Chapter 22
Chris sailed down the paint aisle on the back of an orange shopping cart, grinning like a schoolboy.
Yes, John had been right to come. A bull in a china shop had nothing on Chris in a Home Depot.
And the outing was a needed change from John’s backyard, where he’d been sitting for much of the afternoon, listening to a cactus wren and drafting texts to Celeste. He’d tried to put in some hours in his shop that morning, but the wood had just slipped from his fingers as he thought about the day before—crushed against Celeste’s pliant body in the closet, finally letting the spark between them burn.
Even better was the memory of how she’d laughed off Andrea’s joke upon their discovery, then given John a wink as she ducked into the hallway bathroom. She’d emerged a minute later wearing her signature ponytail and carrying a handful of olive twigs that she’d slipped into his pocket, murmuring with a smile about how he’d messed up her hair “beyond repair.” He couldn’t manage to be sorry about it.
They’d returned to the party then, energy humming between them as they stood hip to hip in the late afternoon sun of Maria’s backyard, trading small touches and nudges as they chatted with Celeste’s coworkers. When it was time for him to leave, Celeste had walked him out, then pushed him against his car for a hungry kiss before folding him into the driver’s seat with a playful slap on the ass and a promise to reconnect when she was back from Phoenix.
“Johnny! My shining knight.” Chris hopped off the back of the cart and half jogged down the aisle. “You didn’t have to come all this way.”
John only laughed. “I know a cry for help when I hear one.”
Chris’s string of texts to John had been a collection of vague diagrams drawn on napkins, inquiries about how much wood he should buy, and, most alarmingly, which brand of staple gun he’d recommend. John had texted back a quick I’ll be right there and headed for his car.
His best friend was brilliant, but shouldn’t be allowed within thirty feet of a staple gun.
“I needed to get out of the house anyway,” John answered, the phone in his pocket heavy with all the unsent texts he’d drafted to Celeste. If there was a balance somewhere between I had fun yesterday and You’re intoxicating. I can’t stop thinking about touching you again, he hadn’t yet found it.
“It could be that I need a little help,” Chris admitted. “And I figured if I called you from inside your church, you’d be more likely to come, and I could lay eyes on you. You’re a hard man to catch lately, John Maguire. It’s all birds, all the time.”
John raised his brows at the accusation. “You’re referring to the bird-watching contest you signed up for and then abandoned?”
Chris clutched at his heart. “Touché, my friend. The pain is of my own making.” His thin fingers rapped against the cart handle. “And how is my replacement doing? Is she keeping up with you?”
John nodded, counting on his beard to cover the heat flooding his cheeks. “She’s a fast learner. You saw that at trivia night.”
“Ah yes, the trivia night. When the Tweethearts kicked ass and you shared a jaw-dropping kiss onstage and then”—Chris tapped on his chin—“how did you put it? ‘Cleared the air’ outside afterward?”
“Yup.” He hadn’t loved lying to Chris and Jared about kissing Celeste outside the bar, but he couldn’t exactly tell the truth either. He’d never hear the end of it, and at the time he’d been trying to quarantine any lingering thoughts about kissing her more. “Anyway. What were those plans you sent me? I couldn’t even tell if you were working in feet or inches.”
“Inches.” Chris dug into his messenger bag for the napkin, pulling it taut between them. “I’m making screens for a series of watershed water quality assessments with a team of my students. You know, to catch the larvae and other little buggers.”
One indicator of water quality was what lived and reproduced within the streams of the watershed. Healthy snails needed healthy water, so a lot of Chris’s university teaching revolved around watershed ecology. When he could, John still enjoyed putting on waders and joining him, though Chris’s time in the field had dwindled in proportion to his attempts to secure tenure through serving on committees and taking on a bigger teaching load.
“I thought you had these?” He took the “plans” from Chris. Somehow Chris’s depiction made a simple rectangular frame with a screen look like the Eiffel Tower. “I’ve seen you use them before.”
“Oh, I did, Jonathan.” Which had never been John’s name, but Chris didn’t care. “But they were lost in my office move, and if I requisition more they’ll arrive just in time for my grandchildren to take one more look at this abused planet.”
“Got it.” He passed the napkin back to Chris. “Should be simple enough.” A few one-by-twos and some metal mesh were really all he needed. They could assemble it all in John’s shop. It would be a welcome distraction.
He strode down the aisle, Chris kicking the cart beside him. “Sooooo,” his friend said. “Back to the birding contest. You and Celeste must be spending a lot of time together?”
Chris was clearly a dog with a bone on this topic, and John wasn’t sure how to shake him off. “That is in the nature of the contest.” They made a left at the washing machines, where Chris reached out and touched every shining knob as they passed. “She’s in Phoenix for a teaching thing, but we’ll be back to birding this week.”
“But you’re doing more than birding, right?” Chris turned the cart to face John, leaning both elbows on the handle. A black sweatband held back his usually floppy hair, leaving blue eyes—and his hallmark mischievous sparkle—clear for John to observe. “What about the rest?”
“The rest?” John choked, rubbing a hand on his beard. Did Chris somehow have intel about Maria’s party, and how John and Celeste had stumbled out of the closet together, ruffled and near orgasmic?
“Yeah, the rest.” Chris narrowed his eyes. “You know, the whole I’ll be your fake boyfriend and you be my fake girlfriend thing? How’s that going?”
“Oh, fine.” John brushed past him to turn into the tool aisle, half hoping the shiny blades would distract Chris from this line of questioning. He knew he couldn’t evade him forever, but he was only just wrapping his own thoughts around the arrangement with Celeste. And putting the last few days into words was like looking at a photograph of a beautiful landscape, like that blooming palo verde where he and Celeste had seen their first bird together, and trying to render it with children’s crayons.
His strategy worked, as Chris picked up a hand drill and waved it around with a grin, pretend-drilling a few screws into the air, buzzing sound and all. “Damn, this stuff is so sexy. If I had a woodshop like yours, I’d be bringing people there all the time to let them handle my tools.”
John had never thought of his shop as remotely seductive. Efficient, yes, and a refuge he’d created for himself after Breena moved out. She’d always wanted to convert their covered carport into a home office, and had rolled her eyes at John’s ideas to turn it into a woodshop, arguing that his “hobby” distracted him from bigger things.
John usually stepped into new things the way he inched his way into cold water, but the minute Breena had driven away for good, he’d gotten to work. Brushing aside his shock that the years of their lives spent together fit neatly in the back of her car, he’d started drawing up plans.
So he’d never had a woman in his shop. Hell, he hadn’t had a woman except his mother in his home since that day.
John opened a carpentry app on his phone and traded it for Chris’s drill before taking over the cart. It was best if Chris’s hands were occupied when they walked past the Sawzalls. “Work out how much we’ll need for how many screens you want. We’ll be using one-by-twos, and they come in eight-foot planks.”
“One-by-two, eight-foot plank. I got this.” Chris chewed at his lip and typed into the phone as he followed John like a baby duckling, humming Coldplay.
But when John arrived at the lumber aisle, he’d lost Chris. He backtracked quickly, assuming Chris was playing with the circular saws. Even without power, he could probably do some damage. But when he found him, Chris was just staring at John’s phone.
“Uh.” Chris wiped a hand across his face, an uncharacteristic blush on his cheeks. “I think maybe I wasn’t supposed to see this.” His mouth kicked into a grin before he steadied it back into a flat line. “It’s from your strictly fake girlfriend birding partner.”
Heart suddenly thumping hard, John took the phone.
CELESTE:Training done. In my hotel room after my bath. Would it be uncouth to say I’m on the bed all alone, wishing you were here?
Wow.
Next to him, Chris cleared his throat. “John?” He waved a hand between John’s face and the text he couldn’t seem to look away from. “Jonathan, my good man, would you care to explain?”
John re-stowed his phone and slowly exhaled. “It’s private.”
Chris barked a laugh. “No shit, Sherlock. Luckily for me, we don’t do private. Remember when I spent that weekend with a Pilates instructor and told you about every position we—”
John cut him off with a look. “I never asked for those details.” Though parts of Chris’s narration had been very educational, especially since John had only slept with a handful of people. “And I’ve never given you mine.”
“That’s because you were with Breena, who was my friend at the time, so I didn’t want to know all her kinks.” A nearby employee cleared their throat, and Chris lowered his voice, just barely. “And since then you’ve been a monk. So pardon me if I want the juicy deets.” He rubbed his hands together. “So you two are dating? This is amazing! Literally better than I could have imagined.”
“No,” John answered before Chris could start planning the wedding. “It’s… casual.”
Chris’s playful smile dropped. “But you don’t—”
“Do casual,” he finished for him with a sigh. “I know I haven’t before, but I am now. There’s an attraction there, and we’re exploring it.”
He’d never done no-strings-attached sex, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Since he’d lost his job, he was breathing a little deeper, shedding the parts of his life he no longer needed and enjoying the space it created. Now he had the opportunity to experience something with a vibrant woman who turned on his body and his brain. And he could explore it without the larger complications of combining lives and careers and all the things that had ruined the spark he’d once had with Breena.
Chris picked up a box of screws, turning it over in his hands like it might hold the secrets to John’s behavior. “You’re exploring it. Casually.”
“Yes, casually.” How many times would they trade that word? “Just while we finish the contest.”
Chris tossed the box back on the shelf and leaned down with a groan, cupping his knees with his hands before popping up. “I’m trying to be cool here. But what the hell? You’re saying you and Celeste are fuck buddies, but only till the Bird Binge is done? Did I wake up in the other timeline?” He looked down at his worn Pantera shirt, tugging it away from his chest. “In this reality, am I the quiet, steadfast one who takes six months to even ask a woman out, and you’re the one who falls into bed after two drinks?”
“I’m not falling into—” John pushed his hands over his eyes, taking a breath. “True, this isn’t how I’ve done things in the past, but that doesn’t mean I can’t now.” He pulled Chris to the side to make space for a woman pushing a cart holding a toddler and a hibiscus. “I know that after everything with Breena you’ve felt like you need to take care of me. But I’m okay. This thing with Celeste isn’t something for you to worry about.”
Chris made a goofy face at the toddler before turning back to John. “First, I will always want to take care of you. That’s just the friend deal we have. It’s why you came to Home Depot to save me from myself.” His twinkling eyes grew serious. “I’m all for you getting your groove on. But are you really going to be cool with it ending in a few weeks? I can tell by the way you talk about her that you really like Celeste.”
“Of course I like Celeste.” “Like” was insufficient, but he pulled his thoughts back from that maze. “And I don’t know how I’ll feel then, but is that a reason to hold back now?”
It had been thrilling to just follow his instincts in that closet and touch Celeste as he’d been dreaming about, letting their energy whisk them downstream. It was a current he wanted to follow, even if he couldn’t see where it would lead them.
“And aren’t people always telling me to go for things? To move faster?” John continued, knowing even as he spoke that he was justifying his actions to himself as much as to Chris, assuring himself the arrangement with Celeste wasn’t out of bounds for him, simply something he didn’t have a guidebook for. “It’s happening, and I’m going to enjoy it. Can we leave it at that?”
Chris studied him, arms across his chest. “Fair enough. If you want to give this a go, more power to you. I want you and Celeste to go at it like bees if that’s what you want.”
Chris loved to bring up the sex lives of bees, the males of whom could mate for fourteen hours straight in breeding season. If only his snails were so prolific.
“But if that’s the case, you better reply to her, because there is nothing worse than leaving a sext on ‘read.’?”
John motioned to the towering shelves, stacks of lumber, and buzzing fluorescent lights. “I can’t respond to her from here!”
Chris followed his gaze, smiling. “Honestly, this place is kind of your fantasy land, buddy. Sexy talk should be easy here.”
John grumbled toward the floor. Just once he wished he had more of his friend’s experience, especially when it came to sending texts like this.
Chris must have read his expression, because his lower lip jutted out. “Oh, sweet boy, you’ve never sexted, have you? It’s perfect for you. You can take a minute deliberating about what you want to say.”
John could do that. He was great at deliberating, and he’d try it as soon as he got home.
“But don’t make the poor woman wait,” Chris said, reading John like a book. “She’s on her hotel bed. She knows you saw her message. All you need to do is write what’s on your mind. Just tell her what you’re thinking.” He pulled him in for a quick hug, then held him by the shoulders. “My boy, so grown up. Now go send your first sext.”
Which was how John ended up leaning against a display of paint samples, all hues of orange, with his phone open to more texts from Celeste.
CELESTE:I hope that was okay…
CELESTE: I know you saw it! Did you run away, or are you waiting for more?
CELESTE:Shit, was that too much?
CELESTE:Joooohhhnnnnn, put me out of my misery.
He owed Chris a thank-you for the push.
JOHN:Sorry. Didn’t mean to leave you hanging. It was definitely okay.
JOHN:I’m just out of the house right now, so I couldn’t respond right away.
He watched his phone, hoping for a response.
CELESTE:Okay, cooooool. I was stressed for a minute that I’d crossed a line.
CELESTE:Where are you?
JOHN:Home Depot with Chris. He needs some help getting supplies, and I was afraid he’d hurt himself.
CELESTE: You’re a good friend. Go tend to him, I’ll keep myself busy.
His imagination immediately went wild picturing what sort of busy. But when wood clattered one aisle over, he knew his time was short.
Just tell her what you’re thinking, Chris had said.
JOHN: I have to run before Chris hurts himself, and then we’ll be working on a project for the rest of the evening.
He took a deep breath and kept typing.
JOHN:I hope you can enjoy your hotel room tonight, because you deserve it. If you need something to think about, you could imagine I’m there, sliding my hands up your thighs as I push them apart. I’m so eager to touch you and find out what it takes to make you come. I know you were close in the closet, and all I can think about is getting you the rest of the way there.
He blinked at his own words, letting that current carry him as he hit send. Later, after he’d built the screens with Chris, when he was blessedly alone, he’d check his phone. Maybe she’d respond with a string of shocked emojis, or maybe not at all. Or maybe she’d tell him what she was thinking about, too.