Page 24 of Count Your Lucky Stars

“I try to vacuum and Swiffer at least once a week. Same with cleaning the bathroom.” Margot ran her hand down the front of her shin, tugging the fabric of her leggings smooth. “We could trade off?”

“I’ll clean the bathroom this week and you can do the floors and then next week we’ll switch. Does that work?”

“Sure. Sounds good to me.” Margot drummed her fingers against her legs. “Also, I’m sure you already saw, but there’s a whiteboard on the side of the fridge in case we’re out of something. Milk or whatever. I mean, we can text, obviously, but sometimes it’s nice to have a reminder right there in the kitchen.”

“Perfect.” Olivia snagged a pen off the coffee table and jotted down a quick note. “Whiteboard for notes. Got it. Okay, let’s see... trash. Is there a chute or do we need to haul it down to the dumpster?”

“There’s a chute. Down the hall, to the left.” Margot rested her chin on her knee.

Olivia dropped her gaze back to the list. “Do you have any pet peeves I should know about?”

“That you don’t already know?” Margot huffed out a laugh. “I don’t know. None come to mind.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

Margot shrugged. “I work from home—well, sometimes I’ll go to Elle’s, but usually I’m here—and I’m not very easily distracted. I don’t need complete silence to focus or anything. I do occasionally record for our video series and sometimes I’ll hop on Instagram Live for Q&As, but I do that in my room, so as long as you don’t crank your music ridiculously loud, it’s fine.”

“No blaring music, got it.”

“How about you? Any pet peeves I should know about?”

Olivia smirked. “Somehow I don’t foresee you leaving the toilet seat up, so not really.”

Margot cringed. “I feel like there’s a story behind that.”

Unfortunately. “Brad was constantly forgetting to put the seat down. I got up to pee in the middle of the night and fell in. I’m talking legs up in the air, ass all the way down in the bowl.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It was awful. I had one of those Ty-D-Bol cleaner tablets in the tank, you know, the ones that turn the water blue? It stained my skin. I walked around looking like a Smurf from the waist down for two days before I got to the store and bought a better loofah.”

Margot clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her chuckle. “It’s not funny. It’s just... the visual.”

“It’s a little funny,” Olivia conceded.

“Not that I picture it being a problem, but note to self, never leave the lid up. Anything else?”

Olivia folded her list in half and ran her nail down the seam, forming a sharp crease. “Should we talk about bringing people home?”

Margot fumbled her phone. “What?”

“If I wanted to have a couple friends over.” She didn’t have many close friends, not anymore, but she’d had Kira over for drinks once or twice, and Margot obviously had a tight-knit circle of friends.

“Friends.” Margot nodded quickly. “Oh yeah. That’s—that’s totally fine.”

“Cool. I would text you first, if you weren’t home. You know, so you wouldn’t walk in and wonder who these strange people were in your apartment.”

“Same.” Margot blew out a breath that ruffled her bangs, the flush along her cheeks not quite fading. “I’d, um, do the same. If I have my friends over.”

She kept underscoring that.Friendsas opposed to some alternative—

Wow.Okay, Olivia could see where her initial question might’ve been open to interpretation. Not that she planned on having dates over. Olivia had donecasualexactly once, and look how well that had turned out for her. Not that she’d known it was casual at the time. Not that it mattered. The point was moot.

She wasn’t going to be bringing anyone home unless they were friends, and what Margot did was her business. Olivia didn’t need to know, and she wasn’t about to ask.

Chapter Six

“It’s open!”