The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig

Author:Lauren Willig [Willig, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

New York, 1999

“Home, sweet home,” said Jon, flipping on the light in the front hall.

The single bulb illuminated a wilderness of cardboard boxes and framed posters still in their packing cases. A pile of unopened mail sat on one of the boxes, bills and solicitations and slippery catalogs spilling over the side. The walls were a pale cream color, contrasting with the white wainscoting, although the paint along the baseboards was beginning to flake.

“It’s nice,” said Clemmie, unwinding her scarf.

“You mean it could be nice. Hold on to that for a second.” Bending over, Jon shifted a pile of posters leaning against what turned out to be a closet door. It opened with a creak and a grunt. Inside hung a beige raincoat and a battered black overcoat.

Clemmie handed over her coat and scarf. “It’s nicer than my place.”

“That’s the benefit of renting all the way up here.” The empty hangers clanked against each other as Jon hung up Clemmie’s old cloth coat. “More bang for your buck. And we get a housing subsidy.”

“Is this Columbia housing?” The building was pre-war, mellow, and lovely, with weathered pink bricks striped in pale stone. The floors might have been scraped, but they were real, long slats of honey-colored wood laid out in a repeating pattern.

“No, but most of the building seems to be Columbia related. It’s like a dorm for professors.”

“Keggers in the lobby?”

Jon gave her a look. “I said ‘dorm,’ not ‘frat.’ Bathroom’s through there.” He pointed her to the left, towards what was clearly the bedroom. Clemmie cleverly deduced this by the presence of a mattress on the floor, sporting rumpled sheets and a blanket. “Don’t be afraid of the towels. I just washed them.”

“You’re not going to give me the tour?”

“There’s not much to tour. Bedroom to the left, study straight ahead, living room and kitchen to the right. It’s your standard rectangle.”

Belatedly Clemmie remembered that he had had a house with Caitlin, a house with a yard and two cars in the driveway and, for all she knew, 2.5 cats and a dog. She knew that at one point, a very long time ago, she’d lived in a house with both her parents and her two older brothers, but that had been so long ago that the memory had faded to something like the print in a children’s picture book, flat and unidimensional. She’d been an apartment dweller for as long as she could remember.

That had been another fight with Dan. He’d wanted a house, eventually. She couldn’t imagine living not surrounded by floor upon floor of miscellaneous strangers. The goal wasn’t to get out of the box but to be able to afford a larger, grander one.

Clemmie trailed after Jon into the bedroom. “Hey, at least you have a rectangle. Mine’s a square. A very small square.”

The bedroom was decorated in a style that could best be described as early cardboard box. A reading lamp stood on one cardboard box, Jon’s alarm clock, a novel, and a spare pair of glasses on another.

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