SIX
Warren
You learn a lot by living with someone.
It wasn't a situation I had been in the position to know about. At least not since I was a child. And then it didn't count.
Things had simply never progressed that far when I was with a woman. Hell, who was I kidding? It never even got far enough to clear out a dresser drawer, let alone think about cohabitation.
It wasn't something Brin was unfamiliar with though. She never spoke of her roommate, but I knew she had lived with him since she got out of school, had been friends with him since they were kids. But that was about it.
So she was used to it, the ebbs and flows of someone else's cycles, moving around someone without getting in their way - or on their nerves.
Having no such experience myself, I found I got in her way, in her hair, and on her nerves.
To be fair, her nerves were like rayon or velcro - everything got on it.
She recognized it a lot of the time, though. Whereas it definitely felt amplified in a home environment as opposed to simply a few hours a week on a job site, she was also more likely to point out that she was grumpy, tired, frustrated, or hangry, and apologize for being so short-tempered.
It's my mother's blood in me, I swear, she told me one night after dinner when she'd snapped at me for suggesting she take a walk before bed since she was clearly having trouble sleeping at night. And, well, it was making her grumpy. Yes, I said grumpy when we all know what she was really being.
She'd assured me back at my house that she was an early riser, that she was used to getting by with very little sleep. So I wasn't quiet at first when I got up, moved around making food or smoothies. Until I noticed her getting up bleary-eyed and moody.
I don't know if it was because everything was unfamiliar - new bedding, new mattress, new sights and sounds - or because of me, but her sleep schedule wasn't what it used to be.
Rings formed under her eyes after two days.
She started to mainline coffee on the third, even skipping the sweet shit she usually put in it out of necessity and desperation while we toured the first home with cameras watching our every move, catching every nuance of facial expression or tone of voice as we made general observations about the extent of damage there, what could and could not be fixed, what architectural bits we could save.
To her credit, she stayed on-point when we were on the job, mustering up energy and enthusiasm I knew she didn't feel, so I did my best to try to be more talkative, take the weight of conversation off of her even though it wasn't exactly my nature. If she was trying, the least I could do was put some effort in as well. I needed this just as much as she did. More, really. If you thought about it, much more was riding on this for me.
She would find her way. Whether we got this show or not, she'd have found her way, gotten her name out there. She was good. She hustled. It was inevitable.
But me?
Had I not found this opportunity that would give me what I needed to be able to put an offer in on the farm, I would have lost it. I knew that. There was simply no other way. No bank would loan me the full amount I would need to buy it off. But a couple hundred k after a hefty downpayment thanks to the sale of my current house and the money from the show? That wouldn't be a problem.
And that farm meant everything.
So when she put shit down, I had to pick it up.
That was how this had to work.
That was how every partnership worked.
And that was exactly what this was.
A partnership.
A business arrangement.
An odd one? Sure. One built on a giant lie that we had to protect? Yeah.
But we would make it happen.
We both had reasons to.
Even when she couldn't seem to bite her tongue.
I tried to bite mine.
Or say nothing.
Never let it escalate.
That way, it wouldn't seep into the work aspect of things.
That was, of course, until the arguments - inevitably, it would seem - started to be about work.
"No," she said, tone clipped, arms crossed, jaw tense.
That was her serious stance.
"Yes," I countered, waving a hand out toward the space that had been a perfectly nice kitchen at some point. But since the roof caved, was a space that needed to be completely gutted and rebuilt. We'd actually found a family of opossum there the day before, much to the delight of the filming crew who thought audiences would get a kick out of the little babies.
They're so ugly they're cute, they'd insisted as they called animal control to have them relocated.
"Absolutely not. It won't fit the house."
"What house, Brin?" I countered, remembering to smile, remembering we were supposed to not just tolerate each other. "There's barely anything left. We can go a different way if we want to."
"Modern doesn't fit," she shot back, waving toward the windows where we were surrounded with coastal houses, all blues and whites and tans, melting into the landscape beautifully.
"Neither does a Victorian when we are going to have to lift it anyway."
She knew I was right.
A lifted Victorian would look laughable at this point.
"What's the point of restoring something if all we are doing is rebuilding it?" she asked, shaking her head. "Why not call a spade a spade? We aren't bringing this back to its old glory. We are creating something completely new."
"You need some coffee? One of the sandwiches in the break room?"
"Oh, my God. Not everything I say is because I'm hungry," she told me, the words tight and airless, like she was barely holding onto her tongue. "This is about the plans. And the fact that I don't like them."
We were being filmed, of course. We were always being filmed. Even when we were standing around sketching, the cameras were rolling, looking for some hidden gem of a moment they could catch and use in promos or something.
They had us on camera talking about the damn weather this morning and how it had made Brin's hair 'wild,' though to me it didn't look any different than usual. I swear if one hair was out of place on her head, she thought it was unruly.
"If I moved this," I said, pointing down at the plans, "would you like it better?"
"I think I would like it better if you burned it and started again," she suggested with a saccharine smile that had the lighting guys in the corner smirking.
"Someone get this woman a sandwich," I called to the crew. "And a valium," I added, smiling when she slammed her palm into my shoulder. "Maybe a couple shots," I went on, watching as some of the tension finally left her face, her lips curving ever so slightly.
"Alright. Fine. We can talk about it over some food," she agreed, taking the first deep breath I had seen all day.
"What's going on with you?" I asked, not realizing it was too blunt until her head swiveled, eyes piercing into me. "You're tense, Brin. You've got to feel it too."
"We fought all the time when we worked on the last job," she insisted as we climbed in the car.
"Yeah, but this is different. You were light with everyone else, joking, smiling. You're wound like a clock now. Every minute of the day."
"It's nerve-racking," she admitted, sinking back into her seat.
The tension left her like a wave, washing through her from the tip of her head down to her feet, every inch of her body softening.
"What is?"
"Lying," she admitted, shaking her head as she looked at me. "I can fake pleasantries. I have trained for that. But I am not, by nature, a liar. I am terrified every moment of every day of slipping up, of doing or saying the wrong thing, of not seeming into you."
Because she wasn't.
Oddly, there was an unexpected gut-punch sensation at that realization.
Which was insane, of course.
That was how it was.
She wasn't into me.
I wasn't into her.
It was all a sham.
"We could stop lying."
"And lose the job and money and respect? Our careers would never recover."
"Not what I meant. I meant... we can make it a not-fake marriage."
Brin wasn't one for speechlessness, but she was in that moment, frozen after the words came out of me, lips parted, brows drawn together, eyes unblinking, but avid, whipping around from one thought to another.
"You can't be serious."
"Why not? Who cares? It's just a piece of paper."
"It is not just a piece of paper," she shot back, surprising me.
I didn't know a whole hell of a lot of people my age who idealized marriage anymore. It was a contract. It made things like mortgages and bank accounts and having children and visiting at the hospital easier. That was all.
I guess I didn't realize that some people did still see it as something to aspire to, something to cherish and hope for.
"It's a smart solution, Brin," I tried again, keeping my tone reasonable. "We will have the papers, so you can relax a little because it isn't a lie anymore. Not legally anyway. And then we can just annul it as soon as the show is done."
Her head turned away from me at that, watching the shoreline as we passed, the flawless sand that was combed every night after dark doted with endless bits of color - towels, umbrellas, coolers, blow-up pools for babies, tents, and bathing suits. With my window cracked, I could hear the distant shrill sound of a lifeguard whistle as someone went out of bounds.
"It's still a lie," she said a long minute later, voice as airy as the wind blowing through her hair, making it dance wildly around her head.
"But there would be no legal issues. That has to be a big part of it for you."
I felt it too, and I wasn't quite as prone to worry as she seemed to be. There was this small hollow spot in my gut that I became acutely aware of when I felt eyes pinning us too hard while we were talking, working side-by-side, analyzing every move we made, every voice inflection.
We could be found out.
And all would be lost.
This could help that.
"No," she said as we stopped at a light, still watching out the window, eyes taking in the smiling kids coming out of the arcade, hands clutching new goodies they got, or the ones more inclined toward delayed gratification holding cups almost overflowing with tickets.
"Why not?" I asked, exhaling, feeling tense suddenly myself.
Her head turned, those eyes of hers more green with some emotion I didn't know well enough to recognize. "Because marriage means something to me. If it happens for me, I want it to be real. I want a love story and a man on his knee and a ring on my finger that says he wants me forever. I don't want to cheapen that, to cheat myself out of that. Not even for this."
The light turned, but I paused, giving her a second of eye-contact. "I get that," I agreed, nodding, before focusing on driving again.
"I know it is the easiest solution," she went on to add as I turned down our street. "And we would both breathe a little easier because of it. I am willing to pretend, but I can't sign my name on a marriage certificate without meaning it."
"Alright," I agreed, parking the car, cutting the engine. "I get it."
And I did.
But it didn't mean I liked it.
It meant more tension. For me, sure, but more so for her. Which was only going to make the bickering escalate.
But we had to do what we had to do.
For her future.
For mine.
It was almost three weeks later, three weeks of some grating arguments over the plans until we both finally agreed on something that was a mix of modern and the Victorian bones she loved.
A crew had been brought in, bigger than the ones that actually got to be on camera. I guess that was something most people didn't get to see. It looked like it was just us and a team of four or five people doing all the work. But it was dozens of people. Electricians and plumbers, bricklayers, window installers, guys to deal with the lifting of the house off its foundation, roofers.
It was a revolving door of people whenever the cameras cut for the day, having gotten just enough footage of each step of the process, and the occasional shot of me and Brin fucking around. It wasn't easy. To get her to lighten up enough. I was half-worried when I tried that she would just snap at me, but she seemed to pick up on the need for levity as well, occasionally instigating herself, hiding my tool belt, hand painting my hard hat with cheesy as hell lovey-dovey words and hearts and flowers... then making me wear it.
That afternoon, she had walked back on set after doing a small filming session at a local flea market to find buried treasures to upcycle for the house to hear Britney Spears blasting like her own personal theme music, making her full-stop mid-stride, looking over at me, shaking her head, then lowering her gaze to the floor when a fit of giggles seemed to overtake her.
Normally, she wasn't a giggling kind of chick.
"You have no idea how that has haunted me," she admitted as she walked into the kitchen that was mostly done save for the installation of the appliances.
"What?" I asked, watching as she reached up to push some of her wayward hair behind her ear.
"The Britney Spears/Brinley Spears thing. The kids at school were relentless. In my parents' defense, she was not a thing until I was like... eight or something like that."
"How'd the hunt go?" I asked, watching as she ran her hand along the countertop she had initially railed against, but clearly changed her mind about.
"Ugh. Flea markets used to be full of gems. The past few I have been to have been like garage sales full of the stuff everyone has clogging up their basements that they - and no one else - wanted. I did find a nice vintage piece of oval glass. I was wondering if you could make a frame for it. It's not perfect. Has some age to it. But it would be cool aesthetically."
"Yeah, I can manage that," I agreed, nodding. "They are pretty much done filming today. They just want some shots of me moving in the appliances. We can take a break after that if you want. You still haven't even been to the beach yet."
"Yes, I was."
"Walking there to pick up a jar of sand for a craft project doesn't count," I shot back, shaking my head.
"The show isn't out yet. I need to keep my Instagram relevant."
Work.
That was all this woman thought about.
I wondered - not for the first time - when she last just... was a person. Did things she enjoyed. Bummed around. Let her mind leave work where it belonged.
I probably wouldn't be wrong to imagine it hadn't been since she started her own business.
"We've been here over a month, Brin. You are going night and day. You need a break before you burn out. It's not like you'll get a break between jobs."
We were actually on a ridiculously tight schedule. That was why the crew was so crazy. They wanted us to get half of the houses - and therefore episodes - done within four months, so they could start airing in the early winter when the ratings were apparently better.
Rachel told us just this morning that we would be doing the tour of the next house just two days from now, whether this house was done or not.
Once they know the plans, you can leave the work to the crew.
It was logical to think that, of course. But it also wasn't how I worked. I was always right there alongside my men, sweating, cursing, getting cuts and bruises, putting some pride into my work.
It chafed that she thought I could sign my name on something that I didn't have a hand in creating.
"I'll be fine," she assured me, but even she didn't sound quite as certain as she usually did.
"Take the night off, Brin. Go see the town. Or watch the sun go down on the pier. Or just hang out and watch mindless TV. But you need to give yourself a break now and then."
"Okay," she mumbled, not making eye-contact.
"Did you actually just agree to take the night off?" I asked, sure I had misheard her.
"I have a heat headache," she told me, turning back, making me see it for the first time, the smallness to her eyes, the way her brows were low and drawn together like the sounds upstairs were wearing on her, making me wonder how I had missed it before. "I could use some Excedrin and a lukewarm bath."
"Here," I said, fishing out my keys, pressing them into her palm, letting my hand linger there for a second, aware that Andy was on the set today, and his eagle eyes always seemed to be looking for something to be amiss. "It's not that far. I can walk back later."
"You're going to let me drive your truck?" she asked, a mix of surprised, suspicious, and excited. "You never let me drive your truck."
"Don't make me regret it," I suggested, smiling a bit when she rolled her eyes at me.
"I'm a good driver."
"Of that little clown car of yours. I don't know if you can even see over the wheel of my truck."
"I'm not that short!"
"Babe, you are," I shot back, chuckling as she slitted her eyes at me before walking off.
I didn't expect to see her again as I stayed behind, wanting to put some extra hours in, wanting to put my mark on this place. The crew actually left before I did. I put up the crown molding in the master bedroom, installed the bathroom vanity.
It was well after dark when I heard a voice from a floor below.
And not just any voice.
Brinley's voice.
And she was pissed.
Not just agitated as she often was with me and the fact that we so rarely saw eye-to-eye.
But pissed.
"Shit," I sighed, wiping a hand across my forehead, and taking a deep breath before moving down the beautifully restored stairs that I was sad to say I had no hand at all in.
I didn't intend as I went down there for things to take the turn they suddenly did.
And maybe a part of me knew that there would be no going back.