One look at Morgan’s face was all it took to confirm she was sincere. The woman had the poker face of a toddler looking at a pilfered handful of Pixy Stix. It really was a sweet offer. One Kinsey shouldn’t agree to.
After being a part of the same online planner group for the past year and a half, when Morgan had found out Kinsey was moving to Harbor City for a job, she’d almost lost her mind with excitement. When Kinsey spilled that she was putting her PhD in pharmaceutical sciences to work in the R&D department at Archambeau Cosmetics, Morgan had called her immediately and had sworn her to secrecy in the planner group. That’s when she’d found out that the bullet-journaling fiend and corgi-butt sticker aficionado was one of the Beckett Cosmetics heiresses (sadly, Archambeau’s biggest competitor)—something Morgan really wanted to keep on the down-low with their group because people always treated her differently when they found out.
Now that Kinsey could understand—not because she was also in line for a billion-dollar fortune but because people loved to take one look at her and put her on the shelf as big-boobed blonde with bupkis for brains.
So she’d promised to never tell, and they’d made a million plans about what they’d do as soon as Kinsey got to Harbor City, including apartment hunting and lunch—but definitely not sponging off her mega-rich friend.
“I can’t impose on you like that,” Kinsey said.
“What imposition?” Morgan scoffed. “My place is big enough that we might not even see each other.”
“But no toilet in your kitchen?” Kinsey teased. “How would I survive?”
Morgan laughed. “I have no clue what is actually in my kitchen, but I can guarantee there isn’t a toilet in it.”
The offer really was the nicest, but Kinsey’s brain was going a million miles an hour pulling up all the other options and tossing them out one after the other in quick succession. Morgan was right—living here wasn’t an option. Toilet kitchen notwithstanding, the rent was already over her budget. The walk-up could be cleaned, and it was cheaper, but it also meant a three-train trip to get to work. Morgan’s place, though, was a fifteen-minute walk from Archambeau, and it would only be until she could find a better fit. It was the logical choice.
Still, it was a big ask for someone Morgan hadn’t set actual in-person eyes on until yesterday.
“You barely know me,” Kinsey said. “What if I’m the kind of person who hits snooze on a super-loud alarm clock forty-five times every morning?”
Morgan planted her hands on her hips and narrowed her bright-blue eyes. “We’ve been a part of our online planner group for two years and snarky DMing each other the whole time. I know you wear days-of-the-week panties.”
Heat exploded in Kinsey’s cheeks as her head whipped around to look at the landlord, who—thankfully—was just as entranced with the soccer match as he’d been before.
“You know I can’t get pedicures because people touching my feet freaks me out, and you know that I didn’t lose my virginity until last summer,” Morgan continued, seemingly impervious to the idea that the landlord was literally six steps away and could probably hear every word. “Anyway, we’re good enough friends that if you pulled that shit with snooze, I’d just smother you during your eight minutes of extra sleep.”
“And what about the work thing?” Archambeau was the biggest competitor to Beckett Cosmetics’s spot at the top of the luxury, privately owned cosmetics companies.
“Considering I have nothing to do with the family business, if you’ve chosen to befriend me in order to do some corporate spying for the Evil Empire—oops, I mean for Archambeau Cosmetics—then you’ve made a massive mistake.”
“Morgan—”
“Nope.” She raised her hand. “You sound just like my brother when you say my name like that. Speaking of which, his gym is just down the block from here, and he owes me brunch. Let’s go drag him out of there. I need some eggs Benedict in my belly, then we can get you moved in”—she shot Kinsey a don’t-even-think-about-arguing look—“to my place.”
Chapter Three
Kinsey
Fifteen minutes later, Kinsey had exhausted every excuse not to move in with Morgan that she could come up with. “Is there a point in arguing with you?”
“Never.” Morgan grinned wide enough to make her dimples sink a mile into her cheeks. “I always win.”
Kinsey had no trouble believing that, or that she’d be moving her meager belongings into Morgan’s apartment after lunch with her brother.
Walking into Vera’s Gym, Kinsey was assaulted by the sensory overload of the place. As if Harbor City wasn’t already enough of a shock to her country-homemade-biscuits-made-with-eight-sticks-of-butter soul, she had to add in a gym that Meemaw would have labeled as not fit for polite company.
“Are you sure it’s okay that we’re here?” she asked, feeling more out of place than she had when she’d walked into her first college chemistry course at fifteen.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Morgan asked, strutting in as if she owned the place and no one would even dare to say boo to her, which they probably wouldn’t.
Kinsey, wide-eyed and sending every silent hey-girl signal she could with her blue eyes, gestured at the scarred-up wooden benches in front of the banged-up metal lockers, the punching bags hanging from chains hooked to the ceiling and patched up with duct tape, and the bald guy with very aggressive fire-engine-red eyebrows chomping on an unlit cigar while eyeballing them as if sizing them up for dinner—to gobble them up, not for a date. Two guys were arguing over no-carbs versus low-carb diets during training. Meanwhile, another was fighting with a mop that kept getting caught in the wringer as he stood in front of what she was really hoping wasn’t a bloodstain on the cement floor.
All of this on top of the echoes of gloves thwumping against flesh and the corresponding grunts of men of all sizes sparring in the huge space, the humidity of sweaty men you couldn’t miss with every breath you took, and the occasional squeak of laced-up boxing boots pivoting on rubber boxing rings.
It was noisy and smelly and an overload of the senses and, although not entirely unpleasant, holy hell it was a lot of testosterone to take in all at once. Kinsey struggled to sort out all the different compounds, break them into discrete elements. It was a habit she’d developed in that first college course as she navigated an unknown adult world as a mere teenager. If you knew what made up the confusion, it wouldn’t be overwhelming. Life was just a giant chemistry set to Kinsey.
Morgan scoffed. “They’re all a bunch of kittens.”
Kinsey looked around at the guys working out by beating the crap out of each other and barely-keeping-it-together punching bags. Kittens? No. Feral barn cats on meth? Quite possibly.