Chapter 14

I come back down the hall from putting Gabe to bed. I hear the water running in the kitchen, stick my head in, and discover Jack doing the dishes.

“You’re still here,” I say, surprised.

“There were dishes,” he says, like the fact that he’s elbow-deep in suds follows obviously from that fact.

“I would have done them.”

He gives me a stern look. “No way. Haven’t you heard of the Federal I-Cook-You-Clean Act?” He raises an eyebrow. “Huh. What kind of asshole were you living with, anyway?”

This time, it doesn’t tick me off, Jack’s badmouthing Harris. After all, he was right about him, wasn’t he?

“Why’d you always call him Big Dick?”

“I was wrong to do that,” Jack says earnestly.

Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrows.

“He obviously has a really, really tiny dick, which makes him feel like he has to prove something by sleeping with multiple women, because if he were at all normal sized, he wouldn’t have fucked things up with the hottest woman alive.”

I try not to let Jack’s ridiculous flattery go to my head. I know he talks like this to every woman—every one he’s hitting on, anyway. Any guy can do the dishes a time or two to get in your pants; any guy can tell you you’re the hottest thing on earth. None of that tells you he’s going to do the dishes when you’ve been together for months or years, or stick around when things get tough or complicated.

You have to trust the historical evidence that he’s not.

“But since you asked: I called him Big Dick because that is the only possible reason you could have ever decided he was worth the time of day.”

I actually giggle a little. Because there’s nothing better, when you’re down, than having someone kick the guy who put you there in the balls.

“Hey,” I say. “It was nice of you to stay for dinner. I think Gabe really appreciated it.”

He rinses the soap off the last pot, sets it into the dish drainer, and turns to me.

“Gabe did, huh?” He smirks.

“And I did, too, of course. It made Gabe’s day.”

“I didn’t stay for Gabe.”

All of a sudden the kitchen feels really, really small. It’s easy to forget how big Jack is, how much space he takes up—and how he can take up way more than his fair share when he looks at me like this. Serious, full of intent.

“You cooked for me. Least I could do was eat it.”

So, yeah, not what I thought he was going to say. I try not to let my disappointment show. I try, more specifically, not to actually feel my disappointment. Instead, I deflect.

“What was up with you? When you got home?”

“Oh,” he says. “That.” He wipes around the edge of the sink and sets the sponge down.

“Yeah, that. Something happen at work?”

He shrugs.

I raise my eyebrows.

He sighs. “Work sucks right now.”

“You want to tell me about it? If you’ve got time. I know you have to meet Henry and Clark.”

“Actually, I told Henry and Clark I’d catch up with them later this week. I thought we could watch a movie or something.”

Everything freezes in me.

“Um…”

“But if you don’t want to, I could still head out with them. No biggie.” He shrugs.

I take a deep breath. He’s not asking me on a date. He’s asking me to kill some evening time by sitting on opposite ends of the same couch and watching something that went straight to Netflix. No need to get silly about it. “No, that would be fun.”

“Cool.”

He busies himself wiping down the chili spatters on the stovetop. I’m staring at his back, wanting—well, what I always want. More Jack.

“Tell me about work. If you want.”

I don’t actually expect him to, so I’m surprised when he starts to talk, still facing away from me.

“It’s just stupid, fucked-up shit. It’s a clusterfuck to begin with because they’re building the little pig’s straw house—only uglier—but then on top of that, it’s all mismanaged. So, like, there should be sign-off on everything, and paperwork on what we agreed to with the client, but there’s nothing.”

He sets the sponge down and turns to face me. There’s a furrow between his brows and a knot at his jaw. “The project director is an asshole, the project supervisor can’t manage his way out of a paper bag—not the project, not the men. He’s always yelling at guys, telling them what they’re doing wrong, never saying when someone’s doing it right. And when anything goes wrong, the blame flows straight downhill. So morale is shit, turnover’s huge—I could do either of those jobs better with my hands tied behind my back and a gag stuffed in my mouth.”

“How do you know all that? About how to do it right?”

“I’ve been doing this since high school summers, more than ten years. I’ve been on a lot of projects, and I’ve seen them done right and I’ve seen them done wrong. Mostly wrong. And more and more fucked up lately. Because everyone’s trying to build faster and cheaper, and there aren’t enough good crews to go around, but no one bothers to train up anyone because it takes time. And they cut corners on the stuff that really matters, like safety and getting client buy-in, which isn’t a way to save money or time. It costs everyone more in the end.”

He’s all riled up, eyes fierce. Up until that moment, I’d thought building houses was just a job for him. But now I see it. He loves it. And Jack on fire like this is the sexiest man on earth.

“You should do it,” I say.

“What?”

“Start your own contracting business. Run it right.”

I’ve always thought Jack would do a great job with his own business. People love him, and he’s got that great combination of authority and the kind of charisma that makes people actually want to do what he asks.

He shakes his head, hard. “Nah. Whatever. I shouldn’t have said that. I can’t do what the boss man does. That’s not my strength. I’m good with my hands.”

He waggles his eyebrow at me.

I feel a surge of heat, even though I know he’s trying to distract me from what he said. Because what he said is so Jack.

“You underestimate yourself,” I say, pushing away the distraction. “You could do it. If you set your mind to it.”

“Whatever.” He waves a hand, dismissing it.

“You know what this is about?” I feel a little reckless. Maybe it’s because the whole night has been so weird, like a roller coaster—all the push and pull. So it doesn’t feel so risky, right now, to get a little real, get back to the way we used to be, when we talked about stuff that mattered. “This is about you thinking you’re not smart enough to do it. But that’s bullshit. The only reason you think you aren’t is because you grew up being told over and over you weren’t. But it’s not true.”

His face tightens. Actually, all his body language does. And I know I’ve gone too far. Even though I was there, so many times, when his father told him he was stupid and worthless, even though I used to be able to reassure him that he wasn’t.

“You think because you knew me when I was twelve that you know who I am now?”

His jaw is tight, his eyes cold, the words hard and dagger sharp. I have to catch my breath against the stab. Because it’s a fair question.

“No.” I shake my head.

“A lot has changed since then. A lot.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have—”

“Our lives went in totally different directions.” He illustrates this with a gesture that makes my heart hurt—one hand rising, the other falling, the fortunes of our two families.

Not totally different, I want to say.

I’m thinking of Gabe down the hall, but also the reason that Gabe is with us, that strange night of intersection, and all the junctures before and after that hold our lives together. Jack and I are bound together, and even though in a lot of ways it makes no sense at all, in other ways, it is the most logical thing in the world.