Chapter 340

The three of you were a mess. Not in a sexual way, you just knew that you looked a little ridiculous.

Gemma and Sabrina, once you invited them, dropped off their bags with fresh outfits to store at your place in your room and discovered the cleaning you’d been doing. That got you kisses, which developed into full-on make-out kisses when Gemma discovered the freshly cleaned washroom as you finished the kitchen. The girls ended up helping you clean the last main area of the apartment; the living room.

On the face of it, the living room wasn’t that dirty. You also were able to assure yourself that most of the garbage was Mosches doing. Once that was taken care of though, the girls wanted to move the couch and the chair to vacuum properly. Your insistence that such an idea might not turn out the way they thought it would went unheeded, and soon you were shifting the couch.

There wasn’t a dead animal back there, but somehow there was enough hair that there was no way it could have come from a person. Your best guess was that Mosche or his roommate had maybe had a long-haired cat for a pet. Or, quite possibly, the cat or dog had belonged to some other tenant who had lived in the apartment before them.

Once the entire living area was cleaned, including dusting the window shades and wiping down all the surfaces - something you insisted on using gloves for considering how you had caught Mosche doing things when he thought he was going to be alone for a while - the three of you collapsed onto the freshly cleaned and Febreezed couch. Soon you had a rerun of The Other Guys playing from the movie channel, the pizza was half-eaten, and you each had a beer in hand. All three of you were sprawled across each other on the couch. You were leaning sideways, your face resting on Gemma’s butt as she was on her stomach. Your hand that wasn’t holding a slice of pizza was massaging Sabrina’s foot as she was laying in the opposite direction. Occasionally Gemma would kick her foot up softly while she was laughing at the banter between Will Ferrel and Mark Wahlburg, and you would lean over and plant a kiss on her ankle or the top of her foot.

That was how Mosche found you when he came back to the apartment. All three of you looked over to the door as he was unlocking it, and Sabrina muted the movie.

“Oh, hey guys,” Mosche said, realizing you were there.

“Hey, buddy,” you said. “You OK?”

Mosche was dressed as he usually was, which was to say somewhere in the shabby-chic department with a zip-up hoodie that didn’t quite fit him, cargo shorts and flip-flops that probably needed to be replaced. The reason you asked was more based on the fact that he looked about as down as you’d ever seen him.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he sighed.

“Mosche, you don’t need to play tough with us,” Sabrina said, sitting up and then standing. She took a slice of pizza out of the box and a beer from the six-pack and brought it over to him, pushing them into his hands. “Come on, tell us what happened.”

“But it’s embarrassing,” he muttered sulkily.

“Well, maybe we can help make it less embarrassing,” Gemma said, also sitting up. That caused you to lose your butt-pillow so you sat up as well. You were less thrilled about helping Mosche work through whatever thing was going on with him. Not because you didn’t want to help him, but because the girls were there to experience whatever hole that Mosche had gotten himself into.