He took me down an aisle full of doors and windows, which opened and closed in display frames. The farther we went down the aisle, the fewer and fewer people there were around us, until it was nobody but us, the sound of our footsteps, and the music from the PA system. It was even a little darker back there, because half the fluorescents above were switched off to save energy. It was like a little quiet corner with just us, amid all the hardware store chaos. With my bound hands in his, his massive girthy fingers enormous in comparison to mine, he pulled me to him. Our bodies collided, and I gasped a little, which made him groan. He looked back over his shoulder and then opened a big door—a white one, no windows, brass lock. He yanked me inside the little display foyer, closing it behind him, and then locked the deadbolt.

We were in a little fort almost, a makeshift space between the huge shelves. It was no bigger than a broom closet, and the only light was what came through between the slats. Even the music playing over the speaker system was quieter back here. But I could still hear it. Collective Soul’s “December.”

“Remember when this song came out?” I asked. The lyrics transported me back twenty years, to me in his Blazer, to the summer when we worked together as lifeguards. I remembered stealing glances at his legs as he drove and his red shorts along his tan line. It hit me as it had once and again that I’d been gawking over him for decades, without letting myself feel a thing.

But now I was feeling it. Like Uma Thurman in that wild scene in Pulp Fiction, he had my heart pounding. Every breath near him felt like my first.

“Fuck yes, I do,” he said. “I remember driving you around while you sang at the top of your lungs.”

We listened to the chorus in silence for a second. “So dirty. I didn’t even realize it then.”

He groaned again. “I fucking did.”

He was possessive here, not so polite like he’d tried to be out in public. He drew my hands up above me slightly and worked the pliers between my skin and the zip ties. He was gentle, but it made me hiss—they were that tight. He froze, watching me close. “You okay?”

I winced. “Totally!”

Without taking his eyes off of mine, he snipped one tie, and my hand came free. The blood rushed back into my fingers, and I flexed my hand into a fist a few times.

“Better?”

“Much.” I brought my free hand up to the back of his neck. It was a rather yummy combination of sensations—the pins and needles of my circulation returning and the soft prickles of his short hair under my fingertips. I shifted the chain of his necklace, just an inch back and forth.

“I like it in here.” I glanced up. “Like a secret hideout.”

He nodded and took my other wrist, working the metal between my skin and the plastic. He snipped the second tie free, and both fell to the concrete floor with a soft clatter.

“I kind of want you to tie me up, though,” I whispered.

“I definitely will,” Max said gruffly. His strong hands moved around behind my ass, and he hoisted me up on the shelf behind me. “But not right now. Not yet.” My ass was only half on the shelf, and I turned to make sure I wasn’t going to collide with anything. Where I sat was empty—behind me, it looked like there were refrigerator boxes or ovens. It smelled like lumber and paint and him, the very distinctive smell of Max’s cologne, and his skin. As he parted my legs with his body, I knew that another smell was also getting mixed up in there—the smell of the two of us together inside me. My favorite, favorite, favorite.

“I want to fuck you here—and everywhere.”

“We could,” I whispered back. “Why not?”

He eyed me closely, and his fingers dug into me a little bit more firmly. “You’re a screamer, though. Fucking noisy as hell.”

I shoved him a little. That was ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. “I am not.”

“Fuck yes, you are,” he said, smiling so hard I saw the very rare right dimple. “Max, Max, Max, please, please, please. Turned up to eleven.”

“No way,” I whispered as he brought his lips to mine so they were touching without actually being a kiss. One of his hands moved up my waist and gripped me hard. We locked eyes, challenging each other to take the first step. “Are we going to have sex in Home Depot?” I whispered.

He got this cocky fuck yeah look in his eye and undid his belt. “Got a problem with that?”

“None,” I told him and hung on tight.

The shelf was just high enough to keep me at the perfect height—lower than a kitchen counter, higher than a bed. He shoved my dress aside and gripped my tattoo. “That makes me fucking crazy,” he growled as he pushed into me. “Makes me want to go with you to see you get tatted up somewhere else.”

I pressed my lips to his shirt to force myself to be silent. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Like my fucking palm print on your ass.” To show me what he meant, he gripped my right butt cheek with his huge palm, and he did it hard. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to make me see it in my mind’s eye. He gave me a spank on top of it. “You drive me crazy,” he whispered into my ear. His breath was hot, his words were heavy and dirty and rude.

Quiet, Rosie. Quiet. I focused on the feeling, I focused on the noise of the store. On the sting on my tush. More than any of it, I focused on him and his body and the way we fit so perfectly together. “Crazy good or crazy bad?”

He didn’t answer that either, but he drove into me so hard he took me right off the shelf. Max scooped me up into his arms, and then, like we were in a movie, like gravity didn’t matter at all, he took me standing, my back against the hard metal posts of the huge solid shelves.

“Crazy good. Like every motherfucking thing about you.”

* * *

Home Depot was lovely in the afterglow. At the paint counter, we stood side by side, hip to waist, the warmth of his body seeping through his jeans and my thin dress to mine. He’d come inside me once more, and I felt a warmth in my panties, a hot trickle as he spilled from me.

Goodness.

I tried to ground myself on what was real, tangible, and familiar. Underneath the little see-through pad for signing credit card receipts was an advertisement featuring a dad painting a nursery. In my dreamy not-there state, I replaced him with Max on a ladder, with Cupcake watching from below, as he dipped a brush into a big bucket of light pink paint, tenderly painting every wall, making everything perfect for…

Kablewy!

I cleared my throat. I didn’t even feel like I was on the same planet as everybody else. I felt like I was one of my little snail girls, sailing away on her hot air balloon. Still, though, real life. I focused on it as best as I could, on the fact that my toes were a little cold from the air conditioning. On the fact that my whole body was pleasantly sore. On the way Max now stood closer to me than he ever had before, when we were just friends. I looked up at him, and a little bit of dog fur on his shoulder caught my eye. I reached up and brushed it off. “Any word from the vet?”

Max shook his head. “Nope. But want to know a secret?”

We didn’t really have secrets. We finished each other’s sentences, and we were each other’s emergency contacts. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. It was written all over his face and his cell phone wallpaper, which was Cupcake in my arms. “You want to keep her?”

He blinked solemnly. “So fucking badly.”

I dragged my eyes from yet another nursery photo, this one with blue paint and a toddler in a walking thingy, also with a big, beefy dad on a ladder, smiling—how did anybody get anything done in this place? “We should probably try to get Cupcake and Julia acquainted. If you’re planning on staying, that is,” I added, coming up on my tiptoes and tracing the edge of the signing mat with my finger.

“Oh, yeah,” Max said, his eyes right on mine. “I’m staying.”

Butterflies had nothing on that feeling in my stomach. It was a school of a hundred thousand fish, swimming in different directions, or maybe those tiny starlings that fly in a solid mass. “For good?”

Max held my stare. He opened his mouth, about to speak…

Which was when the paint man thumped the counter and boomed, “What can I do you for?”