaxing showers once they invent bathroom laptops and install screens where you can answer emails right from the tile?”
“You think they haven’t already invented all that! No, they definitely have. But I will never give up my shower time. Just don’t tell my dad about those advancements in technology, or he’ll be wanting to require all the top sales people at the company to install them.” I chuckled. “Anyway, enough about me and my obsession with showers, let’s get back toyou. Is there anything else you need?”
She frowned as if in thought, and I couldn’t help but combine the idea of long showers with the image of her standing there in front of me. I thought of what she would look like in the shower, the hot water running down her naked body and my hands—
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Oh, except I wanted to talk to you about getting Will a zoo pass. I know I mentioned it earlier, but you know I can’t really afford to just buy the pass for him myself so…” She trailed off.