ARReSTeD DeVeLOPMeNT - 𝑎𝑛 𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛

05 || ceiling the deal

Lucille, for once, was being productive. And not in the alcoholic sense. Well, actually, yes in the alcoholic sense, but even more so in the normal sense.

After waking up to her usual lonely apartment and drinking her usual morning cocktail, she got incredibly bored and decided to do something she hadn't done in years: She wanted to clean out her storage closet.

Of course, this wasn't out of the goodness in her heart; her heart didn't exist. It disappeared with Cinco De Mayo. Her burst of energy truly came instead out of the sudden realization that people were starting to catch wind of things she had been trying to cover up.

Taking a box out and rustling through all the papers inside, she found nothing of interest and wondered with a jolt if her family had already found the things she'd been looking for. She closed the box and put it back, going through her other storage bins and looking specifically for one with an obscure Asian name written on the side of it.

What she found instead was a small shoebox, about one square foot in size, with the name George-Michael scribbled in thick sharpie on the side. She looked down at it in silent contemplation before her landline began to ring from the living room.

"Oh, that dumb phone..." she muttered, stepping back out of her storage area and rushing to it, taking it off the hook and holding it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Lucille," George Senior said on the other end. "How are you today?"

Lucille gritted her teeth, turning to her patio doors and staring out at the coastline. "I was better before you called," she growled, narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips. "I think they're onto me."

George Senior, miscalculating this moment as a good time to try and earn her back, replied with, "Well, I'd certainly like to be onto you, if you catch my drift."

Lucille only sighed, closing her eyes in frustration and pacing back and forth. "George, I don't want you back even when I'm fully plastered. Why would you expect my mind to change when I've only had..." She took a moment to count the glasses on the kitchen table. "...four martinis?"

"Not the time?" George Senior asked dejectedly, and Lucille shook her head as if he could see it.

"Not the time."

"But, just for reference, when is the right time?" he asked in return, "because I just want you to know that I spend all my time thinking about you and I don't know what to do and—"

Lucille, suddenly in need of some fresh air, left the phone on her coffee table and stepped outside, closing the door behind her as George Senior rattled off on the phone to nobody in particular, almost getting away with pretending he wasn't just paraphrasing the lyrics from Falling For You by Colbie Caillat.

"—and I just can't take it," he went on. "I've been waiting all my life and now I've found you... again, and I have no idea what to do—"

The ceiling thought he was putting on a wonderful show. And it wasn't the only ceiling in town that was experiencing this.

There was another very specific ceiling of a small shooting location in a creepy little building that was seeing the performance of its life. And, surprisingly, we are not talking about the soft-core porn shootings we've mentioned in the past with Tobias' ex-girlfriend. We're talking about the commercial.

Tony Wonder had failed to make it in time for the shooting. In addition, he and Tobias were the only two people who auditioned for the role, so the producers decided to take the first person they could find to read off the script. Luckily for them, Maeby, who had just walked inside to cool down before making her way home, seemed to them like the perfect candidate. Upon hearing about the amount of money she'd be paid in compensation, she didn't give a second thought to doing the job.