Fix You (12 page)

             
His smile pulled to the side. “Take that as a no.”

             
Jess was up every morning at five-thirty without fail. Her routine was inalterable: teeth, face, shower, wake Tyler, makeup, hair, wake Tyler again, iron Dylan’s shirt, tell Tyler she meant it this time, breakfast, peck on the cheek, carpool…

             
This was the first morning in the past ten years she could remember accidently oversleeping. She had always been a morning person. Always. But a restless night and gnawing stress had picked her up by the heels and shaken her until she was a disoriented, grouchy mess.

             
She sighed. “I’m sorry. Really. It’s just…it was a long night,” she finished lamely. The last thing on earth she wanted was a shopping trip with her too-happy contractor, but it had to be done, and he was here and clearly had showered and used hair gel and it was a little bit cute and pathetic that he’d even bothered.  “I can go. But I gotta get dressed and wake up my kid.”

             
“I can wait.”

             
“Come in.” She stepped back and held the door wide. “Help yourself to some imaginary coffee in Hell’s actual kitchen.”

**

              Sometimes, Chris juggled smaller projects several at a time, bouncing between clients throughout the week as fit with their schedules. Small jobs were quicker, simpler, and easier to keep within budget. He knew more than a few contractors who worked only the small gigs – man caves, bathroom renos, fireplace face lifts – but he loved the big, blowout jobs. The challenges. The projects that left someone saying
wow
.  The Walker/Wales Allatoona lake house had taken total precedence; he wasn’t working for anyone else while he renovated the place. It was the most ambitious job he’d ever tackled, the kind of rundown house he had wet dreams about.

Though the co-owner might have been more responsible than the house for the wet part.

Chris had always thought mixing business and pleasure was a piss-poor idea. Wasn’t that stitched on a pillow or something? But to be honest, most of his clients were fifty-year-old married yuppies with too much Botox and tiny dogs stuffed in their purses. Rarely did he get to cabinet shop with blonde bombshells who answered the door in whisper-thin white shirts. Jessica having a kid would have left his mother wringing her hands, but he wasn’t looking to please his mom; he was just enjoying the view while he could. And as Jessica went around the corner into her bedroom in her supershort blue cotton shorts, it was one hell of a view.

“One of my sisters is cute and the other is smoking damn hot
,” is what Jordan should have said.

And her kid was cute too, in a very different way of course, as he came shuffling into the kitchen a few minutes later in his Batman PJs, rubbing a fist in his eye. Some of the sleepiness fell off his face when he saw that he wasn’t alone. “Hi, Mr. Haley.”

Chris propped a shoulder against the doorjamb of the walk-in pantry and shot Tyler a smile. “Hi, kid. You don’t have to call me that, you know. You can just call me Chris.”

He scrunched up his little nose. “Mama said that was rude.”

“She’s a stickler, huh?”

“A what?”

“It’s a good thing, I promise.”

But Tyler didn’t look convinced, staring at him with
that oddly penetrating blank stare kids always seemed to give him. His brother had a kid, but Ben Haley wasn’t winning Father of the Year anytime soon; and given the state of things between Ben and his baby-mama, Chris didn’t have any real uncle experience to speak of.

“I’m
s’posta go eat breakfast with Aunt Jo and Uncle Tam. You wanna come with me?” Tyler asked.

His stomach growled, but he didn’t want to give Jessica a chance to back out on him. Not that this shopping trip was about him and Jessica. Nope. Just cabinets and faucets and countertops. Just client/contractor stuff. B
ut he said, “Nah, I should probably wait for your mom,” anyway and watched Tyler go shuffling out the back door in his bare feet and across the drive to his aunt’s cottage. Through the window above the sink, he saw the cottage’s front door open and Jessica’s brother-in-law ushered the kid inside with a pat on top of his head. Chris had seen Tam a handful of times over at Jordan’s house and he seemed decent. He was good to his family, nephew included, from what Chris had seen, and if he had a problem with his wife’s business venture, he hid it well.

Waiting for Jessica became an exercise in inching step by step across the floor until he was at the threshold of her bedroom.
And it wasn’t like he was invading her privacy, he told himself, because the door to the jack-and-jill bath she was sharing with her son was open, and even from out in the hall, he could see her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was up in a towel and she was brushing blush across her cheeks, still wearing the clothes she’d answered the door in. Only this time, the lights above the mirror were hitting her at just the right angle and she wasn’t covering herself.

Nice
.

“Hey, did you decide about the sink?” he asked as he put his back to the door frame, and thought his voice sounded too loud, maybe even guilty. He had been scoping out her tits, after all.

“Only if it’s on budget,” she called back. “I have a spreadsheet drawn up and I won’t blow it on a sink.”

“Spreadsheet?” he asked, and felt his brows climb up his forehead.

“On my desk,” she said, and he took that as an invitation.

Her furniture was pricy stuff: slightly rustic wax pine with solid, clean lines. When she eventually stripped the wallpaper and polished the floors, it would start to look like the sort of place a girl like her lived. He went to the desk – it was a long rectangle, a lamp with beaded shade on one corner – and glanced down at an open three-ring binder and the graph paper chart she’d penned in neat, faint handwriting.
She’d composed a list of kitchen necessities – cabinets, countertops, sink, faucet, dishwasher, range, fridge…and so on – and beside each, a price.

“What’s with the numbers?” he asked, and flipped the page to find a nearly identical chart marked
great room
.

“Those are the average prices for mid-grade products, minus what you’d charge for install, of course, but I won’t spend more than that for each.”

Chris kept flipping; there were charts for every room of the house, and even a landscaping budget, all of it working off some magic, out of thin air numbers she’d concocted. Clearly, she was a control freak, and while his brother Ben would have called that a pain in the ass, Chris thought it was kind of humorous. This was one serious chick.

“You know, you haven’t price
d the stuff I’m gonna take you to see. Your ‘faucet budget’ is probably too specific.”

He glanced over his shoulder and saw her in profile i
n front of the bathroom mirror: the white shirt translucent around her slender torso, the air conditioning tightening her nipples into hard buds. She frowned at her reflection as she applied mascara. “Home Depot doesn’t carry faucets for any less than that.”

“Yeah, but Home Depot’s not wholesale. That’s not where we’re going.”

The towel came off her head with a fast yank of her hand. Her hair, dark with water, fell in wet curls down her back.

“And if you buy something off the showroom floor,” he went on, his eyes running over and over down the slim curve of her throat and across the soft, cotton-clad swells of her breasts. They weren’t the largest he’d ever seen, but they were high and full and he couldn’t stop looking at them. “You can get a huge discount.”

And a huge something else, if you want it,
he thought, his perverted side getting the best of him.

She sighed as she ran a comb through her hair.

“Sorry,” he said with a grin, “didn’t mean to knock your charts. They’re …awesome.”

“Uh-huh.” She clicked on her hair dryer and he decided that was probably his cue to give her some privacy. As much as he’d like to wait and watch her dress, that definitely wasn’t going to happen.

The kitchen was no longer empty when he returned to it; Ellie Walker, overwhelmed by pregnancy in her sundress and flip-flops, and two other women were doing slow revolutions, a mixture of shock and horror marking their expressions. Jordan’s wife he knew – she’d hired him after all – but not the others. One was leggy and brunette and more than a little bit stunning. The other was older, blonde, carrying obvious mom weight.

Ellie saw him first. “Hey
, Chris.” She covered her distress with a smile. She was a cute girl, all sweetness and good manners and big boobs. “We came to see the place. This is my sister-in-law Delta and mother-in-law Beth,” she introduced the others. “Ladies, this is my most professional contractor, Chris Haley.”

Yeah, he was nothing but professional as he’d been spying on Jessica. Nothing like
meeting the girl’s mom after he’d just looked through her shirt.

The brunette, Delta – and who the hell named their poor kid that? – gave him a cool, appraising sort of look, the kind men gave women. The mother, Beth, beamed at him.
Her arm went around Ellie’s shoulders for a fast squeeze as she smiled up at him. “So you’re the one that gave Ellie such a beautiful basement.”

“If you
wanna call a basement beautiful, then yeah. Yes,” he amended, not wanting to lose all sense of propriety in one fell swoop.

“It is! It’s beautiful!” All the friendliness her daughter lacked, Beth made up for in spades. Too many spades, probably. “I can’t wait to see what you do with this…” her eyes went to
the cabinets and their teal, peeling paint, “
place
.” She sounded like she chose the word carefully and Ellie hid a smile behind a hand.

“
Actually, Jessica and I are gonna go look at kitchens today,” he said, and she kept smiling.

The brunette gave him a knowing look that he thought must have just been his imagination because no way did she know anything.

“Oh, good,” Beth said. “I’m glad she’s not looking alone. She - ”

Ellie cleared her throat the same moment Chris heard footsteps behind him and turned to see that Jessica was dressed and sporting dry, shiny, honey-gold hair. She was in short khaki shorts and a white V-neck t-shirt
– with a bra this time. She made a face as she pulled the front part of her hair back at the crown and secured it with a band. “Talking about me?” she asked her mother. “You all look guilty.”

“We also look helpful,” Delta said. “We come bearing wallpaper steamers and Lysol.”

Chris watched a frown skitter across her pretty face. “You do? But…no, there’s still demo to do and El’s pregnant and - ”

Beth waved her to silence
. “We came to help with your room and Tyler’s, and whatever else we can get to. Ellie’s going to
sit
,” she shot a glance toward her pregnant daughter-in-law that told her not to get any crazy ideas about exerting herself, “and watch the children. Your dad and brothers are going to see what they can make of the lawn.”

“But…” Chris watched Jessica’s eyes cut over to him; they were vivid green. “I have to…”

“That’s fine,” her mom said. “Go shop and we’ll be here when you get back.”

She didn’t look convinced, though. “I should be here,” she said, and for some reason, Chris was disappointed, and not because he’d wasted time in coming over here.

“Are you worried about us trashing your house?” Delta asked with a snort. “No, we’re fine. Go pick out countertops with Bob the Builder,” she added with another fast glance in Chris’s direction that was a little too cutting and suggestive.

He didn’t care, though, because Jessica sighed and gave him her full attention. “How long will this take? I don’t want to be gone too long.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either when he said, “Not long,” and motioned for her to lead the way.

**

              “Three weeks, tops,” Delta said once Jess and Chris were gone, and Ellie was too busy inspecting the rusted out range to comprehend.

             
“Three weeks till what?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at the decades of grease that had stained the wallpaper behind the stove.

             
“Till Jess nails the contractor,” Delta said, and Ellie whirled on her, mouth falling open.

             
“No!”

             
But Delta had a smug little knowing smile. “Care to make a wager of it?”

             
“Chris is
not
going to put the moves on a
client
,” Ellie insisted.

             
“And professors don’t put moves on students?” Delta asked sweetly, and Ellie felt a flush blossom in her cheeks. “Trust me: I’m fluent in big goober eye-speak, and he’s all about Jess.”

             
“Well, I hope you’re right,” Beth said, and shocked both of them. “What?” She shrugged. “He’s cute and she deserves it.”

10

             
C
hris’s truck was a white crew cab Ford, the bed lined on three sides by tool boxes, the interior tidy with file folder boxes lined up in the floor of the backseat. She hadn’t wanted to ride with him, but it was just after eight and she hadn’t had coffee yet, so she hadn’t argued, and now watched the front tires eat pavement through the windshield and her darkly tinted sunglasses.

             
“So where are you taking me?” she asked.

             
“Kitchen World.”

             
“Seriously?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“That’s creative.”

             
“Wait till you see Bath World. It’s creative too.”

             
She let her head fall back against the seat and tried to enjoy the warmth of the sun coming in through the windows, but the further they traveled from the house down highway 41, the more nervous she became. It had been more years than she felt like counting since she’d ridden shotgun beside a man who wasn’t her husband, father, or brother. Under the falsely safe pretense of contractor, he’d gotten her into his car and now they were alone together and…even if there was nothing inappropriate about that, it chafed at her. Just a little.

             
“Do you care if I turn on the radio?” he asked.

             
“No.”

             
She didn’t know the song, but when he turned the knob, she recognized the kind of rhythmic guitar chords her dad had raised her three younger siblings on. Mike and Jordan and Jo and Tam, pubescent and eating junk food, playing pool in the basement with stolen beers, had carried on Randy’s legacy of classic and mullet rock. Jess had never jumped on board, but she was pretty sure the song on Chris’s radio was Zeppelin.

             
She asked, just for the hell of it, and caught the surprised smile that twitched up one corner of his mouth. “Sabbath, actually.”

             
“Who?”

             
“Black Sabbath. Ozzy Osbourne,” he prompted with what he probably thought was a helpful smile.

             
Jess stared through the windshield and felt like a dork.

             
“Not a fan?”

             
“I should be, I guess,” she said. “My dad’s into all that…stuff.”

             
“Stuff,” he repeated with a chuckle. “Really not a fan, then.”

             
“I wouldn’t say that…” but she trailed off because she didn’t know what she would say. She didn’t do small talk well; she always ended up following the conversation rather than steering it, because when she did control the topics, they were unimaginative and practical.

             
“Sooo….”Chris said, and his tone told her the question was going to be inappropriate, that reluctant sense of curiosity twisting his smile. “You said ‘no husband.’ Are you divorced, or is this a single mom situation?”

             
She didn’t tell him how rude it was – it would have been too obvious – instead rotated in her seat and gave his slightly-big-nosed profile a sharp glare. “The ladies must
love
you,” she said, a nasty bite to her voice, and damn if he didn’t
keep smiling
.

             
“That was bad,” he admitted. “Sorry. I have a bad habit of just saying stuff.”

             
“I’m sure your ex-wives enjoyed it,” she said with a snort, and pressed her shoulders back against the seat again.

             
He chuckled. “Don’t have any of those.”

             
“No?” She kept her voice neutral, but it was a struggle. “How does a man get to be your age without ever being married?”

             
“My age?”  He was still smiling through the windshield as he drove. “What, like I’m
old
?”

             
“I don’t know, you tell me.”

             
“I’m forty-two.”

             
“Most men are married before that,” she said with a little shrug. “I guess there must be something wrong with you.”

             
“Must be,” he agreed. “’Course, I’m not the one getting divorced.”

             
She tossed him another scowl.

             
“Lucky guess,” he said. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “But I’m gonna shut up now before I get in worse trouble.”

             
“That would be smart.”

             
If she hadn’t needed a new kitchen more than she needed her pride, she would have told him to turn around and take her back to the house. She was offended, sure, but her indignation felt out of context. Who was she, what had she accomplished, to push back against true statements? And she’d started it, if she was honest. So she folded her arms and prayed he would keep silent.

             
He didn’t.

             
“So how the he…
in the world
…did you end up buying that place?” he asked like he hadn’t just insulted the shit out of her.

             
She wasn’t a grudge-holder, at least she hadn’t been, and she guessed now wouldn’t be a good time to pick up a new bad habit. “I couldn’t get a job,” she said in a flat voice, hoping to deter him, “so I made my own job.”

             
“You didn’t exactly go about it the easy way,” he said, and she sighed. “No, that’s a compliment. Most people don’t have the balls to start over like that.”

             
“Most people probably have a choice,” she grumbled under her breath.

             
“So the divorce wasn’t your idea?”

             
Jess curled her hands around her seatbelt until her knuckles went white. “Would you like my whole life story? Abridged or extended version?”

             
“Sorry.” He took both hands off the wheel for a moment, defenseless and maybe, under his stupid damn smile, actually sorry. “Just trying to make conversation.”

             
“Then how about the weather? Good places to go for dinner?”

             
“I’m just…” He sighed, which put them one for twenty on the sighing. “Okay, so how ‘bout this weather, huh?”

             
She let her head fall against the window, scanning the side of the road for some sign of his oh-so-creative Kitchen World. “Lovely.”

**

              Tam wasn’t a yard guy. Neither was Jordan. Neither of them were going to admit that and risk looking ten different kinds of pussified.

             
“I think we should just cut if off,” Jordan said, and hefted the pruning shears in his hand.

             
“Won’t it grow back?” Tam asked.

             
“No. I mean…I don’t think it will.”

             
“Maybe we should dig it up.”

             
“That’ll take forever.”

             
“Better than it growing back.

             
“It won’t grow back.”

             
“You don’t know that.”

             
Jordan sighed and reached out to poke the kudzu vine with the toe of his sneaker. “Let’s just torch the thing.”

             
“Yeah,” Tam snorted. “Your sisters would love that.”

             
Jordan scowled at the vine that was trying to overtake what had once been a gazebo along the path that led down to the edge of the lake, and Tam thought for the second time that the guy was overly frustrated.

             
“Hey, you alright? You’re kinda…” he let the sentence hang when the scowl was turned on him.

             
“Kinda what?”

             
“Really pissed at this kudzu.”

             
He scrunched up his nose like he’d done as a kid and shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

             
“You sure?”

             
“Yeah.” He scratched at his hair. “Well…nevermind.”

             
“Dude, you can tell me,” Tam offered, and stepped on the edge of his shovel, driving the blade down into the roots of the vine. They weren’t burning or cutting the thing down – that much he’d figured out.

             
“No I can’t,” Jordan made a face, “all your advice ends with ‘and then I had sex with your sister.’ So no, thanks.”

             
“Girl problems,” Tam said, still working the shovel. “What did Ellie’s widdle Jordie do to piss her off?” Maybe it was cruel, but it was too fun to resist heckling the guy about the hold his woman had over him.

             
“Why is it automatically my fault?” Jordan asked, and sounded more than a little bitter. He stared off toward the lake, a little wrinkle of tension between his brows. He’d been keeping his hair shorter but it was starting to get longer, a little curly and floaty around the edges. For as simple as he pretended to be, he was a bit of a complicated mess when it came to Ellie.

             
Tam leaned on his shovel. “You guys aren’t having problems, are you?”

             
The dreaded P word. Dylan and his little bondage fantasy routine had brought that word into the family and everyone’s paranoia kept spreading it around.

             
“Nah,” Jordan said, but Tam didn’t believe him. He didn’t get to say anything, though, because footsteps were coming up the trail behind them and Walt’s voice was a blemish against the face of the afternoon.

             
“Hey, jackasses, Dad wants you up front,” he called, and the caustic bite of his voice stood the tiny hairs on the back of Tam’s neck on end. Walt had brought a pulsing energy with him that reeked of a fight.

**

              Jordan was wound too tight. A little wind-up toy twisted two too many revolutions and left caught that way. Ellie’s avoidance of him was rapidly beginning to feel like something that wouldn’t end after pregnancy. She wouldn’t soften, wouldn’t warm, no matter how he tried to ease her into things, and he was starting to be afraid that the girl he’d married was changed irrevocably.

             
The night before, he’d glanced up from the book he’d been reading and found her on the opposite end of the couch, curled up with her laptop, winding a lock of hair around her finger unconsciously as she frowned at the screen. She’d been in yoga pants and a shapeless tank top, her belly round as a little beach ball underneath. He’d watched her dark lashes lay curled against her ceramic cheeks, the long wisps of unkempt bangs framing her temples, her small white teeth worrying at her lower lip, and he’d set his book aside and slid across the couch until her slender white feet were butting up against his hip. He’d wrapped a hand around one of them, the arch sliding right into his palm, and he’d seen the flash of silver that had been her eyes lifting, full to the brim with nothing less than dread.
She dreaded
the touch of his hands these days.

             
He’d swallowed down the desperate surge of longing and anger that had swelled in his throat and asked,
“What are you working on? Your sequel?”

             
“Yes.”
Her eyes had dropped to her laptop screen again, her foot limp as a dead fish in his hand. Where once she would have flexed her toes and opened her arms and invited him down to her with smiling eyes and a happy sigh, she now seemed bent on ignoring him.

             
“Am I in it?”
he’d asked, only half-joking. It would have been nice to know she at least still thought of him, even if she didn’t want to make physical contact anymore.

             
Her lashes had flickered up, her look amused, but unnecessarily cautious. How could she have been cautious? He’d made her his in every way that it counted and had never told her anything save how beautiful she was. But she had been cautious all the same.
“Maybe,”
she’d said,
“there might be a character who’s at least partly inspired.”

             
“Does he get laid more than I do?”
he’d asked before he could stop himself, bitterness creeping into his voice.

             
Ellie’s frown had been immediate.
“Is that all you care about?”
she’d asked in a breathy, almost frantic rush, the words quivering as they’d left her lips. It hadn’t been anger, but so much stupid fear she’d thrown between them.
“Is that…that all I’m worth to you?”