Ben
“Riv, don’t go so fast,” I say, stilling the kid’s hand as he paws through the tray of loose pieces I’ve put out for him on the workbench in the office. My dad’s out front, dealing with customers, and even though he’d told me I didn’t have to come in today, I know weekends are risky for River, easy times for him to get in trouble without his classes. So I’d called him this morning, told him we had to sort through some inventory before Monday. Not true, and I’m pretty sure River knew it, but he’d still shown up at ten.
“You’ve got to go piece by piece with a tray this big,” I say, pulling out a yellowed candle tube to hold up. “See, this might look like junk, but it’s from a chandelier, same as the one we worked on last week. No cracks, and the socket’s in good shape. We find a bulb for this, and it’ll work.”
River doesn’t say anything, but he slows down, taking out pieces and setting them on a large piece of felt I’ve laid out. Right now, the way he’s ordering things doesn’t seem to me to make much sense, but I’m not going to say anything. This is how I learned too—getting a feel for the objects, making my own patterns.
I turn back to my project, frowning at what I’ve got so far. I’m still missing at least thirty pieces for the Baltic chandelier I’d found last week, but I’m in deep now with it. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed doing this when I was younger, how much I relished the puzzles of these old, found objects.
I want to call Kit to see if she wants to come over and have a look. But I know her brother is in town for the weekend, and I got the sense she’d planned a full agenda for them. And while we’ve spent a lot of time together over the last week, I’ve tried to make sure she comes to me first. I don’t want to crowd her. Or, I do—but it’s bad enough I don’t have my head in the game lately. Jasper called me on Thursday night, right as I was leaving her place, checking on whether I’d made any progress, and it had taken me a second to realize that I’d spent three hours with her and not brought up Beaumont once.
My dad limps in, looking a little pale as he lowers himself into the chair across from where River sits. His eyes scan the felt, and I feel my muscles tense infinitesimally. I’m hoping he doesn’t say anything about whatever nonsense system River has going here, because I want the kid to figure it out on his own. I think he might break when he opens his mouth, but then he just as quickly closes it again, looking up at me with a faint smile.
“Dad, you ought to go home. You look tired.”
“I am tired. I’m old,” he says, and River snorts. My dad nudges him with his good foot. “Something funny, Smalls?”
To my surprise, River doesn’t even blink at the nickname now. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to hold back a smile. Even though I was frustrated with my dad for taking on River, especially right now, when he’s still struggling to get better, I can’t deny how good he is at this, how calm he is around River, how easy it is for him to make teasing feel the same as a compliment.
“I’m serious,” I say. “Get Sharon to take you home so you can rest. I can be here until close.”
My dad leans forward and scans River’s tray, picking up what I’m guessing is a column from an oil lamp. “Aha,” he says, like he knows exactly where that goes. The stupid thing is, he probably does. “Just needed to take a load off. Sharon’s out there talking to some idiot about trying to match a stain. I couldn’t listen to another second. This guy, first of all, he puts his cold beer right down on his mother’s Eastlake side table. A real one too, Smalls, you hear? I’d say 1880, maybe. Now this mother, I doubt she’s operating at full capacity, keeping a piece that rare right out in her living space, but I don’t judge.”
River slides his eyes over to me, and I stifle a grin. The only thing my dad does judge people about is how they treat their furniture.
“So this genius looks online at how to get this water stain out, and you know what he finds?” He pauses dramatically, but River only shrugs. Still, he’s listening, I can tell. “Toothpaste,” Dad says, throwing his hands in the air dramatically. “Toothpaste!” He huffs another exasperated breath. “Now the thing about toothpaste is, sometimes it’ll work on water staining, but we’re only talking the real old-fashioned kind of toothpaste here, not this fancy shit they sell these days, you hear?”
I go over to the fridge in the corner and pull out Dad’s lunch, unwrapping his sandwich and pickle and putting it on one of the plates he keeps on top of the fridge. He’s still going on about water stains when I set it in front of him, his color back, and he barely notices me. “Eat,” I say, and snag the tray from River, setting it aside. “You bring lunch?”
“Yeah,” he says, and digs into his backpack, coming up with a crumpled brown paper bag that he unpacks in front of him on the workbench. Can of Coke, smashed PB&J, a bag of what I think are Doritos in broken, jagged pieces, though I probably haven’t seen a Dorito since college, so what do I know. I take an apple and a bottle of water from the fridge and set them in front of him before turning back to my chandelier. “So it’s got to be repainted?” River asks, his mouth full.
“Repainted!” Dad shouts. “Ben, he said repainted! What are you teaching him back here?” I don’t even bother answering, because Dad barrels on, talking to River about wood stain. The next half hour goes this way, and I suspect River is being purposefully ignorant about some things, just to see my dad get riled up. It’s good for both of them, and it’s good for me too, their soundtrack a nice accompaniment to my work. I’m hanging the pear-shaped prisms I’ve got for the chandelier on a length of fishing line I’ve strung up over the workbench, which has the best light for me to check for small cracks or dings in the glass. It feels nice to move my eyes across the facets, to not look at a screen all morning, to not have a phone tucked against my ear.
As though it’s heard my thoughts, my phone rings from the pocket of my jeans, and I close my eyes briefly, thinking of ignoring it. If it’s Jasper, I don’t want to hear it, but it’s bad enough I’m dealing with work from here these last few weeks, so I answer, not even bothering to check who’s calling.
“Ben Tucker,” I say, waving a hand at my dad to quiet down. I think I hear him call me “Mr. Fancypants” to River.
“Hi.” It’s Kit’s voice, and I’m more happy than I should be to hear from her. But even in that one syllable, I hear something I don’t like, a stuffy, wet quality to the way she sounds. My body goes from relaxed to alert, and I turn my back to the rest of the room.
“What’s wrong?” When she doesn’t answer right away, I get even more tense. “Kit?”
There’s a big sigh on the other end of the phone before she speaks again. “Yeah—I probably shouldn’t have called. But something’s gone wrong in the house, and I’m not sure—”
“Is it anything dangerous? Anything electrical? Do you smell gas?” I don’t know why my mind is going to this kind of shit; I sound neurotic. But I hate the way she sounds.
“No, no. It’s—this is really dumb. But I think I maybe—made a mistake with something? And now there’s a mess, and I’m not sure if I should keep going, or…listen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry to call you on a Saturday.”
“I’ll come over. Give me twenty minutes.”
She pauses, and I hear something on the other end of the line, a repetitive metallic, scraping sound, followed by what might be a muffled curse from her. I haven’t known Kit long, but I know I can’t just go over, not unless she says it’s okay. She likes handling herself, and she probably waited until things were really bad to make this call anyway.
“Okay,” she says, after a little more silence, and I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath.
“Don’t touch anything else,” I say, which is ridiculous, because I don’t even know what she’s been doing.
I disconnect and turn back to where my dad and River sit. My dad’s watching me with interest, but River’s still making his way through the tray. “You’ve got your young lady calling you,” Dad says. I don’t even bother correcting him about this. I’m too focused on getting out of here.
“I can come back to take you home.”
He waves a hand. “Go. Sharon’ll take me. She’s on ’til we close.” I nod, and look toward River. My dad jumps in. “Smalls. You’re with me the rest of the day. This moron hasn’t taught you anything.”
“Cool,” River says, and I’m out the door, headed to Kit.
* * * *
I barely hear her say “Come in,” when I knock fifteen minutes later after a too-fast drive. When I walk in, there’s a funny smell of dust and chemicals throughout the house, but I don’t see anything out of order right away.
“Kit?” I call out, shutting and locking the door behind me. She shouldn’t be in here with it open, no matter what time of day it is. This neighborhood is spotty, but I’ll talk to her about that later.
“I’m up here.” I take the stairs two at a time, and it’s a gut-punch when I come across her in the hallway, huddled with her back to the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face pink and tear-streaked. Oh, fuck, I already hate this. I hate seeing her upset. I’m frozen in place, staring at her, and it takes me a second to register the mess she has around her—there’s a propane steamer to her right, shut off, and the floor is lined with plastic. There’s a spray bottle and a metal scraper and a trash can and—I squint up at the walls—a good bit of plaster dust.
“Jesus, Kit. What happened?”
“I don’t know—well, I do know. I tried stripping the wallpaper, and I did everything right, exactly how I read about. And anyways, I didn’t just read about it—I know this stuff. I know chemicals, right?” She picks up the spray bottle, gives it a little shake. “But I don’t know what went wrong. Now the plaster is peeling away too, and—I don’t know! It’s a mess.”
Her head bows, and she brings her hands up to cradle it. That’s all it takes for my stomach to cramp in distress, such a sudden, visceral reaction that I move right away, and before I can think about it, I’m kneeling down in front of her amidst scraps of wallpaper, feeling it crinkle and stick to my jeans. “Hey, hey,” I say quietly, and probably my voice has never sounded that way, so soft and desperate. But that’s how I feel—desperate. Desperate to stop her looking this way.
“I really, really needed this to work today.”
“Why today?”
She shakes her head, the movement knocking her glasses a little from side to side. I wonder fleetingly where her brother’s gone, but I don’t want to press her if she doesn’t want to talk. I think if I could just hug her, or set a hand on her knee—touch her in some small way, maybe it would help. But I’ve never touched her in either comfort or affection, even though I’ve thought about it every single time I’ve been in the same room with her, and also lots of times when I haven’t been. So instead, I reach up past her shoulder and pull at a strip of wallpaper that’s hanging down near her hair. And sure enough, there’s small chunks of plaster stuck to the back. I touch the wall, pretty sure of what I’ll find.
“You’ve got some moisture behind this wall, I think,” I tell her, trying to break the news gently. It’s not the worst thing. Lime plaster isn’t so hard to repair, but Kit’s got a lot on her plate with this house, and I’m guessing every flaw she comes across at this point is a blow.
And sure enough, she lets out a little hiccup, the beginnings of a sob, and—fuck—that does me in. I can’t just sit here, so far apart from her. So I adjust myself, spreading my legs wide on the floor around her huddled form. I gently take her wrists, tugging her hands from her face. I wait for her to flinch or stop me, but she doesn’t—I think she might even lean in to it a little. Her eyes are huge and wet behind her glasses. “Listen,” I say, keeping my voice low. “It’s all right. My dad knows every contractor in this town, and he’ll get you a deal on whatever the work is. Or I could help. I’ve done plaster repair before. No charge, I promise.” It’s a small offer, but I make it as if I’m opening a vein. The way she looks sitting there—I’d say or do anything.
“It’s not the money,” she whispers, leaning back against the wall, closing her eyes. I’m still holding on to her wrists, a little awkwardly, like we’re on some strange seesaw, so I let my hands slip down to—well. I guess I’m holding her hands now, and I have to take a breath to steady myself against the feeling of holding even this small part of her. I’ve known all along I have a thing for Kit. But this thing? This is more than liking her, more than wanting her in bed.
“I won the lottery,” she whispers, snapping me right out of my thoughts. I look up to see if she’s joking, but her eyes are still closed.
“You what?”
“Yeah. I mean, not like, just now. About six months ago.”
“You won the lottery?”
“No one knows,” she says, opening her eyes and looking right at me, a warning. “Greer and Zoe know, because we played together. And my brother.” Here, she breaks off, clears her throat. “My brother knows. But no one else.” I think maybe it’s not a warning after all. Maybe it’s an offering.
I squeeze her hands gently, letting her know she can trust me. But I don’t know what to say now—my mind is reeling. A lot of things click into place—why Kit seems so completely uninterested in the massive salary Beaumont is offering her, how she’s got more renovations planned for the next year than most people would do over the course of a decade. But other things—why she bought such a rundown house in the first place, why she does so much of the renovation herself, why she drives such a shitty car—I’m wondering about those too.
“I think maybe it’s bad luck,” she says. “Greer was worried it was bad luck. And I bought this house, like an idiot, and not a single thing has gone right with it since I bought it.”
“Kit, this is a great house. You know that. It’s always this way with renos.”
She shakes her head again, her hair sticking a little to the wall behind her. “I shouldn’t have bought it.”
“Don’t say that. This place has great bones, and—”
“I mean I shouldn’t have bought the ticket! The lottery ticket.”
I rub my thumbs across the soft skin of her wrists, trying to calm her. Her skin feels so good, I want to press my mouth there. “It’s not bad luck,” I tell her. “That’s just one of those urban myths. I promise you.” Where do you get off, making her promises? I think. You’re probably part of her bad luck.
“My dad is a gambling addict.”
Oh. I shift then, turning to set my back against the wall so I can sit right beside her, but I hold fast to one of her hands, and when I stretch my legs out in front of me, I twine our fingers together. She takes a deep breath, and I wait, holding her hand. I’ll sit here all night, against this sticky, damp wall, on this hard floor, if I can only make her talk to me.
“I’ve never gambled in my life. I’ve never played the lottery before that night. I don’t even like to play Monopoly. My dad—he bets on everything. Horse races. Football. Sometimes reality TV shows. He plays craps and poker. And he plays the lottery too, mostly scratch-off tickets. He’s dead broke most of the time, and he totally fucked up my childhood, and my brother and I—we tried to get him into recovery for years, but nothing works, you know? Nothing.” She kicks out one of her legs in frustration, knocks it hastily into the steamer. “So, I mean, how gross is it that I played the lottery, first of all, and then I fucking win? I win! He’s probably bought thousands of tickets. And I buy one.”
“You can’t think that way. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m keeping it from him,” she says, her words coming more quickly now. She pulls her hand away, and I feel like I’ve lost a limb. “I haven’t said a word. What about that? Do you think that’s wrong?”
“No, I don’t. I think you shouldn’t tell anyone if you don’t want to. And I think if he’s an addict, he may want something from you, something that’s not good for him.”
She gives this impolite little snort. I think it’s supposed to be sarcastic in tone, but she’s been crying and sniffling and so it just sounds sad, defeated. “I send him money every month. Alex and I both have, for a long time. But now—I’m still sending him the same amount. Because if I send him more, he’ll use it for stakes instead of for food, instead of paying his water bill. I know I shouldn’t feel bad—I know I shouldn’t. I used to go to these, you know, Gam-Anon meetings? And people there, they’re always telling you how you can’t make yourself responsible for someone’s addiction. But it’s not easy, you know? I want to be able to do something, and I had this big fight with Alex…”
Alex is the brother, I guess, and I’ve never met the guy but I’d like nothing more than to punch his face for being even partially responsible for the way Kit feels right now. “Is he here?” I say, trying not to sound how I feel, which is restless and pissed.
She slides a glance toward me, as if she sees right through me. “No. We had an exceedingly strained breakfast this morning and then he told me he got an earlier flight out.” She shrugs. “It’s for the best. He needs his space.”
Somehow, I know in my bones what Kit needs, so I go for broke, raising an arm up to put around her shoulders. It’s awkward, at first, because she’s got to lean forward from the wall to accommodate me, but after the barest hesitation she leans in to me, setting her head against my shoulder, and it’s as natural as breathing for me to press my mouth against her hair, to inhale her scent while I hold her close to me. I’m pretty sure my ass is falling asleep on this hard floor, and the baseboard is poking me right in the spine, but I don’t give a good goddamn about it. When Kit takes a deep breath and snuggles herself a centimeter closer to me, I feel like I’ve solved the world’s problems.
“This is really unprofessional,” she says, after a few minutes of silence, silence where I’ve been listening to her breathe, feeling the sweet weight of her head on my shoulder, and also trying not to notice the way she’s set a hand on my thigh.
I laugh, because it is really unprofessional, and after this I have no fucking idea how I’m going to try and get her to Beaumont, but I can’t really scare up any feeling about that at the moment—she’s the only thing I’m thinking about right now. “Sure is,” I say, and she huffs out a small laugh too.
She stirs a little, staying close, but unless she’s inhuman, her ass has to be feeling the pain too. I don’t want to leave her yet, or really at all, but I’ll take what I can get to draw out my time with her, so I say, “Hungry?”
She tips her head up from where it rests on my shoulder. Her eyes are still pink and puffy behind her glasses, but no more tears, and anyway I get distracted by her mouth, which is so close that I could move the barest inch and be kissing her. She’d better not look down, because I am absolutely about to pitch a tent in my jeans. She smiles, the first one I’ve seen from her all day. “I could eat.”
She scrambles up, brushing wallpaper pieces and plaster dust off her butt and thighs as she heads toward the stairs, and I swallow and clench my fists beside me. My whole side is still warm from where her body rested against mine.
“Right behind you,” I say, but it takes me a few seconds to pull myself together.
* * * *
I make her a grilled cheese and she cuts me the biggest piece of chocolate cake I’ve ever seen in my life, and we sit at her dining room table while I scroll through my phone, finding numbers of the local contractors I know. I make her laugh, telling her about my dad and the water-stained table, and I moan over her cake, both because it makes her smile and blush but also because it’s a great fucking piece of cake. By the time she’s finished off her sandwich, I’ve already called my dad to get his suggestions for who I should call first, and when I hang up, stuffing the last bite of chocolate cake in my mouth, Kit’s tapping her short nails on the table, her eyes narrowed at me.
“What?” I say, but it sounds closer to Bwof? I think about all the dinners I go on for work, my impeccable table manners at even the most sophisticated places. Apparently you give me chocolate cake and Kit Averin and I turn into a Neanderthal. The fact that I’ve noticed that her breasts look spectacular in her tank top is, frankly, a further point in favor of this theory.
“Why are you helping me?”
This takes me off guard, even though it shouldn’t. My reaction to Kit—my need, since I’ve met her, to involve myself in aspects of her life that have nothing to do with the job I’m supposed to be doing with her—is not typical for anyone in our situation, and it’s especially not typical for me, since in general I’ve involved myself with women who aren’t interested in much more than a night out, a good lay, no complications. I swallow and take a big gulp of my water, shrugging as I set my glass down. “You called. You said you needed help.” She hadn’t really said this, and I know it, but I’m hoping she won’t call me out on it.
“But surely this works against your purposes.” I can feel her eyes on me, even though I’m looking idly through my phone’s browser again, pulling up the number for the contractor my dad wanted me to call first. “Surely it would be better for you to let everything in this house go to hell as quickly as possible, so maybe I’ll decide to give up and go to Texas.”
I look up at her. Should I say something about what she’s told me, about how knowing she has this money means Texas is probably not a necessity for her, even if this house does go to shit? I don’t want to bring up something that I know is tender, hurtful to her. “Surely that’s true. But let me ask you something, Kit.”
She raises her eyebrows at me, and this is familiar territory, this sparring. We do this well together.
“Why did you call me today?”
She shifts in her chair, looks out the back window. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” I say, because the thing I like best about Kit is that she doesn’t bullshit me, or anyone.
Her chest rises when she takes a deep inhale. “I called because—I thought you’d make me feel better. You do make me feel better.” She shakes her head slightly after she says this last part, as if she can’t quite believe it.
“Doesn’t that work against your purposes?”
“I don’t have any purposes.”
“I mean—your purposes to see me as the big, bad corporate guy. The money guy. The guy you’re going to keep saying no to.”
She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest and leveling me with a big, black-eyed stare. Holy shit, though, that tank top. That tank top is my Everest right now.
“Depends on the question,” she says, and my mind just—stutters. If she’s thinking about work right now, then it’s 100 percent fact that Kit has scrambled my sex radar forever, because there’s something about the way she’s looking at me, something about the way her voice has pitched a little bit lower. I feel like I’m about five minutes away from fucking her on this table, three minutes from getting under that tank top.
I stare right back at her. I watch as a pink flush creeps onto her pale cheeks, right under where the edge of her glasses rest. But Kit—despite the tears before, despite the fact that she’s had a lousy go of it today—Kit is tough as hell, and if she means the way she’s looking at me right now, she’s not going to back down.
I set down my phone and stand from my chair. She tips her head back to follow my movements, to look up at me from where she sits, arms still crossed, eyes still challenging.
“I’m asking,” I say, once I’m standing right in front of her, and she likes that. The right side of her mouth quirks up in a half smile.
“Well,” she says, reaching up to slip off her glasses, setting them on the buffet that’s behind her. “I’m answering.”
I’m on her so fast, lifting her out of her chair to set her ass up on the table, and she instantly spreads her legs to let me step between them, and it’s this hot, unbearable pause where our faces are inches apart, where I know we’re both thinking about how easy that was, how quickly we got to a place where my crotch is pressed against hers. But then I’m kissing her, my hands coming up to cradle her jaw, to tip her face just so, and holy shit, kissing Kit is hot, and sweet, and the way she opens her mouth against mine and slides her tongue across my bottom lip—I’ve got to stop myself from clenching my hands, from grabbing fistfuls of her hair to bring her closer to me. She’s got her hands on my stomach, stroking up and down, and when I feel her grab the fabric in her fingers, tugging, I moan, knowing she feels the same way I do, that desperation to get closer. I want these clothes off, want to feel her skin against mine, and I let my hands trail from her neck down her arms, thinking of how I can get this top off her without taking my mouth from hers.
There’s a soft knocking, and I think—shit, this table, because it’s old, and despite my earlier fantasy, it’s probably not a good idea for me to fuck her on it. But—no, it’s not the table, because then the doorbell rings, and Kit stiffens and pulls away, her busy hands coming to rest right at my waistband, and I think if that fucking antique doorbell weren’t so loud, you could probably hear my dick calling out, lower! Just a little lower!
“I—uh. I should get that,” she says, but she winces when she looks down, sees the bulge in my jeans. “God. I’m so, so sorry.”
I can’t even form words at the moment. All my higher-order thinking skills have relocated to my balls. I step back from her and she scrambles off the table, snagging her glasses. Her hair is a mess from my hands in it, plus she’s still got a few pieces of plaster stuck there in the back, and maybe I got one over on that tank top after all, because it’s twisted and bunched up a little, and she straightens it as she walks to the front door.
Once she’s out of sight, I turn back toward the table, discreetly adjust myself so that whoever comes in doesn’t get sexually harassed just by my existence. Holy hell, I need a cold shower. I settle for another drink of water, a rough pass of my hand through my hair. I don’t think I’ve ever been so turned on in my life from a single kiss.
“Greer is here!” Kit says from behind me, and her voice is so transparently, falsely cheerful that I feel better, more at ease knowing she’s as thrown off as I am.
“Hi,” says Greer, in that small, sweet voice she has. Greer is no dummy—she knows she’s walked into something, and so I make even more of an effort to control my expression, to pretend I’m not going home with the worst case of blue balls I’ve had since eleventh grade.
“Hey, Greer. How’s school?”
Kit gives me a grateful smile, and it’s hard not to feel proud whenever I get even a scrap of approval from her.
“Oh—it’s okay. It’s good. We just started an entrepreneurship unit in my business class,” she says. “That’s kind of your thing, right?”
“Kind of,” I say. Greer is holding her purse in one hand and a few DVDs in the other, and even though I’m doing my best, it’s awkward in here. I get the sense that dining room table has something to say. I turn back to it, grab my phone and keys and tuck them into my pockets. “I should go,” I tell them, but I’m looking at Kit, and she’s flushed and fidgeting. If she asks me to stay, if she makes any move to suggest that she wants me to hang around, even if it’s with her and Greer, even if I’m spending my evening sitting on her couch and watching—I think that’s a copy of Predator, which is unexpected—I’ll stay.
But she seems cautious, and I don’t want to press her. “I’ll make some calls about upstairs,” I tell her.
“Thank you. Really.”
I can sense that Greer is looking back and forth between us, but she too seems locked in place. I hate the heavy, frozen feeling in the room, and I have to do something.
So I do what feels, weirdly, like the most natural thing. I step forward, setting my hand on Kit’s upper arm, where her skin is bare and warm, and I lean down to press a firm kiss on her mouth, a quick, intimate touch, as if I’ve done it a million times, as if this woman didn’t just give me the best first kiss I’ve ever had. “I’ll call you,” I say, right against her mouth, then set another quick kiss there.
And then I’m headed toward the front door, calling out a quick goodbye to Greer. I barely hear the way she squeaks out a surprised “‘Bye!” before I’m on the porch, already wondering when I’ll see Kit again.