Chapter 9 Nips Out, Chilled and Perky
9
Nips Out, Chilled and Perky
It’s a miserable, drizzly morning, which means I’ll be spending the entire day with Adam fighting my hair. At its best, my hair is light brown with a texture somewhere between Felicity -era Keri Russell and Folklore -era Taylor Swift, but today’s spitting rain only seems to emphasize its wildness.
I smell coffee brewing when I back-step into Sam’s apartment clutching two red Starbucks cups. The boxes I filled yesterday are gone, as are the cupboard doors. On the kitchen island are coffee beans, a brown paper bag of bagels, and an extra-large tub of cream cheese. Adam has hit every small business on the block that opens before seven a.m.
“I brought you an Americano for the breakfast buffet.” My words bounce around the sparse living room. The furniture’s still here, but everything that made the place special is now packed away.
Adam’s head pops out of the bathroom door. Scattered around him are several orange Home Depot bags. “Oh, thanks. Leave it there with everything else. I’ll need help installing the faucet when you’re ready.” He bends his head like the matter is settled and disappears behind the toilet.
“Is there a reason we’re fixing the sink and not, say, a licensed plumber?”
“If you have to hire a plumber to replace a faucet, you’re hopeless.” His insult echoes off the bathroom tile.
I roll my eyes, kicking off my winter boots and shimmying my coat down my shoulders. Muddy, slushy footprints show my every move like animal tracks. I curse myself under my breath, knowing that every small thing I do to make this apartment messier only adds to our growing to-do list.
Sam’s parents couldn’t have known the repairs this place needed when they tasked us with getting it ready to sell in only four weeks. Surely they’d forgive us for leaving an imperfect sink, but I don’t want to abandon Adam and whatever feelings are compelling him to spend so much of his free time in this apartment.
“I see you beat me to the coffee. Do you want this Americano? I wouldn’t want to overcaffeinate you.”
“Not possible.” He strides out of the bathroom, washing his hands in the kitchen sink before grabbing the cup from my carrier. He lifts it in a gesture of appreciation. “I got a coffeemaker while I was out. This way, you won’t have to buy it.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s good.” I try to conceal my disappointment. I like bringing coffee. It justifies my presence while he’s under the sink fitting pipes or whatever light plumbing he’s up to.
“And you don’t need to worry about missing your mint mochas.” Adam opens the fridge with a flourish, revealing a slim green carton.
“Fudgy Mint Cookie Creamer.”
“They can’t call it Thin Mint Creamer because of trademarks.”
“Sure.” I turn the carton slowly, certain it’ll detonate in my hands.
“But that’s obviously what it is.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Adam sounded the slightest bit excited. It’s infectious, even though this creamer sounds utterly repulsive. I settle into a stool opposite him.
“I’ll pour some mugs,” he says, and I’m about to ask him, What mugs? when he produces two ceramic, hand-thrown ones from his backpack on the counter. He places the slate-gray one in front of himself and the forest-green one in front of me.
“These are beautiful.” I pick mine up to admire the handsome curved handle, foiling his attempt to pour coffee into it.
“My sister makes them. I stole these from her house this morning. She has all different colors.”
“But these are your favorites?”
“The gray one is. But I thought you’d like the green.”
Adam pushes the green mug—my mug—to my side of the kitchen island. The liquid inside is a promising dark mocha color. I pull it to my lips for a slow, hesitant sip.
It’s revolting.
“Mmm,” I say through sheer force of will. My effort is truly heroic.
Adam is practically beaming with pride, meaning one tiny corner of his mouth is tipped upward.
Then the aftertaste hits, and nausea crawls up my throat like the girl from The Ring .
“I’m sorry,” I say, suppressing a gurgle. “But this tastes like you cut bastardized Thin Mints with antifreeze.”
His head jerks backward. “You said you liked it.”
“Temporary insanity. A side effect of the antifreeze.”
“It can’t be that bad.” He peers into my mug.
“No, the idea is good, but that’s truly heinous. Try it.” I push my mug across the counter.
“Why would I drink something bad?”
“I can’t be the only person in this apartment made to suffer.” I nudge my mug toward him with one finger.
“All right. All right.” Adam cautiously places his lips on my mug and takes a slow sip. He swallows, and I wait an eternity for his verdict. “I’m getting the hint of antifreeze you mentioned.”
Triumph rises in my body and plays across my face. “See!”
Adam’s eyes crease from the smile he’s withholding. The tip of his tongue runs between his lips, and an unexpected ribbon of heat twirls through my insides.
“I feel like I can taste the color green. Did you get that?” he asks, oblivious to whatever is happening beneath my surface.
I clear my throat. “Uh, yes. Aren’t you glad we both have the shared trauma of tasting a color?”
He chases the sickly-sweet sip with his mug of black coffee. “Enough taste testing. I need you to hold the flashlight while I replace the faucet.”
“You couldn’t find a loose child in the hallway to help you?”
“I don’t lure children into apartments I’m working on,” he retorts.
I roll up the sleeves of my white top and hop down from my stool. “All right, Berg. Let’s do this.”
···
Adam lies face up with his head in the vanity, his bent leg jiggling restlessly. I crouch next to him, wielding my flashlight like a weapon.
I feel my leg bump his torso and make the devastating error of looking down at the point of contact. His light gray thermal is pulled up, exposing a small strip of skin over the top of his jeans. My pulse sputters, and I avert my eyes back to the pipes. It’s too late. Every cell in my body is off-balance.
“So why are we replacing the sink?” I ask, because I need the distraction.
“The faucet—and because it needs to be replaced.”
“Isn’t this a bit above and beyond the call of duty? I thought they wanted us to pack up Sam’s stuff.”
“If we only pack everything up, his family will still have so much to do and…” His voice trails off, and I wish desperately that I could see his face. He swallows. “If I’d known Sam needed his faucet fixed, I would have fixed it. So I’m doing it now.”
I nod, knowing exactly what he means. I’ve driven Chelsea to the airport at four a.m. and moved Mara into a fifth-floor walk-up, and I’d hide a body for either of them if they asked. Whatever issues they might have had, Sam and Adam were that kind of friends. That doesn’t just go away.
“ You’re doing it now? As if I’m not a crucial member of this operation? Is this flashlight floating above you in thin air?” I tease, hoping to lighten the mood. He bumps his knee against mine, and I topple backward onto the white tile floor. “Just for that, I quit. You can lure a child in here for the rest of the job.”
“Alison.” His voice frowns.
“Fine, fine.” I click the light back on.
Adam loosens and tightens various pipe parts, but I’m too aware of our proximity to pay attention. I’m hovering over him. A light breeze would send me into his lap.
“Do you do this stuff at work?” I ask. More distractions.
“No. In my own house.” He adjusts his head under the sink, and I catch a glimpse of his eyes, sharp with concentration.
“Ooh. Homeownership. Brag.”
He twists his wrench, biting the tip of his tongue as he works.
I bite my own tongue without thinking. I’ve captured a small part of him he wouldn’t have shown me—the embarrassing concentration face. Something sugary sweet melts in my belly at the thought.
“And at my sister’s house in Minneapolis. June’s pretty handy, but she’s usually busy with my nephew, and her husband, Dev, works a lot.”
“You guys must be close. That’s nice.”
“Yeah, but we’re complete opposites. She’s bubbly and full of energy. Super chatty. She’s like color personified.”
“Really? That sounds exactly like you.”
A low laugh rumbles from Adam’s chest. The sound reverberates through my limbs and disrupts my equilibrium. I grope at the floor.
“What took you to Duluth?” I ask.
“The carpentry master I apprenticed under got me temporary work with a contractor in Duluth until I was ready to start my business in Minneapolis. And that was about seven years ago, so…” This laugh is hollow and uncomfortable. “Waiting for the timing to line up.”
I want to ask more, but I like talking with him too much. I suspect pressing this particular topic will disrupt our delicate back-and-forth.
“Can you shine the light over here?” His voice strains with the movement of his wrench.
“Sorry.” My arm, having drooped under the weight of a whopping half-pound flashlight, is spotlighting the inch of Adam’s torso that I’m definitely not thinking about. “So, in Duluth, do you live with roommates or—”
“Alone,” he interrupts.
Sam talked about Adam’s dating life once. I’d asked him about setting him up with Chelsea. I wanted someone steady and kind for her, and he brought up and dismissed the idea of Adam.
He never dates. No one seems to be worth the effort, he said. It painted a portrait of Adam as an arrogant ass. That image doesn’t match up with the man I’m with today. Prickly and stubborn? Yes. But self-important jerk?
“You’ve stopped talking,” he observes, seconds or minutes later.
“Yes, Adam. I’m aware that you think I talk too much.”
“ Too much implies I don’t like it.” The word like wraps around me like a worn flannel shirt. He pushes himself out from under the cabinet and stands.
I side-eye him. “Yeah? Yesterday, did you like when I read off the titles of everything in Sam’s entertainment cabinet?”
“Especially the part where you were struggling to sort his Xboxes. Riveting stuff,” he deadpans, cleaning the new polished nickel faucet with a dry rag.
“I’m still not over that. It goes 360, One, and then Series S ? Who names this stuff?” A smile pulls at my lips despite my best efforts to contain it. “I don’t mind silence. I actually like it. I don’t like when other people feel uneasy with it.” Everything they’re not saying presses against my chest—it carries a weight—and if I let it go too long, the quiet turns on me. Judges me. It assigns blame.
They wouldn’t be writhing in this interminable silence if you were a more interesting, captivating, exciting person, my insecurities whisper.
So rather than face down that voice, I fill the space with my own chatter.
Sam never needed me to crowd out an awkward moment because there never was one. His exuberance was relaxing up until the point where it exhausted me. Granted, some of that exhaustion may have been all of the mountain biking, rock climbing, etc.
But Adam doesn’t radiate agitation in silence. He likes it too.
He leans down to put his tools back in his toolbox, and I position myself in front of the vanity. I wince at the frizzy bangs in my reflection and promptly fuss with them.
When I turn the sink handle to wet my hair, I barely register Adam’s shout before witnessing the water sputter violently all over the front of my white shirt and numb breasts in the mirror. An unintelligible, startled sound chokes out of my throat, and I stand there, frozen.
“Air bubble,” he explains, searching the empty bathroom for a towel. My eyes are fixed on my startling entry to this impromptu wet T-shirt contest. Numb everywhere it matters, I feel only the damp, cold sensation spreading across my neck and stomach as I twirl away from the traitorous sink.
Wherever my nipples are in the universe, they are no doubt chilled and perky.
Finding no towel in the bathroom—I packed them all the first day—Adam averts his eyes and leaves for the bedroom.
One of the only upsides of not having nipples is going braless in a white tee. During my recovery, I met with a tattoo artist specializing in three-dimensional nipple art. She explained that without nipples, my breasts would look incomplete —“a face without a nose,” she said. She promised tattoos would fill the gaps in my confused brain so I’d no longer do the dreaded double take in a mirror.
By the time I’d healed enough for tattooing, they didn’t seem incomplete to me. They didn’t look anything like my old breasts, but they looked like my breasts, so I decided against the cosmetic substitution. But my first time with a guy after my surgery, I finally understood.
I told him my brCA story over craft beer and overpriced tater tots. He attempted to sympathize by revealing his precancerous-mole-removal story.
I should have called it then, but I wanted to rip off the intimacy Band-Aid. I took my shirt off and watched his brain short-circuiting at the landscape in front of him—rolling hills rather than twin peaks.
Eyes registering my breasts as incomplete looked suspiciously like a man finding them wrong, gross, and repellent . It’s upsetting to watch someone’s brain puzzle out your body in real time. I’d never felt so guilty for being in a woman’s body with scars and imperfections, for choosing survival over vanity. I didn’t have cancer, yet, I thought. I could’ve risked it. I could’ve waited until I had someone who loved me with breasts before forcing them to love me without them.
It was only a moment, and we had fairly routine, uneventful sex after that with no mention of my physical differences. Still, that one moment was enough for me to invest in lacy bralettes for future one-night stands.
I never summoned the courage to have sex with anyone else I actually wanted to see again. The stakes for physical rejection felt too high.
And now I stand here, waiting for Adam to see through my newly translucent shirt and register something lacking. That familiar shame creeps up my spine.
Adam returns holding a sweatshirt with duluth trading co written across the front. He presses it to my front without looking, and I clutch it against myself. He starts to rub the sides of my arms but freezes, and I watch the awareness that he’s touching me—kind of intimately—amble over his features.
“Sorry, uh, you have goose bumps,” he stammers.
Cold bristles over my skin the moment he releases me, and before I realize what I’m doing, I’m leaning forward into him. I know I should back away—I’m making this weird—but he’s too warm. I’m always so aware of what my breasts don’t have and can’t feel, but the pressure of his firm chest against mine just, well, feels .
He lets me stand against him a few seconds more before he speaks into the top of my head, his breath tickling my hair. “Where do you keep your clothes here?” he asks.
“I don’t,” I say into his shirt. The soft cotton is warm on my cheek, and his Adam-y scent fills my nostrils. This close, I can unravel notes of cedar and oranges, and I wonder if it’s fabric softener or soap or just him. His finger brushes a strand of hair away from my forehead. He moves it so gently—so reverently—that his body becomes the only thing keeping me from melting into a puddle on the floor. “I’ve never stayed over here, you know. We were never…I was never ready for that step.”
Adam’s body goes rigid against me as immediate regret rips through me like a tidal wave. Why am I confiding in a near stranger about my sex history—or lack thereof—with his best friend?
He clears his throat and nudges me toward the bedroom by the hand. “I have a spare shirt. Or you can wear one of Sam’s, of course.”
Whatever phantom sensations the weight of him shot through my breasts dissipate on my exhale.
I pull open the top dresser drawer and realize I don’t know where anything is. I open two more drawers before settling on a plain green T-shirt. Once I’m dressed, I plop onto the bed and hold my boobs protectively.
“I’ll throw this in the wash.” He points at my soaked shirt, and I toss it into his open hand. “We should take care of this room today.” He gestures around the bedroom.
For the rest of the day, we box up Sam’s clothes. Any of these sweaters could be sentimental, so we take the coward’s way out and every box becomes “Keep.” His closet feels imbued with him, like his clothes are an extension of his person—an exoskeleton.
“How are you doing with this?” Adam asks. He tilts his head lazily to look down at me. It’s cute. Adam is suddenly extremely cute to me. It’s staggering.
I roll my head up in his direction, mimicking him. “How are you doing with this?” Because whether he’s realized it or not, his relationship with Sam was more significant than mine.
“A bit surreal—like packing him away. But it needs to be done.” He looks up at me again from the shirt he’s folding. Warmth glows in his eyes. “I can’t imagine having to do this for my ex. Not that…you know…”
I stifle a snort. “If you’re only now telling me that your ex-girlfriend died—”
“No.” A smile teases his lips. “She’s very much alive. And married with a kid and a house on a lake.”
“Ooh, the dream,” I tease. “How long were you guys together?”
“Most of college.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I haven’t dated much since. It wouldn’t make sense if I’m planning to leave Duluth, and dating itself is such a pain. I get all dirty from work, so I have to change my clothes and figure out what to eat…”
I can’t help but smile. “You’re describing basic human functioning. First-level ‘hierarchy of needs’ stuff.”
We pack until the bedroom looks like a soulless Airbnb—not Sam Lewis’s bedroom.
“Do you think we’ll be able to make the deadline?” I gesture at the apartment. I feel like we’ve been at this an eternity, but with our side projects and derailments, it still looks like Sam just walked out for coffee.
“We got a bit done this weekend, but it’s the painting and repairs that are the problem. I won’t put that on anyone else when I’m more than capable of doing it. You don’t have to help if you don’t want to. I know you only signed up for packing.”
“Oh, you’re not getting rid of me now. I’ve watched too much HGTV to back out as soon as it’s getting good.” I suppress my grin. Just yesterday morning, the idea of spending a third weekend in Adam’s company might have sent me into a stress spiral, but now I’m hoping he wants me to stay. “I’d like to help. If you want me to.”
“That…” He looks down at the floor, then meets my eyes steadily. “I’d like that,” he finally says.
The words zing through my chest. Every bit of it.