“Yes, I am. Welcome home.”
Ashley exhaled. “Wow, good. I thought maybe you’d deserted us.”
“Never. I just thought in case you brought someone with you that I shouldn’t show myself until I knew we were alone. I might be hard to explain to some of your friends.”
“Oh, good thinking. You’re right. Let’s do that. Let Tootsie greet me. I’ll call out to you if it’s all clear. If not, you’ll have to stay hidden for the night. Okay?”
“Does that mean you’ve decided to let me stay rather than bury my bones?” he asked.
She laughed, and he smiled at the sound of it. “Yes, you can stay. But I need to shower; it was some pretty messy work in the walls and attic today on the job. I kept wondering if I was going to run into a ghost.”
“Funny girl. I’ll finish up dinner.”
When she came downstairs dressed in a cotton sundress as if she was going on a date rather than her usual choice of a T-shirt and sweatpants, she felt a bit foolish, but wanted their first full night alone together and both aware of each other to be very special, so she’d decided to dress up.
“Wow, you look wonderful!”
“Thank you. The makeup worked out for you, too. Looks like you figured out how to use the washer and dryer, too.”
“These conveniences are great. We had a wringer washer, and Priscilla hung our clothes out to dry. It took her many more hours to do household chores than it takes today. Looking back, I really don’t know how she got it all done.”
“Well, most women didn’t work outside the home then, so it was their full-time job, so that’s how they did it. Now, we work at least eight hours away from home and have to care for our homes when we get back, so we need these appliances to make the housework a little easier, or we’d never get it all done. Men help now too. Used to be men’s work and women’s work. There’s really not that great divide anymore. My ex-husband used to do the cooking and most of the cleaning. I did laundry and the yardwork.”
“Will you tell me about your ex-husband?”
“He’s a software engineer. That means he works on computers. That thing you see on my desk over there. I’ll give you a tour of it tonight. So he mostly worked at home all day. But he cheated on me. When I found out, I divorced him. I moved out of Vermont to New Hampshire because my brother, Jordan, who you probably saw on moving day, lives in Hollis and my mother does too. I wanted to be around family and didn’t want to be anywhere near him.”
“He was a fool to cheat on you. How long were you married?”
“Six years.”
“That’s longer than Priscilla and I were married. Ours was just over four.”
He served her haddock with lemon sauce, a baked potato, and broccoli, with a personal-sized tossed salad as they chatted. Somehow, this bizarre circumstance seemed so normal. But it couldn’t be, and she knew it couldn’t last. She needed a real life.
Later that evening, she taught him how to use the other electric gadgets around the house, including Alexa to call up music he might enjoy during the day while she was gone, and she gave him a short explanation about the world of computers by showing him the website for G & J Renovations. He was extremely impressed by the projects they’d completed during their years in business and the fact that they felt secure enough to expand into another state.
Then she plastered over the opening in the wall to assure him he was there to stay. When she finished, he asked, “Are you in love with Rex?”
“Oh, God, no. He’s a brother to me. Liz, his wife, is my best friend. We’ve been like the Three Musketeers forever since elementary school. Never once have I thought of him as a boyfriend even before he married Liz.”
“You work with men all day? Do you have romances with them?”
She laughed. “Well, aren’t you the nosey one? I work with women too. But mostly with men because of the physical demands of the work, but I’m the owner, the boss. It would be totally inappropriate for me to be having a romantic relationship with them. It would cause people to think I was playing favorites, even if I wasn’t. It would be awkward for me and my lover because we’d be seeing each other both at work and at home and would have to act differently in each place. It just wouldn’t work, so I’ve never let it happen.”
“Good.”
She took another sip of her wine. “So happy you approve. Why should any of this bother you?”
“I care for you. I don’t want anyone else in your life.”
Ashley, who had been sitting next to Perry on the couch, got up then, and Tootsie, who had been resting with her head on Ashley’s lap jumped down onto the floor; she stood over him and pointed her finger at him, “Let’s get this straight. No one tells me what to do with my life. Not my mom, my brother, my business partner, and not you. This is 2020, not 1920, and you don’t get to tell a woman, especially not this woman, what to do.”
“I don’t care what year this is, you don’t need to talk to me that way.” In an instant, he was gone.
Ashley took her wine glass to the kitchen and placed it in the dishwasher. She let Tootsie out for her last pee of the night, and they went off to bed. That night Ashley slept fitfully, but it wasn’t because she was having wild, passionate sex; it was because she was dreaming of ghosts, goblins, werewolves, ghouls, and vampires, as if she’d been caught in a Halloween haunted house that had no end.
When she woke the next morning, she made her own coffee and grabbed a bagel with cream cheese to eat in the truck on the way to the worksite. She set the house alarm as she left the house wondering if she was locking Perry in or locking him out.
Chapter Twenty
It went on that way for several weeks until one night Ashley came home and found that she’d caught a mouse in the trap in the smaller of the upstairs bathrooms. “Yuck,” she said. She called her brother, Jordan.
“Jordan, could you come over and get rid of a mouse I caught?”
“Sorry, Sis, Barb and I have parent/teacher conferences tonight. We’re on the way out the door. If you can stand waiting, I’ll stop by tomorrow after work.”
“No thanks, I’ll figure it out,” Ashley answered.
“Perry, could you help me with this mouse? I hate mice,” she pleaded loud enough that she knew he’d hear her pretty much anywhere in the house.
Suddenly, a small swoosh of wind filled the tiny bathroom. “Now, you need me.”
“I hate mice. They terrify me.”
“Women are always afraid of things that they tower over; I’ll never understand it, but it is rather cute—seeing you helpless.”
That got her ire up. “I’m not helpless. I just hate mice. Are you going to help me or not?”
“And if I do?”
“I’ll thank you.”
“And just how would you go about doing that?” He grinned at her.
“I don’t know exactly. I can’t cook for you because you don’t eat. Maybe I could pleasure you as you have me.”
He chuckled. “Sorry. Remember when you reached for me and your hand went right through me? That’s how it would be. You see, I can pleasure you, but you can’t return the favor. All I want from you is your company and love.”