Chapter 1 – It Ain’t Easy Being Green

SPOV

“Good morning Godric,” I called out into the room, while I set our daily Starbucks intake down onto the table just inside the front door.

His soft spoken melodic voice filled the room as he greeted, “Good morning Miss Stackhouse. I trust you had a good evening?”

His cadence could lead one to believe English was his second language, which – technically – it was. But that made no difference to me and I loved how polite he was. It was a trait that had somehow bypassed his maker.

And it was a good thing they weren’t so alike. I couldn’t handle two of them.

Godric’s name alone was a testament to his maker’s narcissism. When I’d had the misfortune of asking Eric why he’d chosen a name that sounded like something born out of the first century – rather than the twenty-first – I learned sometimes it was better to not always know every little detail.

God plus Eric equaled Godric.

And it wasn’t even because Eric thought himself the modern day Almighty or second coming of Christ. He named Godric – the artificial intelligence life form that was wired all throughout the house – after the mangled words his dates (and I used the term loosely, just like moral codes of said dates) shouted whenever he entertained them.

Ohmygoderic!

He even smirked at me when he claimed Godric’s first two initials were ‘O’ and ‘M’.

OMG. TMI.

Eric’s head already needed its own zip code, so I wouldn’t have felt the least bit sorry if his entertainment sometimes meant a shot of penicillin and an antibiotic chaser were needed when he was done with them.

But Godric truly was a work of art. The prodigy of Eric’s own brilliant mind. Not only was he capable of spitting out data faster than Google, he was just as readily accessible. I could even converse with him on my phone if I needed to.

There was an app for that.

“Yes Godric,” I replied needlessly. “My evening was as fine as always.”

And boring, but I left out that little detail. I wasn’t so sure Godric and our boss didn’t gossip about me behind my back the moment I walked out the door at night. Because genius or not, Eric had the emotional maturity of a hormonal teenage boy in a constant state of puberty and who knew just how far the AI apple fell from the tree.

“I am glad to hear that,” he answered in a way that made it sound as though he was wearing a smile on his nonexistent computer animated face. “Eric is downstairs in his lab,” because the day ended in ‘y’, I silently added, “But I am afraid he left a bit of, shall we say – a mess – for you up here that you may want to attend to before going down to greet him.”

I felt my eyebrow quirk up just as I noticed the wrappers trailing down the hallway, so I walked into the kitchen and pulled out a pair of latex gloves from underneath the kitchen sink. When they were snapped into place, I proceeded to pick them up one by one and shoved them into the trash bag in my hand, stating the obvious out loud, as I mused, “I see Eric decided to get takeout last night.”

“I am afraid so,” he chuckled. But I chuckled when he filled the room with the sound of bells, whistles, and loud applause, making it sound as though I’d guessed correctly on a game show.

Godric may have been computer based, but he did have a personality. A likable one.

But my prize majorly sucked ass.

Shoe. Shoe. Skirt. Shirt. Bra. Panties.

The wrappers to Eric’s takeout went into the trash bag as I went down the hall.

“I have already made arrangements for the car service to provide transportation for Eric’s guest. They’re entering through the front gates now,” Godric offered.

He really was a godsend and I thanked him as I headed down the hall, snickering again when the soundtrack from the movie Jaws followed me. I even played along and peeked through the door like there was actually a giant shark waiting for me on the other side. But Godric switched things up and made me jump a mile high when the sound from ‘Psycho’s’ shower curtain scene suddenly blared out unexpectedly and at a decibel little kids in China could probably hear.

Who needs caffeine to jumpstart your day when there’s a smart ass AI tracking your every move?

“You cock sucking mother fucking swamp ass stinky shit!” I hissed at him, waiting for my heart to come back down from the ceiling where it was currently lodged. I may have graduated with top honors from the Wharton School of Business, but my inner voice – who I was convinced was the love child of a drunken trucker and a dirty stripper named Candy – sometimes became my outer voice too.

“I am afraid that is impossible, Miss Stackhouse. Artificial life forms – like myself – do not require nourishment and therefore are unable to produce solid waste. Mr. Northman designed me to be as green as Kermit the Frog, but I do emit trace amounts of a byproduct that could be considered gaseous waste. Even so – I assure you – my shit does not stink. However if you’d like, I can make you a model of it on the 3D printer in the lab.”

“Keep it up, Binary Boy,” I glared – at nothing in particular since he was only heard and not seen – while fighting the smile that was threatening to form on my face, which he could see thanks to the umpteen thousand sensors built into the house. “I know where your off switch is.”

It was a lie and we both knew it. Eric had managed to bury Godric so deeply into the grid, nothing short of a worldwide nuclear fallout that flung us back into the dark ages would take him offline.

But Godric’s abilities extended beyond being a virtual smart ass/Wikipedia/IMDB’s Greatest Hits player because he was able to extrapolate data and learn from it as well. It was what gave him such a great personality. And he may have even learned from me to pretend I wasn’t full of shit when he treated me to a tone as smooth as a baby’s bottom while he asked, “Have I told you how lovely you look today, Miss Stackhouse? Have you lost weight?”

Losing the fight with my lips, I laughed out loud, not caring if we woke up She-Who-Had-No-Name. I didn’t need a bloodhound to figure out where I would find her since they’d left me a trail even Stevie Wonder could’ve followed. Eric never took his conquests in his own bed, but finding naked women passed out by the pool in the backyard wasn’t out of the ordinary. However this one was left in one of the guest bedrooms, so I tossed the bag with her clothes onto the bed and hoped it would be enough to wake her up.

So of course, it wasn’t.

I decided to cliché it and cleared my throat softly, saying, “Ahem.”

Nothing.

Subtlety may have been my specialty, but it would do me no good here. So I acted like Eric’s ego was caught in my throat and yelled out, “AHEM!”

Nada.

If I couldn’t have seen the rise and fall of her chest, I might’ve been more worried. But only because I wasn’t dressed for hiding bodies and Godric would be absolutely no help in that scenario unless he printed me off a 3D shovel. As it was, my only worry was falling behind schedule.

Sookie Stackhouse did not fall behind schedule.

She just jumped a mile high when cock sucking mother fucking swamp ass stinky shits scared her half to death.

Deciding I needed to up the ante, I moved a bit closer and leaned down. And because I wasn’t a cock sucking mother fucking swamp ass stinky shit, I kept my voice to a half-whisper and sang out, “Time to rise and shine…”

Because seriously, the sun had risen hours earlier and I didn’t have all damn day to play ‘Name That Walk of Shame.’ And I grew even bitchier knowing the whipped cream on my mocha caramel latte was no doubt fighting a losing battle in maintaining its whip.

It wasn’t as though I’d scheduled her into my day, but given the common occurrence, perhaps I would from now on. Besides, I couldn’t ‘Name That Walk of Shame’ because I didn’t know her name and I doubted Eric made it a point of finding out what it was the night before either. He used them – to quote – “Clear his head.”

Both of them.

But on the plus side, he’d actually left his lab, which was a good thing. He was prone to becoming obsessed with his work and I knew his newest obsession was eating him alive.

Not that I knew what it was he was working on.

He didn’t like to play show and tell before he could actually tell me all there was to whatever it was he was showing me. And he’d been working on his current project day and night lately and it had him going on very little sleep, with even less human interaction than normal. In fact, I’d planned on dragging him out of his lab that very day to get some sunlight on his skin before his pale ass keeled over from vitamin D deficiency.

But seeing now that he must’ve gotten out at some point in the night – although I wouldn’t have put it past him to have ordered in – I might cut him some slack. Besides I needed the time meant to take him out for a walk to get Name That Cum Stain out of bed and out of the house.

She finally stirred and the scent of stale alcohol and sex wafted up when she flipped over, showing me and the empty room everything God, her momma, and her Beverly Hills plastic surgeon had given her.

So…it was a typical Tuesday morning for me.

I took a step back before her smell or anything else she might be carrying had a chance to latch onto me. And when the sleep cleared from her eyes, she didn’t bother to cover up as she asked, “Who are you?”

At first I stifled the urge to pretend I was Godric’s 3D printed twin sister, but seeing the vacant look in her eyes, I decided what the hell.

“I am Godrica. Mr. Northman created me to oversee his home,” I said, letting my eyes glaze over. My twin brother didn’t help any when he snorted through the speakers, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Or maybe she thought I robotically farted out some Kermit green gas.

Her head tilted to the side when she asked, “Huh? Like his daughter or something?”

Yeah…because he would’ve had me when he was six.

Dumbass. Eric was an overachiever, but that was really pushing it.

She was too stupid to be any fun, so I wiped the Godrica from my face and took a page from my boss’s book. I ignored her question and pointed at the plastic bag on the bed, saying in my indifferent yet polite voice, “Your clothing. There’s a car waiting for you out front and the driver will take you anywhere you’d like to go.”

Even the free clinic. They’re open on Tuesdays.

“What are you? The maid?” she asked, looking more and more pissed when she realized it was just me and her in the room.

Or at least she thought so.

“And where’s Eric?” she added in a huff.

“Hardly,” I smirked, answering the former and ignoring the latter. “I have other tasks on my agenda this morning, so if you’ll please gather your things I’d be happy to see you out.”

Why not? I’d already seen everything else of hers.

“But…Eric?” she half-whimpered half-snarled.

Ugh. He was so giving me a raise for this shit.

I forced my eyes not to roll, while I forced an appropriately sympathetic expression onto my face. It was one I normally reserved for strangers who saw my somewhat wholesome appearance and thought that meant I gave two shits about their problems.

Godric and I were alike in more ways than one because I gave not a single shit. About their problems or hers.

But feeling my anxiety build, knowing I had other more important things to do – things I gave lots of shits about – I pushed the trash bag containing her clothes closer to her. She weird-eyed me, watching me take the latex gloves off and tossing them into the trash can. But since she was still waiting for an answer – and hoping giving her one would get her to get a fucking move on already – I lied/explained, “Mr. Northman is very sorry he couldn’t be here to see you off, but he had other pressing matters he needed to take care of this morning. I’m sure he’ll call you when he’s available.”

For another meaningless fuck when there’s no one better who catches his eye.

Although I doubted it. Eric normally didn’t do sloppy seconds. Not even his own, so she was likely shit out of luck on that front.

But at least she had a shit to be out of.

It always boggled my mind when the women he used to satisfy his carnal need for flesh didn’t know what they were signing themselves up for. He was a complete dog when it came to women and that fact was as well-known as he was. And if it wasn’t for his other more redeeming qualities, I wouldn’t have been with him for as long as I had.

Eric was brilliant in a way that would’ve made Albert Einstein look like Gary Busey. That wasn’t even an embellishment because I didn’t do those either, just like I didn’t fall behind schedule. But Eric was truly in a class all by himself. And if he wasn’t such a social butterfly – or rabbit, in this case – he would probably meet all of the bench marks for being classified as an idiot savant. His brain was like a mathematics wonderland and he saw things in a way no one else could see. He’d told me once every problem was a numbers game. You just had to put them in the right order in order to win. And he was, no doubt, a winner. His corporation – Northman Inc. – dabbled in everything from technology to medical research and was constantly at the top of the Forbes Fortune 500 list. And at the age of thirty-three, he had the whole world in the palm of his hand because he was nowhere close to slowing down.

In fact, he never slowed down.

When Eric did anything, he did it in the extreme. He lived his life exactly how he wanted to and he didn’t apologize for it. I admired that about him, even if I sometimes wanted to beat him with a shit stick for making more work for me. He overindulged in whatever struck his fancy at any given moment. Cars. Houses. Art. Women. He spent money like it was made of water, so it was a good thing he had a natural knack for turning water into wine.

Very expensive wine.

But when he was focused on his work, nearly everything else ceased to exist to him. If I hadn’t occasionally found him passed out on top of his desk, I might’ve assumed he didn’t even need to sleep. Ironically, I couldn’t count the number of times I’d had to force him away from the number hieroglyphics on his smartboard and make him pretend to be human for a few moments. Force him to eat or shower. But I was unashamedly in awe of the man most of the time.

However the women he chose to entertain himself with should make him ashamed and evened the scales. Half genius/half straight up idiot.

But I didn’t blame him. Why wouldn’t he have his way with them when they literally threw themselves at his feet? He worked constantly and he did his best work alone, so he’d have no way of meeting a normal woman. Nor did he have the time to put into having a normal relationship. In fact, I was the only female who was a constant in his life.

And we were so not going there.

Don’t get me wrong. I had eyes and I knew he was drop dead gorgeous, but he was still a little boy on the inside no matter how much of his outside was all man. A pretty package wasn’t what floated my boat anyway. It was his mind that would be more of a turn on to me.

Not that he turned me on.

Much.

Like I said, I had eyes.

And so did he. I knew he hired me for my tits, but he pretended I didn’t know that. But that was okay because I only applied because of his pretty brain. Neither one of us were willing to admit to our hypocrisy, so neither one of us called the other one out on it. And maybe I had a bit of secret hero worship going on, but it was warranted.

The man was a genius.

Rude. Indulgent. Egotistical. And the poster boy for Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.

But a genius nonetheless.

But he was also my boss, so there’d be no hanky panky between us. People already thought I fucked my way into the job, but I didn’t care. I knew the truth and that was good enough for me. Eric only exacerbated the problem with his constant flirting, but that was just a part of him. In fact, I was sure his head would implode if he couldn’t say whatever inappropriate thought popped into his head at any given moment.

Maybe I’d give the fellas on Mythbusters a call and see if they could get on that.

But right now it was his indulgent dick dipping that was pissing me off because his little pussy pot was making me late. So I turned to leave the room, saying, “If you like, I’ll let him know you’d like for him to call you. For now though, you need to get dressed. The fumigators will be here any moment.”

Godric snorted again at my lie, with a breath he was incapable of making, and I wanted to tell her not to hold hers.

Because getting Eric to call her was a numbers game she wasn’t going to win.