Nick Oswald

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NICK HAD HAD ONE HELL of a day. At only thirty years old he was already the head of his very own engineering firm and it was a business that was quickly taking Austin, Texas by storm. It was a good city to be that go-to guy in, too. Austin was growing so rapidly the city could hardly keep up with itself. Almost every day there was somebody else knocking on his door and asking him to take on a new project. There were men who would have crumbled under the weight of all of that work but Nick wasn’t one of them. He ate it up. He lived for that pressure, that drive. He placed the relentless demands of his job at a premium higher than anything else in his whole life. Anything, that was, other than his friends.

Women were a dime a dozen, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them, or even worse, hated them, just that they weren’t a priority. He’d never met one who turned his head so that he wanted to have her around for more than a week or two. His friends, though? They were another story. Nick’s friends were the second most important thing in his life and one of the only things he would drop everything for, including work. Leaving work wasn’t something he made a habit of, that was for sure. If he had, his company wouldn’t be the raging success it was. Days like today, though, he was happy to make an exception. It was Abel’s birthday and Abel was a friend worth leaving work for. He and Abel had been friends since the two of them had ridden tricycles instead of full-fledged bikes. As they had grown up they had developed into two very different kinds of men. Abel was solid and quiet, the kind of man who got rattled by next to nothing. He was the antithesis of the work-driven machine Nick himself was, what Nick liked to call “one of those granola types.” For all intents and purposes, they had no business being in each other’s lives anymore, but friendships were funny things. They’d maintained their friendship throughout the years and it showed no signs of departure. Nick was pumped to hang with him and take a fucking break for once. He was so pumped, in fact, that he almost didn’t notice the frigid one standing on the stoop. When he saw her, he did his best to engage her in a little back and forth, a little banter, but as always she was stone cold. He had no idea how to handle a chick like her except to brush her off and go about his day. It was the only way that made sense to deal with chicks like her.

“Um, excuse me?”

“You’re excused.” It was a juvenile answer and he knew it, but he couldn’t quite keep his mouth shut. He had his back to her now, no intention of carrying on this miserable excuse for a conversation, but he didn’t need to be able to see her face to have an idea of what her expression must’ve been. He had seen her roll her eyes in disgust enough times to know what it looked like from memory.

“God, so funny. Never in my life have I met a man as funny as you.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” He began to turn the knob, already knowing that she was far from done nagging him. Right on cue, she put a surprisingly firm hand on his shoulder and tugged, all but forcing him to turn around.

“Seriously, Nick. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“What, aside from having this delightful conversation?”

“Yeah,” she answered with an impressive amount of sarcasm, “aside from that.”

“I’m sorry, I thought that was kind of obvious.”

“Well, let’s pretend that you aren’t actually as easy to figure out as you think.”

“Sure, I guess we can do that. Assuming that it’s not painfully obvious. I’m just paying my buddy a visit on his birthday.”

“Huh.”

“Huh what?”

“Oh, nothing,” she answered in a voice that meant it most definitely wasn’t nothing, “I’m just wondering why you would pay your buddy a visit by waltzing into my best friend’s apartment unannounced.”

Nick clenched his jaw. His teeth were grinding together seemingly of their own accord, probably messing with some of the very expensive dental work he’d had done over the years. He’d spent some time around this chick over the last six years, but he would never have said she was his favorite woman around. Every time he saw her, it was some version of this. She was cold. More to the point, she was downright icy. She appeared to him like she always had her nose in the air, which meant to him that she thought she was better than him and ninety-nine percent of the people she came into contact with. He did his best to be nice, or civil even, when he was around her, but she seemed to be on a personal mission to make that impossible – to piss him off. On top of everything, she was hot as hell. Her being kind of a bitch and nothing special to look at would have been one thing but she wasn’t your average girl. She was honestly one of the hottest women he’d ever seen and every time he was around her his body responded to it independent of his opinion of her personality. She wasn’t one of those stick-thin women he never felt like he could really grab onto. She was thick, voluptuous. She had a rack that appeared to defy gravity, enough to fill his hands up to capacity in the unlikely event that he was ever to find himself in a situation where his hands were anywhere close to her tits. She had a waist but underneath it were hips and an ass that wouldn’t quit. The hottest part about her was her confidence despite not being the skinniest girl on the block. She knew she was hot as hell and she acted like it. Being demure didn’t strike Nick as one of her issues, hence the constant ruins and arguments just like this one.

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, Olivia.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“This isn’t Caroline’s apartment.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because. It’s Abel’s place.”

“You realize she lives here, right?”

“I gathered. So what do you think? Did he ever giver her actual verbal permission to move in or did she just pull one of those sneak attacks?”

“Sneak attacks? That’s not even a thing.”

“Sure it is. You know, where the chick starts bringing her things into a guy’s apartment under the radar? She’ll bring in one small thing at a time, little by little, putting said things around the apartment but in places the guy’s not likely to notice for a while. Then he wakes up one day and all of the sudden he’s surrounded by some chick’s things. So what’s he supposed to do then? Does he bag it all up, tell her he’s sorry but he’s not so into the idea of having a surprise roommate?”

“God, you’re such a pig.”

“The thing with that,” Nick went on genially enough, as if he’d never heard her evaluation of him at all, “is that it’s like walking into a minefield. A guy does that and he’s got to handle the wrath of this chick he’s just offended. Not a good deal, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Olivia answered stonily. He had to hand it to her, it was a tone of voice that would have brought many men to their knees. She knew how to intimidate.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Not a good deal. So then what?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re a chick. I’ll tell you what happens. Any dude who doesn’t feel like getting himself involved in World War Three decides he’ll bite the bullet and let her keep her junk in his place, which means she’s going to keep bringing more junk in whenever she feels like it. After that goes on for a little while longer, she’ll sit him down and have the conversation.”

“What conversation would that be?”

“The conversation where she lays out all of the reasons why they might as well move in with each other. And at that point the dude is kind of screwed, right? Chances are she’s staying over all the time already, which is why she started bringing her junk over in the first place. Seeing as the guy didn’t want to get into it over her leaving her stuff at his place, he’s already opened the door to her becoming a permanent resident, both literally and figuratively. And there you have it.”

“There you have it? You make it sound like you solved the great mystery of the universe.”

“Nope, not solved. I wish. I’m just saying, that’s how you get stuck living together.”

“Neat. None of which has anything to do with this being Caroline’s apartment.”

“My point is that it’s not her apartment. Pretty simple.”

“Except that it is.”

“You know you’re not going to convince me of that, right?”

“So you’re saying it was a scenario like the lovely one you just laid out for me?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Except that you’re wrong.”

“You know what? I have a really simple solution to this little problem we’re having.”

“Oh yeah?” she retorted, her hands on her hips and a scowl on her pretty face, “What might that be?”

“We’ll just ask them.”

Nick knew Olivia wouldn’t approve of him just barging into the apartment, which is why he didn’t bother to ask her opinion of the matter. He knew that Abel rarely left the front door to his place locked because the two of them had had many a conversation about how stupid it was to be so trusting in the current day and age. Normally Nick would have considered Abel to be a flat fool to leave his place open but for the moment, it only made his life easier. He tried the knob and grinned when the door swung easily open. He stepped inside confidently and did his best to shut the door behind him.

“Hey!” Olivia shouted from behind him, one of her hands jutting out at lightning speed to stop him from closing the door entirely, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“If you need to ask a question as simple as that, I’m afraid there’s no hope for you in this world.”

“You can’t just go barging into her apartment that way! Ever hear of knocking?”

That’s what you were doing when I walked up, right?”

“Um, yes, that’s right. I was knocking because I’m a civil freaking person.”

“Right. Didn’t look like it was getting you anywhere. Thanks for the tip, but I think I’ll stick to doing things my way.”

Nick turned back towards the front hallway of the spacious apartment, grinning widely as Olivia squawked her disapproval. He didn’t consider himself to be the kind of man to incite women’s anger on purpose, not regularly anyway, but there was something about Olivia that made it so damned tempting. Besides, she may have disapproved of what he was doing, but her disapproval didn’t extend so far that she wasn’t hurrying after him. She was so close behind him, in fact, that she ran smack into his broad back when he got to the living room and abruptly stopped.

“What’s the matter with you?” she cried, coming up to his side with disgust radiating off of her body.

“Christ,” he said, ignoring her completely and instead choosing to address his buddy and his buddy’s girl, “I’m sorry. I guess knocking really wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.”

Olivia, who had been too intent on trying to murder him with her death glare alone, allowed her eyes to drift to the couch Nick was already trying not to look at. When she saw why he had stopped, she let out a gasp.

“Hey, guys,” a nearly naked Abel called out cheerily, “welcome to our casa, I guess.”