Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 95676 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95676 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
"Thanks." I grab my dead cellphone from the couch and head toward her bedroom. When I step inside, I can't help but to laugh. Her room is as chaotic as she is. Done in a soft cream color with deep purple accents, it's definitely a girl's room. Clothes, shoes, and designer handbags are spread from one side to the other. A stack of manuscript pages sits on her bedside table. Another stack takes up half of her desk. It's a mess.
I pick my way carefully through the minefield of her room, being careful not to step on any of the heels poking up from the mess, and plop down at her desk. When I move her mouse, the computer screen comes to life, opening to a Word document full of corrections and typed comments in the margins.
I skim over them, smiling.
Erin is a mess most of the time, but she's damn good at her job. She puts her whole heart into her work, and it shows. I've lost count of how many bestsellers she's helped cultivate over the last year and a half. My best friend is kind of a bad ass.
I save her document and then hit the icon in the very bottom corner to shrink everything down. Chris Hemsworth is shirtless in the background image splashed across the desktop. Unlike her bedroom, the files on her computer are highly organized. Everything is neatly labeled and grouped together in different areas. Program files are ordered in the top left corner, with work files in the top right. The bottom left is reserved for folders with labels that make me laugh out loud. Every single one of them says something about porn.
A lone folder in the bottom right corner catches my attention. It has my name on it.
Curious about what she's put in there, I hover the cursor over the folder and then hesitate. I shouldn't be going through her personal stuff, even if it does have my name on it.
I quickly move the cursor away, open a browser, and surf to my bank.
Looking at my balance is depressing. I have exactly $138.74 in my checking account. Not enough to live on for long. Luckily, Bryan convinced the school board to pay me through the end of the school year, so I'll have at least one more paycheck coming in. After that, I'm honestly not sure what I'm going to do. I have to decide soon though…preferably before I'm destitute.
Opting to use the little bit of cash I still have on hand, I log out of my account and close the browser. My gaze catches on the file with my name on it again. This time, curiosity gets the best of me, and I double click to open it.
There are all kinds of pictures of me saved inside. Some are my modeling photos, others are more recent. A couple of pictures with me and my family are sprinkled in. There are a few of me and Erin, and a couple of us with other friends, but most of them are of me by myself.
A weird sensation bubbles up from the pit of my stomach as I scroll through. There are, literally, hundreds of pictures of me saved to the folder. I don't even remember some of them being taken. They look almost as if someone was photographing me from afar.
Why does she have all of these? And where did she get them?
"Hey, do you want to go to Santo Rosario or El Pescado?" she hollers, her voice growing closer.
I quickly exit out of the folder and jump to my feet, my heart pounding hard. "Um, Santo Rosario is fine," I say when she pokes her head into the room. "I'm not feeling seafood."
"Cool." She gives me a funny look. "You okay?"
"Yeah." I nod and grab my phone from the edge of the desk before squeezing past her into the hallway. "Seeing my balance was depressing," I say, giving her a half-truth. I'm a little freaked out at the fact that she has hundreds of photos of me saved to her computer, but little alarm bells are ringing in the back of my mind, urging me to keep quiet about what I found until I know what it means. All I know is that something isn't right.
"I'll pay for your dinner."
"No, that's okay." I shoot her a weak smile. "I'm poor, but I'm not that poor yet. I can swing dinner."
"Okay then." She shrugs before stooping to grab a pair of jeans out of the floor. "Any chance you saw a pair of black Jimmy Choo's with a four-inch heel in here?"
"Nope."
"I knew you were going to say that," she says with a dramatic sigh.
"I'm going to shower."
She waves me off before tossing her jeans on her bed and rummaging through the piles in the floor in search of her shoes, muttering to herself about how she's going to hire a male maid to clean for her because nothing is sexier than watching a man clean. I watch her for a moment before darting down the hall to the guest room. Once inside, I close the door and then lean up against it, breathing hard.