The Sinful Obsession

Chapter 5

It was weird being neighbors with your girlfriend. Like really weird. It was weird that she could just come over any time she wanted (but a good weird). And if she did stay the night, it was weird to fall asleep with her warmth and wake up with emptiness beside him (bad weird). And it was weird that she left him little notes every time about how cute he looked when he was sleeping when she got up super early to go to work and tried her best not to wake him (good weird).

And it was definitely weird how much Jake loved her little notes. He maintained that it should be illegal for any business to require their employees to be signed in by 6:00 AM. If they swiped their card or did their pin code (Jake wasn't actually sure what form of electronic monitoring they used at Amy's work to track times, but he knew it was overkill) at 6:01 AM or, god forbid, 6:02 AM that was unacceptable and deserved some sort of reprimandment. So Amy rolled out of bed at 5 o'clock on the dot so she'd have enough time to get to work early enough that even if there was a traffic level from a 20 car pile up she would arrive no later than 5:45.

Now school for the kids didn't start until 8:30 AM, and Jake always tried to get there around 7:30, but more often than not he got there at 7:45. He could manage to get to work at 7:30 if he ever got up right when his alarm went off at 7 AM, but he usually hit the snooze button for a total of 15 minutes, hence the 7:45 arrival.

So there was a two hour difference between Amy's wake up and Jake's wake up on weekdays, so she always tried her best to not make a ruckus when she left in the morning. And every morning there was a note next to the pot of coffee that said something about how she had to resist kissing him awake, or how she couldn't wait until Saturday morning so she actually could sleep in with him. And if she didn't have any special thoughts to say that morning, she would just leave a sticky note that featured an expertly drawn smiley face. Jake didn't know how she managed to make her smiley faces (the two simple dots and the smile) look so professional every time, but they always looked perfect like they were clip art or some sort of graphic design than someone drawing them because they were always the same and always perfect.

The notes felt embarrassingly similar to a mom sending notes in a kid's lunch box every day and Jake should've been bothered by that, but they really made him too happy to be properly embarrassed by the sappiness.

Seeing her smiley faces always made him smile.

Amy never was a spontaneous person, even if it involved her ambition. But everything aligned for her to move to Fairfield she went with it (after some very careful deliberation). It was the same company she worked for in Chicago, and for the transfer she was offered a higher position and pay grade- really her main motivator because a promotion went towards her ambition drive which combated her cautious nature in pretty much all walks of her life. She wasn't the only one offered the position, but nobody else wanted it because Fairfield was in the middle of nowhere and hundreds of miles away from where all of her coworker's lives were built. But Amy wasn't particularly attached to the apartment she'd lived in for close to a decade, and five of her seven brothers didn't even live in the same state they all grew up in anymore.

Then there was Kylie. Amy's best friend since they were assigned roommates in college. Kylie had been living in the area for the past couple years, but she was looking to move closer to the center of the city because she lived on the outskirts of town before due to apartment prices, but they were cheaper because it was close to an hour's drive away considering all the traffic.

Kylie's lease was up and she figured out it was almost cheaper for a single person to get a house than a single person to get an apartment (and when you factored in all the amenities it really was more bang for your buck) so all the stars aligned and Amy and Kylie got the house on Tacoma together.