“You could come with to Hidden Creek?” she suggested.
He looked down at his hands and shrugged. “Let’s get your stuff first and see what happens.”
Selene’s one-room loft apartment was nothing much to look at. Over the years she had jumped from one hole-in-the-wall to another. She had picked up some of the used furniture that filled the small space at a second-hand store, but most of it she’d found on the side of the road or in a dumpster and had refurbished herself.
Compared to his place, hers looked like a dump. Even though she was clean, almost compulsive about it, the four-hundred-square-foot place looked… well… dumpy. Her mismatched, brightly colored furniture had seen better days.
Leaving Scott standing by the door, she walked into her bedroom and started packing up her personal items. She would have to arrange with the building manager to have the furniture donated or just hauled away.
“Are you going to be moving all of this?” he asked, following her back through the curtain she had hung to separate the living spaces.
“No, just my clothes and personal things. I’ll donate the rest.” She shrugged as she started putting her clothes into her luggage. “This shouldn’t take me long.”
“We can head back to Atlanta and stay at my place? We should get back around dinnertime,” he suggested, sitting on the side of her bed.
She glanced over at him as she pulled a stack of socks from her drawer. “Sure,” she said, trying not to let her voice reflect the fact that her heart had practically leapt out of her chest at the thought of repeating what had happened the night before.
It took a couple trips to get her things down and into the trunk of his car. The fact that everything that mattered to her fit in the trunk of his car slightly depressed her.
Not that she was a material sort of person. She liked having few enough belongings that she could pack up and move all by herself. Didn’t she?
After leaving a message for Larry, the building manager, she locked the door and slid the key under it before walking away without looking back.
“You did that so casually,” Scott said as he drove away.
“It was a shithole,” she said with a slight shrug.
“Yeah, but still, it was home for a while.” He glanced sideways at her. “I remember every time we moved as kids. You used to be more sentimental.”
“We’re not kids anymore.”
He was silent for a while. “Still, I doubt I could fit everything I have in the trunk of a car.”
She glanced over at him, then nudged his arm. “Diva.”
He laughed at the old joke they used to share whenever they had to leave something sentimental behind.
As they made their way back to Atlanta, they talked about their childhood together. They tried to figure out how many different homes they’d been in, but they couldn’t agree.
When she tried to prod him further on his new job, he acted slightly embarrassed and tried many times to change the subject. But she stuck to her guns and shortly before they arrived back at his place, she got some information from him.
“I handle accounts,” he said at one point.
“You already said that. I thought the company you worked for was in marketing of some sort?”
“Of sorts,” he answered.
“Scott, are you being obscure on purpose?” She narrowed her eyes at him.
He finally sighed and relented a little. “We handle large accounts. Multi-billion-dollar accounts. We market people and their personae or businesses.”
“Like… movie stars?”
“Yes, we have some as our clients.” He nodded.
“Okay, so you what? Help them market themselves?”
“Sometimes.”