Chapter 7

Get a fixer upper, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. They were liars. Fixing an old house up fucking sucks.

-Tate’s secret thoughts

Tate

“Remind me again why I said I’d take this place?” I asked Baylor.

Baylor looked over at me with amused eyes.

“Because it was free?”

I snorted and turned my eyes back to the dilapidated house.

“It’s a piece of shit,” I muttered.

“It is a piece of shit,” Baylor agreed. “But it’s your piece of shit.”

He handed over the keys, and I took them, making my way up the front walk.

The porch groaned underneath my weight.

I winced and kept going, ignoring the way the wood creaked with each additional step I took.

I turned and surveyed the porch.

The house itself was built in the nineteen hundreds. It was a two-story monster with over ten rooms. The house itself needed work…a lot of work. There were places in it where I could see straight through the walls to the outside. It was built on pier and beam, and I wondered if the beams holding the house up were even whole.

With the way that the wood underneath my feet groaned with each step, I doubted it.

“May have been free,” I sighed. “But it might not be worth it to fix up.”

Baylor grunted something behind me. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “But the historical society will pay you to fix it up to their expectations. Not to mention if you do get it fixed up, they’ll buy it from you.”

That’d been one of the reasons I’d agreed to take it. I needed somewhere to live, this place was available seeing as it was left to me after an uncle died three years ago, and I wasn’t in a position to complain.

“That apartment building is supposed to be coming down next month, and that house right there,” Baylor pointed, “belongs to your best friend.”

I looked in the direction he pointed.

The house itself was old, like mine, but it was cute and fixed up, where mine was in need of a complete and total overhaul.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?” I accused.

Baylor’s lips twitched. “I thought you could use some eye candy while you fixed this place up.”

He didn’t tell me how he knew whose house it was, but it was Baylor. He had his ways, and I never questioned him because he wouldn’t tell me anyway.

I flipped him off, and started to turn around to head inside, when the front door of the house I’d been studying opened.

Then she was there, in a pair of sweatpants, an old t-shirt that looked to be from high school with her ‘Pirate Volleyball’ on it, and tube socks that were slouched down around her ankles.

It was the least sexy thing any woman could wear, but on her? She totally fucking rocked it.

“Goddamn,” I muttered.

Baylor started to laugh, and I tossed him a glare. “Fuck you.”

“You’ve always had the hots for her, TC.”

I rolled my eyes at Baylor’s old nickname for me.

I didn’t know why, but during school, everyone always called me by my full name—Tate Casey. They never, ever shortened it, or only used Tate. Everyone but Baylor, that was. He shortened it to TC, and I’d let him.

Now, I wasn’t sure why I allowed him to do half the things he did.

But whatever.

I walked through the house with an experienced eye, calculating what I would need to do to make this place livable for the time being.

The summer of my junior year, and the entire year of my senior, I’d worked for a construction business fixing up houses almost exactly like this one. In that year and a half, I’d learned a lot, and had continued to do it on my own when I was on leave from the military.

Then, when I’d gotten out of the Marines, and started working with Travis at Hail Auto Recovery, I’d done it on my days off. At first, it’d started out as a hobby, but then had turned into a side business as I started flipping houses on my own.

So no, this wouldn’t be my first rodeo.

But it would be my toughest.

“This is going to be a disaster,” I said. “But the inside structure is solid,” I pointed to the studs I’d exposed when I’d ripped a piece of paneling off. “The support structure is good, too. The only thing I’m worried about at this point is the roof, but I can have that knocked out by Wednesday next week if I can get a dumpster out here by Monday.”

“I’m sure you can make it happen, buddy,” Baylor agreed from the other room. “Do you want me to get rid of this?”

I looked at him.

In his hands was a snake, about four feet in length. It was harmless, a rat snake, but where a rat snake was, usually indicated there were rats.

“Fuck,” I grumbled. “Yeah, go ahead and throw him outside. We’ll see if we can plug whatever hole he came through.”

Baylor started to laugh.

I sighed and growled under my breath.

“I’m going to have to pull the RV over here and live out of it. There’s no way in hell this is livable until then.”

“Has running water, at least.”

I looked at where Baylor turned the water on, and winced.

“Doesn’t have any plumbing, though.” I pointed out when water started to leak out of the drain pipe underneath the sink.

“Oops,” Baylor burst out a laugh.

I ignored the water and continued the inspection.

Then I drafted Baylor’s help in getting the RV out to the house and set up.

Lucky for me, Baylor was a licensed electrician in his spare time, because by the end of the night, I had power to the RV, as well as a few plugs in the house we were able to wire in about four hours’ time.

And not once did I think about my new neighbor.

Also, I was a liar.