Free Feverish (Bullet #3) by Jade C. Jamison Page B

the funniest part of it all, that as
she settled in and got Clay organized in a way he’d never been
before, she realized additional things she needed to do to help
him, things he hadn’t even thought of.
    Part of her wondered if she was inventing
ways to made herself invaluable. Maybe she was, but she also
realized that Clay hadn’t been joking when he said he needed
someone to “organize his shit.” She wondered how he’d gotten along
without an assistant for this long, and she figured it was mostly
thanks to Mary.
    Mary was amazing. Emily already loved the
woman. She was good at her job, but more than that, she was patient
and kind and she kept Clay’s house from falling in disarray. It
didn’t take long for Emily to realize how disgusting Clay’s house
would be if not for Mary. That was another thing that drove her
crazy, but she’d get past it.
    Clay had already thanked her too. His bills
were now caught up and all his paperwork organized. His email was
almost caught up as well, and he had mentioned that maybe next week
he would have her help him out with Facebook and Twitter. His
bandmates had kept telling him he needed to participate online at
least semi-regularly. Fans liked to reach out and they would think
he was stuck up if he didn’t post at least occasionally. He told
Emily he was pretty sure he hadn’t ever tweeted—at least not
sober—and the last time he’d been on Facebook had been around New
Year’s. Brian was also a regular Instagram addict, often posting
semi-nude selfies and getting five-hundred likes from what they
assumed were rabid teenage girls in less than an hour.
    She’d also bought a Rolodex and started
organizing the contacts she knew about, and she’d put most of his
computer files in order to make sure what she needed would be
easier to find. There wasn’t much. There was more porn on the
computer than anything else. She’d almost deleted it and had
decided against it. It didn’t stop her from filing it away in its
own folder, though, and she’d marked it PORN in big letters
so she wouldn’t accidentally open it later.
    She didn’t get guys and their porn
fascination. She didn’t hold it against him, but she didn’t want to
see it.
    The hardest part was settling into her own
room. She didn’t plan to be here forever, so she didn’t want to get
used to it. Instead of setting up her room like she would have if
she’d been a student again, she treated it like a hotel room. She
unpacked her clothes and everything she’d need for day-to-day
living, but decorative things and other items like most of her
books stayed in boxes, tucked away in her closet. Fortunately,
having been a student for the past several years, she didn’t have
much to her name. Most of her keepsakes were still in her father’s
house. The plan was to someday move it all out, but she wasn’t
ready yet. She wanted someplace permanent before she fully
extracted herself from her dad’s house. As it was, she was afraid
it would kill him when she’d have to. She’d been his whole life for
way too long.
    That first night was strange. Clay was
definitely a night owl…and she wasn’t. She’d heard him being all
hyper as he often was, watching fifteen minutes of some CSI rerun and then going back to the music room and strumming some
chords. Then he’d come back out and get on the phone, microwave
some popcorn, put in a movie, and after a bit, go back to play more
music. She had a hell of a time going to sleep.
    It wasn’t until the third or fourth night
that she heard him playing a porn movie on the television. Jesus. At first, she hadn’t known. The music was a little
cheesy, but she could barely hear the dialogue. It wasn’t until she
heard the gasping and groaning that she figured out what was going
on. She’d been horrified, thinking at first that maybe Clay was
fucking some woman in the living room.
    God. That was embarrassing. She wished she
had a bathroom connected directly to her bedroom in