“Tomorrow, I’ll be back to see how it went. I hope you two can work out all this nonsense and find some harmony. Life is too short to spend it fighting.”
“Is that why you came by?” Noah asked, his jaw tight and his teeth clenched. No doubt the idea of spending time with her outside of work was every bit as revolting to him as it was to her.
“I heard there’d been some squabbling, and I wanted to nip that in the butt.”
Brianna tried to contain the snort of laughter that erupted from inside her at the way the woman mangled the expression “nip that in the bud.”
Noah cleared his throat as if he were also trying not to laugh.
“I’ll see you two in the morning. You have a nice dinner now and put all this bickering to rest.” She turned and walked away before either of them could think of anything else to say to her.
For a full minute after she left, neither of them said a word.
Finally, Noah broke the silence. “Way to go.”
Chapter Three
“It is when we hurt that we learn.”
—Steve Maraboli
Why couldn’t she have just gone along with him when he said they were communicating, not fighting? If she’d done that, he wouldn’t be showering and shaving the scruff off his face to go back out. No, he’d be throwing logs on the woodstove and settling in for a long winter’s night of reading. Instead, he had to go another ten rounds with the architectural equivalent of Muhammad Ali. She exhausted him.
And she turned him on.
God, he hated that. He hated to be feeling anything resembling desire for the first time in three long years—long enough that he’d worried the plumbing had broken—only to have it return for someone who drove him mad.
She wasn’t even his type, for Christ’s sake. He usually went for the frosty blondes, but Brianna had curly dark hair, curves on top of her curves and sharp brown eyes that didn’t miss a trick. One of his guys had referred to her as a “smoke show.”
Noah had asked him what that meant.
“You know, smokin’ hot,” the young man had said, looking at Noah as if he were ancient.
It wasn’t possible to be more “out of it” than he was. No cell phone, no social media, a TV he rarely turned on, a computer he used only for billing and work-related activities and little to no contact with people other than the men at work. And he kept his distance from them. He’d learned the hard way not to get too buddy-buddy with his employees.
After Mrs. Hendricks had dropped her bomb—and her coupon—on them, Noah had spent the rest of the day supervising the redo of the fireplace. His foreman, Carlo, had been full of apologies for misreading the plans.
Noah had told him not to worry about it, but he couldn’t help yearning for Miguel, who’d been with him for years before everything between them went to shit in the most spectacular way possible. Before that horrible day, Miguel had been the other half of Noah’s brain. He didn’t ever have to be supervised or told what to do. He just knew.
In the end, Noah had paid a hefty price for trusting his foreman so implicitly, but he didn’t wish to think about that nightmare when he needed every ounce of fortitude he could muster to deal with the current one.
A night out with Brianna Esposito was his idea of hell. What would they talk about? Ugh. Mrs. Hendricks was a lovely lady. She’d once been his Cub Scout leader when he and her son Jud had been kids. After Noah’s father left their family, Mrs. H had started driving Noah to all the activities he and Jud did together—football, baseball, basketball and Scouts. Often, she’d drop off a meal, claiming she’d made way too much of whatever her family was having for dinner, and somehow ended up with more than enough to feed nine extra people.
Noah had been old enough to know how dire their situation had been, and the kindness of people like Mrs. H, as he’d called her then, had gone a long way. He’d never forget it. That was why, when she asked him to take Brianna to dinner at the Pig’s Belly Tavern, he would take Brianna to dinner at the Pig’s Belly Tavern.
Even if he didn’t want to.
He soooo didn’t want to.
He was dying to get back to the spy thriller that’d kept him up way too late the night before. He’d been thinking about the story all day and wanted to know what happened next. But nope, that wasn’t happening. Not until later, anyway.
He found a navy sweater his sister Izzy had given him for Christmas and pulled it on over his usual thermal Henley and the well-worn jeans that counted as “dress up” jeans because he’d never worn them to work. And they were clean. With that, he’d put more effort into his appearance than he had in years.
What did it matter what he wore or how he looked? Who cared? Not him, that was for sure. He didn’t care about much these days, except his family and his job. That was about the extent of the things that got any time, mental energy or emotion from him. They were all things that were, for the most part, incapable of hurting him in any significant way.
Noah had learned to avoid people and situations that could cause him grief. He’d had enough of that for one lifetime.
Ten minutes before leaving, he used the remote to start his truck and get the heat going. He bundled up and headed out into the frozen wilderness that was Northeastern Vermont in the winter and got into the still-freezing truck cab.
After work, he’d spent ten minutes collecting the discarded coffee cups and other trash that had accumulated on the floor of the passenger side. No one ever rode in his truck but him and occasionally one or both of his aunt and uncle’s dogs when he was taking care of them.
His life was dull and boring, and he liked it that way. He’d taken a walk on the wild side of the road and found out what can happen when the wild side goes bad, and he never wanted to experience that again. He was better off staying in his lane and not risking things he couldn’t afford to lose, such as his heart, his sanity and his ability to trust anyone other than family members.
And yes, he was self-aware enough to know that bitterness was the reason for his disconnectedness. But that was now so much a part of who he was that he wouldn’t recognize himself without it. His first experience with the emotion had come from what his father had done so many years ago, and then life had dealt him new cards that added to his stores of bitterness.
As he drove to the house Brianna was renting near his cousin Will’s place, Noah tried to think of things he might talk to her about over dinner. It would serve his digestion—and hers—if they stayed away from anything to do with the project that had put them in this predicament in the first place.
People were always interested in what it had been like to grow up as one of eight siblings and ten close first cousins who’d been like extra brothers and sisters to him. That was probably a safe topic. He could tell her about the years he lived in California when he’d attended USC on a full scholarship for mechanical engineering. While there, he’d survived an earthquake that registered a 6.9 on the Richter scale and killed people two blocks from where he’d lived at the time. That made for a good story.
Hopefully, that would be enough to get them through the appetizer part of the meal.
Noah couldn’t overstate his level of dread for this outing.