Three hours...that’s how long I’ve been in this house. Three long hours.
At nine o’clock this morning, I checked out of my hotel and came straight here, noticing how different the house looks at daylight. Outside and inside, the place is immaculate. Wyatt has informed me that a cleaning crew comes by once a week and scrubs the place from top to bottom. That’s one less thing I have to worry about doing.
Right now, I’m in my old bedroom, lying on the queen-sized bed, looking at all my old posters on the walls. Looks like my father has preserved my bedroom over the years. Everything is the same, well, except for the bed covers. The nightstands still have all of my junk in them – lip gloss, old high school passes, my senior yearbook and a bunch of other things.
Wyatt is here, too. He’s in the bedroom next to mine. I can hear him moving about, getting settled and talking on the phone about shrubbery. I figure it must be something work related. I also make a mental note to watch how loud I talk on the phone because these walls are not sound proof.
Three hours and five minutes...
Time drags on. I’m bored out of my mind. How am I going to survive staying here for three months when the first few hours are worse than Chinese water torture?
I get up from bed, stretch my arms high in the air and decide to take a walk through the house. I head downstairs and look around again. The spiral staircase leads down to the living room where there’s a comfortable, beige, leather couch set – the couch I sat on briefly last night. There’s not a TV in the living room. There has never been a TV in the living room because that area was off limits, reserved only for guests of the Knight Ranch to have elegant seating. The funny thing is, we rarely had any guests.
When I walk to the kitchen, I see all new stainless steel appliances that blends well with the granite countertops and white cabinets that look to be freshly painted. I open the refrigerator door to see if there’s any food inside and it’s not. It’s actually completely bare.
“I was going to run out and buy some food if you want to come with me.”
I turn around to look at Wyatt. He looks even taller in this house.
“Will you stop sneaking up on me?”
He smirks. “I didn’t sneak up on you. I just walked in the kitchen.”
“Well, next time make some noise or something so I can know that you’re lurking behind me.”
“Do you want to come with me to the store or not?” he asks, seemingly losing his irascibility.
“No. I don’t.” I leave him standing in the kitchen and continue my tour of the house. I skip my father’s bedroom because I don’t know if I can go in there. I do peer into the other two bedrooms downstairs. They are decorated nice as well – looks like something straight off of Pinterest. He must’ve had a professional designer come in and do this.
The family room is cozy, decorated with a dark, chalk blue micro-fiber sectional sofa with an area rug that has geometric designs and variations of blues, oranges and reds. The strong colors are complimentary to the pillows, the art on the wall and the table runner on the rectangular coffee table. The centerpiece of the room is the sixty-inch flat screen that’s mounted on the wall.
I step out into the hallway, figuring I’ll go back to my room when I see Wyatt standing at the base of the stairs.
I thought he was going to the store? I have good mind to walk on by him, run upstairs, grab my purse and get out of here, but I know that would probably anger him. Since I have to be stuck in this house with him for three months, I want to at least make sure we’re not at each other’s throats the entire time. Besides, I have a weird, unsettling feeling that he already feels some type of way about how things ended between us.
“Why don’t you want to go with me to the store?” he asks.
“Because I have other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, I have to stop by the funeral home to pick up my father’s ashes since his dying wish was to have them dumped in the pond behind this house.”
“What else?”
“And I have to buy some clothes, toilet paper, paper towels, bath towels...things I need to live here.”
“And we can’t do that together?”
“We can…I just would prefer not to. Now if you would excuse me, I have to run upstairs and grab my purse.”
Wyatt steps aside so that I can pass and says nothing more.
When I come back downstairs, he’s not there. I feel relieved that he’s gone and I happily skip to the front door, jump in my car and drive to the closest shopping center.