"Is that the prerequisite for lending me a nail gun?"
"Baby, I don't have a nail gun. I have nine kinds of chainsaws and zero nail guns. I just want to see what you've been doing there the past six weeks."
Though my hair was back to rights, Linden continued running his fingers through the strands, tugging only enough to light up my scalp with the kind of warmth and softness that made me feel loose everywhere. "Then you're not trying to keep me away from power tools?"
"I am definitely trying to keep you away from power tools. I'm also interested to see how the house is coming along."
"We could stay right here instead," I murmured.
He sighed into my neck. "I love your hair."
I blew out a breath, my eyes still closed and his shaft still heavy against my ass while those words soaked into me like the sun's rays in winter—strained, filtered, and inarguably true.
"It's always so soft," he continued. "I don't understand how anything could be this soft."
I nearly explained my shea butter conditioning mask but stopped myself in time.
"And you always smell so…lovely," he added.
Again, the shea butter mask. "Thank you."
He banded his arms around my torso and gave me a great squeeze, his face pressed to my neck. As he held me, a rumbly growl sounded from his throat, a noise that wasn't nearly as predatory as it was possessive. Like he was deeply satisfied.
I stepped out of his hold and away from the dishwasher. "What do you want to see first?"
It hadn't occurred to me that Linden would be critical of my work on Midge's house though when I led him through the front door, a blast of preemptive defensiveness flooded me.
"Obviously, I'm not an expert when it comes to any of this," I said.
"Wow, it looks so much better in here," he said, stepping away to travel the length of the living room. "Such an improvement over the bat cave."
"Well, anything would be an improvement over the bat cave."
He kneeled down, ran his fingertips over the floor. "The hardwood needs a good refinishing but it's in decent shape. I wasn't sure if there was water damage."
I twisted my fingers in the hem of my shirt. "I don't think there's any. Not in here."
He stood and turned to face the wall, his brows pinched. "You painted this room, right?"
"Yeah, the walls were not pretty. I found a bunch of paint in the basement so I just used the colors Midge already had in the house." He continued staring at the wall with that pinched brow gaze until I snapped, "What's wrong? What's the problem?"
He gave a quick shake of his head and stepped toward me. "Nothing. Nothing's wrong. What else is there to see?"
I pointed out the freshly painted walls and ceilings in the hall, the spots where I'd pulled up the old carpeting, the rotted cabinets I'd ripped out from the kitchen. Linden murmured and nodded at the right moments, though I was still poised on the edge of a defensive cliff. I could fall off—or jump—at any moment.
When I led Linden into the little room I'd claimed as my own, he dropped both hands onto my shoulders with a rough groan.
"What? What's wrong?" I barked.
"Nothing is wrong, Jas. I just hate that I let you stay here alone—and that was before you did all this work."
I pointed to the wide windowsill where the cat slept, as he often did when the morning sun shone in. "I'm never quite alone. This guy is always nearby."
Linden chuckled. "That's funny. I've never seen him as much as I have since you moved in."
"He's waiting for me to finish the house," I said. "Then he'll go back to his wild woodland life."
"That cat is as concerned about you and tools as I am." Turning to the opposite wall, he asked, "What kind of paint did you use?"
"I don't know. Regular paint. Paint from a can. Paint paint."
"Are you sure you used interior paint?"
"What do you mean, interior paint?"
"Okay. Let's go exploring." Linden steered me out of my room and toward the back of the house, moving through the kitchen and down into the basement. He stopped us in front of the long row of cans I'd organized on a shelf near the nonfunctioning washer and dryer. It was right across from the nonfunctioning water heater and the barely functioning electrical panel. Good times.
With one hand on my shoulder, he gestured to the label on one of the cans. "Exterior paint."
I wasn't on the defensive cliff anymore. I was in the self-sabotaging swamp again, the place where I could help myself but never did.
"What—what's the difference? Does it matter? Really? It doesn't. It doesn't, it can't. It looks fine. It looks like paint and it's fine so it doesn't matter. Right? Right? Did I screw the whole thing up? What does that mean? I can paint over it with the right type or—oh my god, please tell me I don't have to tear down the walls. Please, Lin, please tell me I don't have to replace the walls because I didn't notice it was exterior paint."
He closed both arms around my shoulders and chuckled into my hair. "Jas. Peach. It will be fine. But this is why I'm not putting a nail gun in your hands."
I followed Linden off the trail, deeper into the woods. After I'd started yelling "Why! Why? Why are you exterior?" at a paint can, Linden had ordered me into his truck.
With a long gaze at his denim-clad backside, I asked, "Why are you still single?"
His step faltered for a moment but then he called over his shoulder, "Is that what I am?"
"Unless there's something you need to tell me, yeah."
He gave a slight shake of his head. "If I'm single, what are you?"
Oh, no. No, no, no. We weren't going down the what is this? path. We were already lost in the woods, as far as I could tell, and there was no need to define what was most definitely a fling.
Since we weren't doing any of that, I replied, "I have been in a codependent relationship with my job since I was a teenager and laboring under the belief that a job would fulfill all my emotional and spiritual needs. That's what I am." I caught up to him, elbowed him in the side. "Back to you. Why are you single? Your fingernails are clean, you only hurl obscenities on selected occasions, and you don't appear to be involved in anything illegal. You're a catch, Lin."
"Is that all it takes? I never knew." He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages for a minute. "Seems like we should be talking about that codependent relationship."
I groaned. "Haven't we done enough of that?"
"I would agree if you didn't make it sound like a present-tense type of situation. Thought you quit that, Peach."
"One does not simply walk away from a career after fifteen-plus years in it. Even if they recently realized they hated parts of their job and maybe-probably engaged in big-time self-sabotage. One does not simply toss all that in the shredder."
He chuckled, still paging through his book. "Then what's your plan?"
"I wouldn't call it anything as sophisticated as a plan but I have been talking with a few folks about some consulting projects. Nothing solid. Optics are so important right now. No one wants to risk it at this point."