Chapter 12 On a Steaming Hot Tin Roof
On a Steaming Hot Tin Roof
“I thought we agreed to work on Forest’s Bridge?” Elliot asked, when Lainey’s first lesson in DIY took them to cabin one, the recently vacated turtle cabin that now housed a family of raccoons.
She tied up her mop of red hair with a scrunchie, tightening the ponytail at the base with two fingers—the way she did when she meant business. “Oh, you’re not ready for Forest’s Bridge.”
“Is this a Karate Kid situation where you spend several months tricking me into washing your car and painting your fence?”
She faced him. Lainey didn’t wash her car, because rain existed, and she didn’t have a fence because Elliot hadn’t installed one, despite the increasing number of weirdos wandering into her yard.
Just the other morning, an individual with a handlebar mustache, dressed as a turn-of-the-century newspaper boy, was taking selfies and knocked on her living room window because she was “in his shot” while she’d been minding her own business in her own house.
“This is because I can’t, in good conscience, watch you poke around an electrical panel in the turtle cabins without immediate intervention.”
He nodded at her. “Surprisingly thoughtful of you.”
“And if you die by electrocution while removing a UVB heat lamp next to a taxidermied muskrat, the Bauers are going to be all the way up my ass. When someone gets murdered, they always suspect the spouse.”
She tossed him balled-up gloves from the pocket of her overalls.
He caught them in the air. “I take back the thoughtful part.”
“Remember that the next time you feel overwhelmed with the desire to strangle me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he responded “Oh, you’ve got a…” He leaned down and gently swiped her cheekbone. “There,” he said, lowering his hand and putting on his gloves.
“Oh. Thanks.” She lifted her hand to also wipe her face for some unknown reason, but whatever it’d been had evaporated into the crisp spring air, and she was left staring at him feeling…unsettled.
Lainey needed to breathe. And to look at something besides his mouth.
“You have a raccoon problem, right?” she asked, forcing her focus back to the task at hand.
“First thing we need to do is remove some of the entry points, starting with a new roof.” She gestured at the pile of metal in front of them like a game show host. “I’m thinking that we’ll want about two inches of overhang on the front.
We can drill the metal panels right into the frame.
The most important piece is the first one… ”
From his back pocket, Elliot pulled out a small notebook and golf pencil that looked tiny in his gloved hands. He was taking notes.
“You were saying…” He gestured with the pencil for her to continue.
She wasn’t sure why she’d found the action so surprising. Maybe it was how intentional it was. He was taking the task seriously. He was taking her seriously.
“Yeah…You have to make sure the first panel is perfectly square. We’ll use that one as our guide the rest of the way, so if that one’s off…
” She paused, half expecting him to interrupt her—to assume he understood the gist of what she was saying and finish her sentence for her like most people did.
But he didn’t. He waited patiently, deferring to her.
“…it’ll look terrible the whole way down. ”
His brow furrowed. “May I ask questions?”
“Yes,” she answered with a laugh. She was enjoying this version of Elliot, and for some reason, enjoying him felt more dangerous than irritation with him ever did.
“What are we using the staple gun for?”
“Nothing,” she replied.
He lifted his pencil. “Follow-up question: Do you know why I bought a staple gun?”
She stifled her laugh. “If I had to guess, you thought you were shopping for roof shingles rather than metal panels.”
He tilted his head to one side in acknowledgment.
The two quickly found a rhythm. It helped that Elliot was exceedingly capable once he had the slightest clue what he was doing.
Elliot knew how to listen. His eyes fixed on her as she spoke, absorbing each sentence with intense brows as if he were carving her words onto the marble tablet of his mind.
“Like this? Or is it more like this?” he asked when they were positioning the second row of panels. There was no strategic ineptitude with Elliot. He wanted to learn how to do things, and he wanted to learn from her. “I really want to make sure I’m doing it the way you want.”
All of his questions sounded dirty. All of them.
Each and every thoughtful inquiry hooked hot and low in her belly.
And the worst part was, he wasn’t intending to press his thumb on some highly niche kink of hers.
He was merely learning a wholesome new skill.
She was the one on a steaming hot tin roof all by herself.
“Where’d you learn to do all of this?” he asked her, lifting the front of his T-shirt to wipe sweat beading on his forehead, exposing a glimpse of his bare stomach.
She closed her mouth before answering. “Gran wasn’t big on rules,” she explained, resetting her balance on the slope of the roof before kneeling down to drill in another panel.
“So I’ve been doing sculpture art basically since I was, like, eight, which got me comfortable with tools pretty young.
That, and the fact that we never had much money and lived in an old quirky house.
I spent a lot of time on YouTube figuring out how to fix stuff.
And of course, from working at the retreat.
” She slid another panel into place. “You know that I used to work at the Groff Retreat, right?” she asked, looking up at him.
He lifted a sheet of metal up the ladder without so much as a grunt. “No, I didn’t.”
“First job,” she said, letting the sound of the drill punctuate her sentence. “And my last real job, but that’s…”
She didn’t want to get into the story of how that had ended. Not when they’d only just found their groove three-quarters of a roof ago. The way her time at the retreat had begun was much less fraught.
“I worked with the maintenance team all through high school. Those guys were amazing. Taught me so much, and I still don’t know a quarter of what they know. When the grid goes down, that’s where I’m headed. Immediately. No hesitation.”
He let out a low, musical laugh that warmed her cheeks. “Did you quit working there to pursue art?”
She snort-laughed so hard that had she been standing, she would’ve fallen clear off the roof. “What about my life gives you the impression I make money off of art?”
“You seem very…single-minded when you’re doing it. I assumed there was some larger goal there.”
“My projects are rooted into the ground in the property behind my house. Who could I sell them to?”
“I’m aware of where they are. I own the land, remember.” He handed her the next panel with a low grunt.
The metal bowed between their hands as it passed between them, only to flatten completely when Lainey slotted it into place. The tiny knot at the base of her spine loosened when all went as intended.
“What I enjoy about it is that I can’t sell it. It’s doomed to remain only mine.” She looked up from her work to find Elliot’s eyes as he gazed at her, one foot on the ladder and one perched on the roof. “But what’s mine is yours now, I suppose.”
“So you’d really never want to be a full-time artist?”
She sighed. “Sure, I’d love to do that,” she said, taking her turn to climb down the ladder.
Her eyes searched the well-trodden grass for the last unopened box.
“What I don’t want to do is have an Etsy store making custom ceramic models of people’s pets, while running seven other side hustles to make ends meet, and still never having the time to make something just because I want to make it. ”
“Huh.” He took that in. “I can’t imagine not wanting to do only one thing. All I’ve ever wanted to be is an architect.”
“Why are we doing all of this, then?” she asked, hacking at the long cardboard box with her utility knife.
“When I got the inheritance, I was hoping it would become more of a passive-income thing, so I’d have the freedom to leave my government job and start my own architecture firm.
And being an innkeeper of a lakeside resort designed by one of my heroes sounded like the dream way of accomplishing that. It sounded like a fantasy.”
She grunted, still prying open the thick cardboard. “The Shore Thing must’ve been a real disappointment.”
“It was. But Forest’s Bridge. Now that’s a silver lining. That’s what’s making this whole mess worthwhile. Is France your Forest’s Bridge?”
“What?”
“You said that’s what you wanted to do with the money. What are you going to do there? Go to museums? Drink wine?”
She breathed, feeling unexpectedly exposed. “You ask a lot of questions,” she observed. Hauling the narrow ridged pieces out the final box, she hoisted them skyward. “Can you grab these?” He freed her hands, allowing her to climb back up, the ladder trembling under her feet.
“France is less my silver lining and more the realization of my big ‘what if?’ Bree and I had made plans to move there together forever ago. But the summer before we were supposed to go, I started getting migraines. I was trapped in bed constantly, and nothing seemed to make them better. The medication I’m on now hadn’t even been invented yet.
Plus I had this boyfriend at the time, and he…
” She shook the thought away. “Our big adventure started to feel like a burden, so we shelved it, and…I don’t know, the whole thing’s probably silly.
It’s not like we can get that time back.
Bree’s in a completely different phase of her life. ”
But Lainey wasn’t. In so many ways, she was as unfinished as one of her sculptures in the yard, still unsure what she ought to become.
Kneeling sideways to brace himself, he placed the last piece on the peak of the roof, completing the puzzle. “That doesn’t seem silly to me,” he said, drilling it into place.