Free Web NovelChapter 139: 139 | A Crime Against God
I shrugged. "Let’s get this shopping trip over with."
Famous last words from a guy who should’ve known better by now.
Diane Fitzgerald does not shop. Diane Fitzgerald conducts operations. The moment Marina pulled up those floor plans on her tablet, something behind Diane’s eyes activated, some dormant predator that had been sleeping under twenty years of silk blouses and client management, and it woke up hungry. She commandeered the corner display table like a forward operating base, spread both apartment layouts across the screen, and started marking zones with a stylus she produced from nowhere.
"Living area faces east in both units, which means morning light through the windows," she said, tapping Lukas’s layout. "We want warm tones to balance that. Cool-toned furniture in an east-facing room washes out by ten AM and looks like a hospital waiting area."
"Cool."
"Bedroom is on the interior wall, no windows, which means we need ambient lighting. Overhead fluorescents are a crime against God. We’re doing a floor lamp and a desk lamp minimum."
"Cool."
"Bathroom connects through a pocket door rather than a swing door, which saves us approximately four square feet of usable floor space. I want a shelf unit in that gap."
"Cool."
Diane looked up from the tablet. "Are you going to contribute to this process or are you going to stand there saying cool until I furnish your apartment for you?"
"Option B sounds great."
Her mouth twitched. The corner barely moved, but I’d spent enough time studying that mouth to catch it.
Here’s the thing about me and living spaces. I’m a simple man. I need a mattress that doesn’t actively hate my spine, a desk where I can sit without my knees hitting the underside, somewhere to put my clothes that isn’t the floor, and a couch that doesn’t make me want to stand instead. Past that, I’m good. Paint the walls whatever color. Hang art if that’s what the room needs. Give me my system notifications floating in my peripheral vision, a playlist loud enough to drown out the Oracle Feed when it gets chatty, a cold diet cola, and a box of those pizza rolls they sell with the Hero sponsorship logos on the packaging, and I will be perfectly content in a concrete bunker.
Diane understood this about me. More importantly, she understood that my ambivalence was not laziness but an actual gift to her, because it meant she had seven hundred fifty square feet of apartment to design without anyone second-guessing her choices. Her eyes lit up the way they lit up when she closed a deal with a difficult client.
"Marina. Show me what you have in walnut-toned bed frames. Platform style, low profile, upholstered headboard in a neutral linen. Not grey linen. That mushroom color you had in the spring collection."
Marina practically ran to the back.
Sloane watched this exchange with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised so high it nearly disappeared into her hairline. She was building up to something. I could feel it the way you feel a storm front moving in.
"Mom."
"Hm."
"You’re not doing my room."
Diane didn’t look up from the tablet. "Sugar, I am going to furnish Lukas’s apartment because he has given me carte blanche and I intend to abuse it. Your apartment is your own project."
"Good."
"Within reason."
Sloane’s eyes narrowed. "What does within reason mean."
"It means I have veto power over anything that will make you physically ill to look at by October."
"Nothing I pick will make me physically ill."
"You wanted a neon pink accent wall when you were fourteen."
"I was fourteen."
"You wanted LED strip lights behind your headboard when you were sixteen."
"LED strip lights are cool."
"LED strip lights are what happens when a nightclub has a baby with a migraine." Diane looked up from the tablet with the expression of someone who has been waiting for this fight and is going to enjoy every second of it. "Your room is your room, baby. But if you come to me in November telling me you hate the way it looks and can we please start over, I am going to remind you of this conversation at volume."
Sloane’s jaw set. Her blue eyes, the same shade as Diane’s but carrying a completely different flavor of stubbornness, locked onto her mother’s face with the intensity she usually reserved for sparring partners.
"I want a black bed frame." frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
"Acceptable."
"Platform style."
"Also acceptable."
"With red sheets."
Diane’s stylus paused mid-stroke.
"Red sheets," Sloane repeated.
"Red sheets," Diane echoed, and the way she said it made it sound like Sloane had suggested sleeping on a pile of raw hamburger. "In a seven hundred fifty square foot apartment with overhead lighting and no natural ventilation in the bedroom."
"They’re sheets. They don’t need ventilation."
"Red sheets in an interior bedroom look cheap, darling. The lighting will turn that red into something that resembles a bargain motel. Burgundy, maybe. A deep wine tone with good thread count. But fire-engine red? In that light? You’ll feel like you’re sleeping inside a Valentine’s Day card."
"I don’t care what it feels like. I like red."
"You like the idea of red. You’ll hate the reality of red. There’s a difference."
Sloane turned to me with a look that said back me up right now or suffer consequences. I raised both hands and took a deliberate step backward.
"I’m not involved in this."
"Coward."
"Survivor."
Diane pulled up a color palette on the tablet and began swiping through options. "Look. This is the red you’re imagining. And this is what that red looks like under warm overhead lighting at sixty watts, which is what Halloran installs as standard. See how it goes orange? Now look at this burgundy. Same warmth, but it holds its depth. It reads as sophisticated. Confident. Mature."
"I don’t want to be sophisticated. I want red."
"You will always want red. That is who you are as a person and I love that about you. But you will want the correct red or you will spend two years staring at your ceiling hating it and blaming me for not stopping you."
