Hard Checked (Ice Kings #4) - Stacey Lynn Page 0,54
that,” she says. She dips a towel on the bar into a bucket of cleaning solution and wrings it out. “It’s why I go by Gigi.”
“Yeah, but it’s something I didn’t know about you and now I like that I know it and I’m guessing not everyone you meet does.”
“I like that you do.” She rolls to her toes and gives me a kiss. “This won’t take long. You need another drink?”
“If I do, I know how to get one. Go get cleaned up before I’m too tired to walk up those metal stairs and risk my life.”
She gives me a funny look and then shakes her head. “All right, hotshot.”
It’s less than thirty minutes later when she has the tables and chairs cleaned, the bar wiped down, the cleaning stuff taken somewhere and left wherever she put it.
She comes back from the office, keys and phone in her hand, shaking them and grins.
“I have a feeling there was something else you forgot that night you came here and crashed upstairs.”
There’s a lot of things I blacked out about that night, none have anything to do with her.
“Like what?”
“Come on.” She gestures with her head down the hallway. “And I’ll show you my cupboard under the stairs.”
She’s laughing at she says it, and while I’m totally flummoxed, I have the startling realization that there are probably very few places where I won’t follow this girl.
So a cupboard under the stairs it is.
“What the hell is this place?”
She’s taken me to the storage room. Not exactly where I expected. As the door to the bar behind us closes, she tugs on a string hanging from the ceiling, lighting up shelves of supplies. The room is tiny and for one brief moment, every horror movie I’ve ever watched sparks in my memory.
“Uh. Gigi?”
I turn to see her smiling at me, keys dangling from her hands. “You don’t remember?”
“Being shoved into a cramped storage room full of paper products? No. Can’t say I do.”
“Come on.” She slides behind a metal rack where packages of paper towels sway back and forth when she bumps into it. I follow her, swearing I hear the music to aforementioned thriller flicks.
“The hell?” I ask, when she pulls out a set of keys and pulls open a metal door. A horrific creaking noise squeals into the tiny room.
With her back to me, she laughs.
The door is barely taller than Gigi so I have to almost bend in half to see what she’s laughing about.
“The cupboard under the stairs,” she says gallantly, swinging an arm out. “This staircase leads to my apartment so I don’t have to go outside to get in and out when the bar is open. But you made the drunken, and admittedly, cute, Harry Potter reference the night I dragged you up here.”
I’d been wondering how in the hell she got me up those metal stairs.
“I like to read,” I mutter.
She laughs harder, shoulders shaking. Dipping her head to make sure she clears the door, she grins at me over her shoulder. “You coming?”
I wouldn’t miss this trip for the world. “After you.”
I have to bend so far forward to get through the small door I’m practically kissing my knees but as soon as I’m through, she’s turned on another light switch and we take the definitely more stable set of cement stairs to the top where she unlocks two different locks on the door before pushing it open. As soon as we’re in her apartment, I give the place a quick scan, noticing not much is different from what I remember before.
Bright colors. Small tables covered with books and a few cameras placed on top. Shelves heave from the weight of more books and then there are the photos she’d been trying to explain to me when I’d rudely left that morning.
To my right is the arch that will take me to her bedroom area and bathroom, and to my left is the door to outside along with her kitchen.
“You’re staring at my place like you can’t decide what to clean up first.”
Gigi’s still laughing and this time, I give her a full smile. “You are not tidy.”
She shrugs and tosses her keys and purse onto her kitchen counter, possibly the only thing in this place that’s been cleaned recently.
“Life’s too short to waste it picking up every thirty seconds,” she says. Her hair is pulled up into a bun on top of her head, stripes of teal and blonde mixed together.