Page 52 of As a Last Resort
Sam burst into laughter beside me but slammed her hand over her mouth.
“I’m so sorry.The, um,bubble production, was my fault.I think I put too much soap in the dispenser.”
She held her breath and glanced at me.And we both fell into hysterical giggles again.
Josie looked at me from the door with a sly smile and narrowed eyes.“It’s been acting up a bit lately.I’ll tell Harold.In the meantime, let me check which room I can switch you over to temporarily, Ms.Leigh.”Josie winked at me as she turned and walked back out.
“What’d you do, put the whole bottle in there?”I joked.
She paused.“Was I not supposed to?”
“Wait, you seriously put thewhole bottlein there?”
“It was super tiny!”she yelled.“I thought it was one of those things like the shampoos they give you in hotels.”
“Those last a couple days!”I yelled back.
“Well, you don’t have as much hair as I do!”
“Why are you yelling at me?!”
She burst into a fit of giggles again.
“I don’t understand,” I eked out in between breaths.“Do you not do laundry at home?”
“No.You send your laundry out in the city.People come to your door, pick your dirty clothes up, and drop it off clean the next day, folded all nice in these little stacks that all match.”
I had no idea something like that even existed.
“Most apartments in the city are too small to have a washer-dryer.It’s big business up there.”
Little did I know, laundry fairies were real.
“I haven’t done my own laundry for years.”She tried to wipe some of the suds off her.
“I didn’t do laundry until I was forced to as a full-grown adult.”
“Yeah, well, when you run out of clean underwear as a teenager and your mother can’t get off the couch, you figure it out.”She laughed through it like it was such a normal thing to say.“Although I will say, I avoided this particular situation happening somehow throughout my early years of domestication.I guess it’s been a while.”
Lexi and Sam are four years younger than me.When she was a freshman, Vanessa and I were riding high on life after having graduated, talking about marriage and kids and what it all looked like long term.I technically had a room at our parents’ house still, but I didn’t ever stay there.Vanessa’s parents were never home, so I practically lived at her house.I remember Mom talking about how Sam’s dad got sick.Really sick, really fast.He passed quickly.Her mom didn’t take it well, not that anyone would take an unexpected death well but she turned to pills, then alcohol.
Sam was over at our house a lot after he died, especially as her mom’s drinking ramped up.She was a staple at family dinner nights, but I wasn’t anymore, which was yet another reason Mom didn’t love my fiancée.Vanessa couldn’t fathom having dinner with family every single week so I wasn’t around a ton.I was working a lot, saving up money at the time to buy a house.
“Have you seen her yet?”I asked as I made my way on all fours to the small dining table in the middle of the room.I eyed the chair, hoping to use it to gain a fighting chance of standing up.
“Well, she made a spirited appearance on my Zoom call with my boss and the rest of the due diligence team in her thong bikini yesterday morning.”
My jaw dropped.“She didn’t.”
“Oh, she did.I’m still waiting for the fallout.While I think she’s doing better than I expected her to be, she single-handedly may have cost me my job.”
I pushed up and braced myself against the chair.
“You good?”she asked from the floor.
“Of course.”I stood straight up too fast and the chair slipped from under my palm.I crashed onto the floor, my head making contact with the side of the table as I went down.
And then, everything went black.
