Read Roomies (A Standalone Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) for Free Online

chair. “I’ll stay on for a while, but don’t
expect Cannon to amount to shit. He needs someone to breathe down his neck and
berate him or he falls apart like a little bitch that couldn’t make himself a
bowl of cereal.”
    “I’ll take that under advisement,”
Jim says. “Hey, I’m sorry it has to be this—”
    “Oh, fuck yourself, Jim,”
I tell him and am back in the kitchen a minute later.
    On the upside, that’s
nowhere near the first time I’ve told my boss to fuck himself. On the downside,
I think that’s the first time he really knew that I meant it.
    I’ll be lucky if he keeps
me on until the end of my shift.
    Somehow, he resists the
temptation to fire me straight away, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell
Roommate Chick. Although I’m fairly certain that learning her name would be a
positive step before I tell her I just lost my job. First, though, I’ll have to
tell her what it is that I actually do. That’ll be a great conversation.
    When I get home, Roommate
Chick is sitting on the couch, reading.
    She’s obviously busy, so
I decide not to disturb her.
    “Hey,” she says, not
looking up from her book.
    Shit.
    “Hey,” I answer. “How’s
it going?”
    “Fine,” she says, turning
the page. “Where’d you get the confit de canard?”
    “I didn’t get it,” I tell her.
    “Whatever. I’ve been
looking for a place that serves a decent version of it. Where’d you pick it
up?”
    Right now, I’m fighting
two urges: My chef’s pride wants me to tell her that I made it. On the other
hand, if I tell her, she’s going to want me to cook for her all the time. Worse
than that, the conversation will inevitably lead to the one topic I’m trying to
avoid.
    “I picked it up at some
French place a few blocks from here.”
    It’s not a complete
falsehood. L’Iris is only a few blocks from the apartment, and I do work there, for now, anyway.
    “Does this place have a
name?”
    “Yeah, but I can’t
pronounce it,” I lie. Day one on the job was learning the proper French
pronunciation of everything in the restaurant, and I do mean everything.
    Jim insists that we call
the spoons “ Cuillère .”
    She scoffs and returns
the modicum of focus she was expending on me back to her book. Or, at least
that’s what I was hoping she was doing.
    “Do you remember the
address?” she asks, her eyes moving side to side as she reads.
    “Not remotely.”
    That one’s not a lie.
    “Do you know the name of
the chef?” she asks. “I could probably look it up from that.”
    “You really liked it,
huh?” I ask, secretly patting myself on the back.
    “Yeah,” she says. “Oh
well. If you can’t remember, you can’t remember.”
    “All right,” I say and
start to walk back toward my room.
    “Only…”
    I stop.
    “I don’t know. I’d love
to find out where you got it. It’s the best confit de canard I’ve had
since—well, it’s the best I’ve had in years.” She finally looks up from her
book. “Maybe some time when you’re free we could walk through the area. I’m
sure we could find it.”
    I have to give her
something; otherwise every conversation is going to end up here. We really
don’t have anything else to talk about.
    “It has a flower on the
sign,” I tell her. “Other than that, I’m not sure that—”
    “ L’Iris ?”
she asks, her breath bated.
    “I don’t know,” I say.
“Maybe.”
    When I’m free and clear
of the restaurant, I’ll tell her where to go. Not that Cannon could even dream
of making confit de canard without me holding his hand and slapping him in the
face with it.
    “I bet that’s it,” she
says. “I’ve wanted to try it out, but I hear the chef is a real jerk.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “Yeah,” she says. “If the
food’s that good, though, maybe it’s time to drop in and see what happens.”
    “Nah,” I tell her. “I
could hear that guy from the kitchen. Everything was ‘fuck this,’ and ‘fuck
that.’ It kind of