“I’m not making fun of you.”
“It feels like you’re making fun of me,” I point out, and he stands, and now that I don’t have my sandals on, he’s not just taller than me. He towers over me, making me feel tiny and fragile.
“I would never make fun of you. I think the way you talk is cute.”
“Oh.”
“I’m gonna go out to my truck to get my tool bag. Can I use that door?” He tips his head toward the sliding door off the kitchen that leads to a deck, which looks over one of the large ponds in the middle of the community.
“Yeah, but you’ll have to walk around the back of the building and go through the gate at the side. It’s easier if you just go out the garage. Besides, if Burt is out back, you may have to run from him, and I can tell you from experience that’s never fun,” I inform him, and his eyes have once again filled with humor.
“Who’s Burt?”
“My landlord’s Chihuahua. He’s small but scary as hell.”
“I’ll go out the garage.”
“That’s probably smart,” I murmur, and he shakes his head then opens the door and leaves. I listen to him head down the steps and hear him open the garage door. Standing here, I wonder what I should do, and then my stomach grumbles, reminding me I didn’t eat breakfast, which is something I definitely shouldn’t be missing out on. Since I need to take my pills, I really need to eat.
Opening the fridge, I grab the stuff to make myself a sandwich and hear Sage coming back up the steps. As soon as he is in the apartment and closes the door, I turn to watch him drop a huge bag of tools onto the floor near the box.
“Do you always travel with so many tools?”
“Most of the time,” he says, pulling out a power drill and a plastic box with attachments inside. “I work on my house when I have time, but I don’t leave my tools there since someone could break in and take them when I’m not around.”
“Is your house in a bad neighborhood?” I ask, opening the breadbox and pulling out a loaf, dropping it to the counter.
“Do you know Percy Priest Lake?”
“Yeah.” My eyes go to him over my shoulder, and I notice he already has the pieces of wood for the shelf separated into piles.
“My house is on the lake. The house is shit. One day it will be beautiful, but right now, it’s shit, which means I got it for practically nothing and will probably spend way too much fucking money and the rest of my life fixing it up.”
“It will be worth it,” I tell him immediately. Even though I haven’t seen the house, I know for certain that one day, when he’s done, it will be beautiful.
“Waking up to a view of the lake every morning and sitting out on my deck at night, watching the sun set on the water, I know it will be, too,” he says quietly, and something in his eyes changes in a way that makes my body feel funny.
Pulling my eyes from his, I turn around to face the counter before I say something stupid, like “I want to see both those things with you.”
“Do you want a sandwich?” I ask instead, and hear him say, “Sure,” behind me right before the power drill starts up.
Once I’m done making a sandwich for him and one for myself, I pull down a box of Cheez-Its from the top cupboard and drop a handful on each of our plates. Then I take both over to the coffee table and set them down. Moving back around where he’s working in the middle of the room, I head to the fridge and open it up to see what kind of drinks I have, which isn’t a lot, since I don’t drink soda or anything else besides water really.
“Is water okay with you?”
Turning off the drill, he nods, and I grab two bottles from the still open fridge. I hand one to him as he stands, and then he follows me to the couch where we both sit.
“Do you read a lot?”
Chewing and swallowing the bite of turkey and Swiss sandwich I just took, I look at him and notice his eyes are on my collection of signed books I have stacked up neatly in the corner of the room.
“Yeah,” I reply, folding my feet under me and setting my plate on the tops of my knees. “I love reading. I always have. When I was young, I used to sneak into my parents’ room in the mornings before school and read whatever book my mom was reading. Then when I got old enough to buy my own books, I would buy romance novels with guys on the covers with their shirts open and their long hair blowing in the wind.” I laugh, watching his eyes fill with humor. “Once, my dad found me in my room reading one of those books, and he lost his mind. He was convinced I was reading porn. Thankfully, my mom came to my defense and told him to back down and that he should be thankful I was reading and not out partying and doing drugs.”
“My mom reads a lot, too, and so do my sisters.”
“How many sisters do you have?”
“Three, and two brothers.”
“I always wanted siblings growing up,” I confess, wondering not for the first time what it would have been like if I hadn’t been adopted, if I had grown up with my mom and sister. I know my life would have been completely different. My mom shouldn’t have had kids at all, and I know that because my sister told me about her childhood. She told me what it felt like to wonder if she would get dinner or where she would sleep.
“So do you think it will take us a year to finish the shelf?” I joke when I feel sadness start to creep over me like it always does when I think about Kelly and what she had to endure growing up alone with our mom.
“Nah, it shouldn’t take long at all.”
HOLDING THE LAST shelf, I watch Sage screw in the last four shelf guards and fight the urge to laugh at the frustrated look on his face. It’s been over five hours since he told me it wouldn’t take a year to put the shelf together, and he was right; it shouldn’t have taken so long. He had all the right tools, but half the screws and things that came with the shelf had disappeared, which meant we had to go to Home Depot to buy them. And seeing how he just happened to know everyone we came in contact with, our ten-minute run into the hardware store took us forever.
Okay, so I may have spent a little time there wandering down the aisles. Home Depot may be a store dedicated to men, but every female knows they have the best cleaning supplies at the best price you can get anywhere. Plus, Sage took me to the kitchen department so I could see all the stuff he was planning on putting in his place, which included an awesome six-burner gas range with matching fridge, dishwasher, and double oven. He also showed me the cupboards and countertops he had chosen, which were a cool, sandy-colored material with flakes of teal, silver, and gold glass in them.
After he showed me everything, I made him promise that I could see the kitchen in person when he was done with it, and that was when something changed. I don’t know exactly what it was, but when I made him promise, his face turned soft and his eyes warm, right before he took my hand and led me to check out, not letting me go until I was back in his truck.
“Are you laughing at me?” he asks, bringing me out of my head, and I shake it then press my lips together when he starts to grumble under his breath. About what? I don’t know, but it’s cute seeing him like this. “Fucking finally.” He takes the shelf I’ve been holding and puts it in place before stepping back. “Jesus, this thing was a pain in the ass. I think we’d have been better off building the shit from scratch.”