Chapter Six
~ Quiad ~
The first time I imagined building Levi a house, it was the middle of winter.
The farm was dark by five, the world outside my shop brittle with frost and the sky sucked clean of color.
I was on my back in bed, listening to the pipes thrum and to the faint, scratchy radio Levi played downstairs when he thought I couldn't hear it.
The thought came in fully built, like a prefab barn dropped out of the sky: a house, small but sturdy, planted by the creek where the grass grew high and nobody could get to us unless we wanted them to. I hadn't told him yet. I didn't know how.
But by the time I did, it was June. The morning in my loft above the carpentry shop looked like a page out of a paint swatch deck: the blue-tinged gray of the walls, the gold from the rising sun leaking through the warped glass, and a dirty brushstroke of sawdust coating the kitchen floor.
I sat at the table, elbows propped, coffee cooling in my hand. Across from me, Levi perched on the edge of the chair, knees pulled up tight, body swaddled in my old army hoodie.
He looked like he'd been up half the night, and he probably had. Every now and then, he'd glance at the clock, then at me, then at the clock again. Like maybe time would start behaving if he kept an eye on it.
I sipped my coffee and waited for my brain to catch up. It didn't. There were too many things in the air between us, none of them said out loud: the feel of his body under mine, the way he'd clung last night, the taste of his skin when I bit his shoulder hard enough to leave marks.
He kept the sleeve of his hoodie pushed back, showing off the raw, angry scab of the tattoo he'd gotten for me. It was still red at the edges, but the black lines held, and the swelling had gone down.
He caught me looking and twisted his wrist, just a little, like he needed to see it from my angle. Then he met my eye, blue-on-brown, and for a second the whole world spun around that fixed point.
“Coffee’s getting cold,” I said, more to break the tension than anything.
He shrugged. “I like it that way. Less risk of tongue mutilation.” The voice was casual, but his shoulders ratcheted higher, like a spring winding up.
I set my mug down and braced my hands flat on the table, waiting for the moment when I’d know how to begin. I didn’t need to wait long. Levi couldn’t let silence go unchecked for more than a minute.
“You wanna tell me why you made me sleep up here last night?” he asked, voice pitched just a touch above normal. He tried to play it off, but the tips of his ears went pink. “Not that I’m complaining. Your bed is like a memory foam slab for the soul. Just curious.”
“I wanted you to myself,” I said, as direct as I could. “Didn’t want to share you with the rest of the house.”
Levi laughed, the sound tight and a little uncertain. “I’m not that interesting, you know.”
I let the silence stand a beat. “You are,” I said.
“And I want to build you a house. Down by the creek, where we had our picnic. Not too close—don’t want you swept off in a flood—but close enough we can see the water from the porch.
Oak tree’s still standing, so we’ll put the kitchen window facing it. ”
He stared at me, slack-jawed, a chunk of hair falling across his eyes. He brushed it back with the hand that bore my name, and when he spoke, his voice was thin as rice paper.
“You want to build us a house?” He said the words like he wasn’t sure if he’d heard right. Then, a second later, “From scratch?”
“That’s what carpenters do, Sunshine,” I said, and let the corner of my mouth twitch up.
He blinked a couple times, as if trying to focus through a magnifying glass. Then he gave a breathless little laugh. “I thought you were gonna say you wanted to build a canoe. Or, I don’t know, a garden shed. You’re talking about an actual house.”
I got up, the chair legs scraping rough across the floor, and retrieved a spiral-bound notebook from the junk drawer. The cover was splattered with paint and there were pencil shavings stuck in the binding. I set it down between us, then rooted in the drawer for a stubby Dixon Ticonderoga.
I thumbed open to a blank page and handed him the pencil. “Tell me what you want in it.”
Levi’s mouth opened and closed a few times. Then, as if remembering his body, he straightened, set his coffee down, and drew the notebook close. The tip of the pencil hovered over the paper like a divining rod.
“Anything?” he said, voice gone soft.
“Anything,” I said, meaning it.
He chewed his lip, then started sketching. Not a blueprint, just a rough rectangle with a peaked roof. He drew two squares for windows, a block for the door, then frowned and erased the roof twice before settling on a shape that looked more barn than bungalow.
He slid the notebook toward me, shy as a kid showing a test to his teacher. “Is this stupid?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Just needs an entryway, so you don’t track mud all over the place.” I added a small box, then handed the pencil back. “What else?”
He stared at the page, tapping the eraser. Then: “A window seat,” he said, all in a rush. “For reading. And, um… maybe a loft. Or an attic? I’ve never had one of those.”
“Attic’s doable,” I said. “But if you want a reading nook, we need to steal some space from the main room. Here.” I sketched a bump-out, a little alcove just off the living room, and started shading it in.
He watched, fascinated, as the lines on the page became something real. His knee bumped mine under the table, and I didn’t move away.
“Can we have a porch?” he asked, barely more than a whisper. “Not a fake one, but a real, wraparound one. With rocking chairs?”
“Already in the plans,” I said, and shaded in a porch that snaked along the front and side of the house.
He grinned, wide and toothy. “You’re serious.”
I met his eyes, steady as I could. “Never been more.”
He touched the tattoo again, a nervous tic, then looked down at the sketchbook. “Can we… can we put the bedroom on the side facing the creek? I like the sound at night.”
I nodded, and drew a rough circle for the bed. “You want one bed, or two?”
He flushed so hard it went up to his hairline. “One,” he said. “Unless you snore. Then we’ll talk.”
I laughed, low and rough. “You’re stuck with me, either way.”
He leaned in, close enough that his breath fogged the page. “Okay. But only if we have a place for your tools. I know you—you’ll lose your mind if you can’t escape into a project.”
“Workshop in the back,” I said. “Soundproofed, so you don’t hear me swearing at the planer.”
He grinned wider. “Perfect.”
We spent the next hour sketching out the rest, passing the pencil back and forth, each of us adding little details: a brick fireplace, a line of bookshelves, a kitchen island big enough to prep food for an army.
Our hands brushed a dozen times, and every time it happened I felt the heat bloom under my skin.
When we finished, the paper was a mess of erasures, arrows, and corrections, but the house—our house—stood proud in the center. Levi traced the outline with his finger, slow and careful, and I couldn’t help noticing the way his hand shook.
“You’re really doing this?” he said, eyes not leaving the page.
I nodded, once. “Already called Pa about the land. There’s a flat spot near the bend, just past the oak. Good drainage. No neighbors in shouting distance.”
He laughed, then wiped at his eyes, embarrassed. “You sure you’re not sick of me yet?”
I reached out, laid my hand over his, thumb brushing the inside of his wrist. “Never,” I said.
He smiled, small and fierce. Then he turned his hand over, palm up, and laced his fingers with mine.
For a long time, we just sat like that, the sketchpad between us, morning light pooling on the table. Every now and then, the wind outside caught the eaves and made the whole building creak, but inside it was all quiet.
I let my mind wander to the house, to the porch in summer and the fireplace in winter and the way the world would look with him at the center of it. Eventually, I said, “We’ll start clearing the site next week. Need to get the foundation poured before the first frost.”
He nodded, squeezing my hand. “You ever think about what comes after?”
I didn’t answer right away. I let the question hang, let it settle in the air. “Every day,” I finally said.
He smiled, and it felt like someone had thrown open every window in the room.
I pulled the sketchpad closer, and together we started filling in the details. If this was what building a future looked like, I wanted to spend the rest of my life at the drawing board.
By noon, the kitchen table looked like the aftermath of a paper mill explosion: loose leaf, grid paper, the spiral notebook open to three different blueprints, and an army of stubby pencils with teeth marks up and down their length.
Sunlight burned through the grimy windows and bounced off the aluminum percolator on the stove, painting the far wall with wobbly gold.
We’d forgotten to eat, but neither of us cared. I’d never seen Levi this locked in—his whole body bent over the table, tongue out, lips flecked with graphite where he’d unconsciously smudged his face.
It started practical: a main bedroom for us, a second for “guests or emergencies,” as Levi put it.
But then the plans grew wild, uncontained, sprawling across page after page: secret attic hideouts, ladder-access lofts, a wraparound porch that would take three years to build at my pace.
We went at it with a kind of fever, neither willing to be the one to say “enough.”
At one point, Levi paused in the act of shading a window. He looked up, eyes bright, and said, “We need a tub. Like, an actual, grown-up bathtub. One you can float in, not those sad little ones you can’t even fit your knees under.”
“Done,” I said, marking it on the plan. “You want jets in it?”