Betting on the Boy Next Door

Copyright Copyright © 2023 by Melanie Jacobson All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. Dedication To Jaymee Besties rule Chapter One Sami It’s past midnight when I open the trunk of my car and toss in my gym bag with the combat boots, torn prom dress, and fishnets. I stand there for a minute, calculating. My parking space is in front of our condo, and all the windows are dark. That’s good; the odds are lower I’ll get caught sneaking in by my roommates—but they aren’t zero. I’ve thought about this all the way home: what is my cover story? I washed my hair thoroughly, but I can’t be sure I got out all the glitter until I see it in the morning. It’s hiding under a beanie right now, so that will help. I only need to get past my roommates on the first floor, and I’m safe. But I’ve never been out this late after a gig before, so I’ve never had to think of an excuse. What if one of them asks me where I’ve been? I won’t tell them the truth. I don’t tell anyone the truth. Well, except my grandma. But she wouldn’t judge. Maybe . . . a midnight supply run to the twenty-four hour superstore. I find one of my reusable grocery sacks and put in some random things from the trunk: an unopened bottle of motor oil, my car first aid kit, a flashlight, and a softball from the time I told Ruby I’d join her city league team but then remembered how much I suck at sports. I look at the lumpy bag. It’s not completely convincing, but it’s the best I’ve got. I close the trunk with a soft click and let myself in through our patio door. The house is quiet. I slip off my shoes and sneak up the stairs. No one opens their bedroom door to see who it is or what I’m up to. I dart into my room and shut my door, leaning against it with a sigh of relief. I let the bag of fake groceries slide to the ground. I have got to come up with a better excuse for next time. Which is tomorrow. Great. There’s a word for a person who is as obsessed with bacon as I am: addict. Lots of people think they love bacon; they like bacon. Loving bacon is if you get captured by terrorists who try to torture secrets from you and everything fails: waterboarding, sleep deprivation, playing “Macarena” twenty-four/seven for weeks. But then one day, they cook bacon and say you can have a piece if you tell them all your secrets. So you do, starting with the time you walked across the stage at high school graduation with toilet paper stuck to your shoe to the time last week when you got in your roommate’s car at the grocery store, except you realized thirty seconds later it was actually a middle-aged woman you’d never seen in your life and you just changed her radio station. Or that’s what I did, anyway. The toilet paper thing. Then the car thing. It was awkward. She almost pepper sprayed me. I haven’t given any information up to terrorists yet though. Mostly because they haven’t offered me bacon. So when the smell of bacon frying curls under my bedroom door on Saturday morning, New Year’s Eve, I follow my nose into the kitchen more predictably than one of Pavlov’s dogs. Ruby, one of my three roommates, smiles up at me. “Morning, chica. Figured it would be you in first.” “Bacon,” I mumble. “Coming up. But also, someone’s moving in.” The condo next to us has been empty for nearly two weeks. The previous owner, a family with two young kids, sold it to move to Atlanta when the wife got a new job. But as I shuffle over to our patio sliding doors, I spot the moving truck. I slide the door open and poke my head out. There’s some low-key clatter as two guys in company jumpsuits bring down a sofa and manhandle it through the low gate next door. “Sit out there,” Ruby says. “Bacon and omelets coming up. Tell me when the movers come by with something new.” “What have they brought in so far?” I ask, settling into one of the wicker patio chairs. I glance at Ava’s parking space, which is empty. She’s at her lab, no doubt. She doesn’t have to be. Neither of us has to work weekends. For her, it’s because the lab has normal business hours. For me, it’s one of the perks of being the RN at a nursing home. My job is to oversee the licensed vocational nurses and certified nursing assistants, and since I outlasted the previous night shift RN, I got to move to days six months ago. “A mattress. King size. Metal mattress frame. That’s it. It was the first thing off the truck.” I squint, trying to think through my pre-coffee brain cloud. “Could be a couple. Or a tall guy.” Ruby nods. “Going to have to see the headboard.” A new neighbor in the Grove is a big deal, especially one right next door. The condos form a square, the front doors facing into a courtyard with a pool and community barbecue areas. The back of each condo has a patio and a small grassy yard with a low iron fence, separated from the parking lot by a sidewalk, plus a balcony hanging over it from the second-floor bedrooms. It means we all get to know each other well. There’s no space between yards; they run along the sidewalk in an unbroken row. We always see neighbors if we hang out on the patio. We’re also always bumping into each other at the mailboxes or the pool or the shared