Chapter 15 #2
Right in front of the entryway is a staircase leading up to a landing on the second floor that overlooks the whole bottom level.
The first floor is very open: a living room with no demarcated walls flows into the kitchen, which flows into a dining space, which flows right back to the entry, and then around to the living room again.
The living room has floor-to-ceiling windows, and around each side of the front door are large rectangular windows.
It’s bright and feels about twice the size it actually is.
The walls are white, the floor a light wood hardwood, although right now it’s covered in plastic sheets and drop cloths, so it’s hard to see fully.
I let her lead the way, and she walks us through the kitchen.
“I’m still waiting on the marble countertops, and the repainted cabinets are here and I need to bring them in, but you get the idea. Actually, feel free to walk around here and the upstairs while I bring in the cabinets.”
I head toward where the garage connects to the kitchen, but Abby starts to follow.
“Oh, do you want help?”
“No, because then I’d have to pay you for labor costs and I don’t want to do the paperwork.”
I spin to face her, walking backwards.
“You could pay me in other ways,” she says.
I stop walking. She’s got her hands clasped behind her back, pushing her chest out, looking up at me through her eyelashes.
She’s teasing me, and I know it, but god—if I thought she was serious, I would not hesitate to take her up on the offer.
I bite my bottom lip, thinking about all the places in this house I could take her.
On the stairs, against the wall, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, on the balcony outside, in the pool…
“Say the word.”
She twists her lips. She’s either thinking of a clever comeback or deciding if she wants to take me up on the offer.
I take a step toward her, and she breaks into a shy giggle and shoos me with a wave of her hands.
“Go. Go get your cabinets or whatever,” she says and walks toward the living room.
I load the cabinets into the garage and find Abby on the patio, which feels like the wrong word.
The ground is a natural stone, cool under bare feet, especially in the shade, which is abundant.
Tall pillars hold up the patio roof, which matches the red curved tile of the rest of the house.
The outdoor space is shaped like a C, centered around the infinity pool that overlooks the stretch of private beach behind their home.
Pool chairs will eventually line the edges of the pool, but the wood-fired pizza oven and grill have already been installed.
“God, imagine living here for part of the year. Or for a month at a time, whenever you wanted. And this is probably their second home,” Abby says, leaning her forearms onto the deck.
“Third,” I say.
“What!”
I nod.
“Did you do their other one?” she asks.
“I’ve done them all,” I confirm.
“You must like working for them.”
“I like money,” I say.
“I like this pool,” she says. “Is it treated?”
“It is. I wouldn’t normally have it done so early, but as you can imagine, there’s a lot of demand and not enough people to meet it, so we had to honor the date we scheduled them. Been sitting here kinda useless.”
“You’re never tempted to get in after a long day of work?”
“Oh, I’m tempted. But I have to set a good example and blah blah blah. Did you go upstairs yet? I want to show you the beach, but if you haven’t seen the rest of the house, we should do that first.”
“Lead the way,” she says.
I lead her back into the house, up the stairs, and Abby walks through each bedroom, peeking into the bathrooms, which are still being worked on, so they can’t be walked through. All the bedrooms are painted a different shade. One is blue, one purple, and another a soft yellow.
When we get to the primary bedroom, she’s rightfully wowed by it.
It’s the size of two bedrooms, spacious and open with windows on each sage-green wall letting in the afternoon sun.
It’s more than a little warm up here, with no air conditioning on in the house yet, and that dip in the pool is sounding more and more tempting the longer we’re here.
“God, you could fit a whole living room set in this room and a king-size bed and still have space,” she says.
I shake my head. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
“I just wouldn’t know what to do with all this space.”
“In a bedroom? Or in a house?”
“Both. I mean, it’s just me, so there’s no reason for this much space. Maybe if I had a family, but even then, it’s so much space!”
“Do you still want that? To get married? Have a family?”
“You asked me that already.”
“And your answer was unsatisfactory.”
“I don’t know what else to say. I do want to be married. I want to find my person. I thought I had found him, but I was wrong. I’ve been wrong a few times, it seems. And I do want kids. I’m worried that the clock is ticking for me and all that being thirty-three, but I do want to be a mom.”
She pauses, looking around the room. I wait, because she looks like she might have more to say.
Her comment about being wrong a few times hurts my stomach, but she’s right.
We did talk about marriage. In college, we talked about our marriage.
Our future. She wanted two kids—girls. She wanted to see them wear my hockey jersey and cheer me on in the stands.
I wanted a boy so I could teach him to play hockey.
My chest aches at the memory. I still want kids, but I don’t know if I could give them my love for hockey. And at this rate, I’m not convinced I’m going to find the person for me. No one feels like home yet.
“I know it’s only been six months since the breakup, but I’m scared it won’t happen for me. That I won’t have the chance to get married again or fall in love again. That I won’t get the chance to be a mom.” She stuffs her hands into her shorts pockets, biting the inside of her lip.
I want to tell her that she’s young, that she has plenty of time, but I know she knows that and she doesn’t need to hear it from me.
“I know how it feels to be scared about an uncertain future,” I say. “But I also know how resilient you are, how patient you are, and even if it doesn’t happen on the timeline you want, I know you’ll find your person. You’ll get the life you wanted.”
I could be the one to give it to you.
The thought rises from somewhere deep inside me.
Something I buried when I made the decision to choose my career over this woman.
I never stopped believing that we could have a future together—I just shoved it so far out of my consciousness so I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of ruining the best thing that ever happened to me.
I lived with it anyway, especially after my injury. And I have spent years believing this shared dream Abby and I held was dead. But flowers are starting to bloom on the cracked, dying soil of our relationship, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe old dreams can be resurrected.
“That’s…that’s sweet of you to say,” she says, but her eyebrows squish together, and she only holds my gaze for a second before looking at the floor, then around the room as if searching for something.
She chews on her lip like she’s uncomfortable or confused, and I think maybe the nerve I touched is too sensitive.
Time to change the subject.
“Did you look at the bathroom yet?” I ask.
Her face lights up. “No, but I bet it’s the size of this room.”
“It is,” I say, and she runs over to the door and peeks in.
The room is flooded with light thanks to the two large skylights in the ceiling.
It’s also not finished, so she can’t go all the way in, but she can see the deep clawfoot bathtub that sits between the large stand-up shower on one side of the room and the sauna box on the other side.
Next to the shower is a Jack-and-Jill sink and a mirror that takes up the whole wall.
The light fixtures are hung but need bulbs.
“Insane,” she says with a smile and a shake of her head.
“Ready to see the best feature?”
She nods enthusiastically and claps her hands together. “This is so exciting. What you do is so cool,” she says.
I swear my chest puffs up as she says that. It makes me want to take her around the country and show her all the houses I worked on, just to hear her praise me.
I lead her back downstairs and out onto the patio, past the grill and down a well-hidden set of steps. We remove our shoes before walking along a sandy, tree-lined path that opens up to the beach.
“Oh my god. Talk about beachfront,” she says.
“A house that expensive should be beachfront.”
“A house that expensive should clean itself.”
As we walk toward the water, I sway toward her, brushing my knuckles against hers just to feel her skin against mine. I swear I feel her fingers flex for more contact. But it’s over just as fast, and she veers off to the side a bit, losing her balance a little and correcting.
“It’s funny, you know. You working on a beach house. Bringing me to see it. It’s our first time ever being at a beach house together,” Abby says, her small smile and this reference cracking my heart in two.
One night, the summer before our senior year of college, she had come to stay with me in Pittsburgh for a week.
We’d gotten in a fight—over something stupid, no doubt—and we were lying in bed, neither of us sleeping, neither of us speaking to each other.
I’d asked her how we could resolve this. I asked her what she wanted from me.
“I want to know that you love me. That when we fight like this, you aren’t just going to call it quits. I know, Miles. I know how you feel, but I need to hear it. I need that reassurance.”
I tried. I tried so hard. Because I did love Abby; I felt it in my bones. I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone. I almost loved her more than I loved hockey. But when I tried to say the words, they’d get stuck in my throat.