Elsie #2
I had to admit, the guy had good instincts.
Replacing alarms wasn’t exactly on the top of my list of priorities at the moment, but there was no way I would let this random man come and start making all these home improvements because he thought I was some pitiful woman who didn’t have anyone else in the world to help her.
I mean, I was. But I didn’t want him thinking it.
“Then maybe I shouldn’t trust you to change the lock,” I challenged, crossing my arms across my chest as I matched his stare.
“What?”
“It’s about my safety, after all.” I shrugged, throwing his words back at him. “I mean, what if you screw it up or something?”
“I won’t,” he said.
“You just told me not to trust other people with my own safety.”
“I didn’t mean me. I meant other people.”
“What’s wrong with other people?”
“Most people aren’t reliable.”
“And you are?”
“Yes,” he said definitively.
I threw my hands up in defeat. I’d let him win this one, if only because of that intense look in his eyes. I knew how to pick my battles.
“Okay, then can we get back to the door?” I tried to distract him from the alarm situation he was so fixated on. “Because that’s definitely the biggest safety concern here.”
“Colbridge is the safest town in New England,” he responded. “The lock is an unnecessary precaution.”
“That seems hard to believe considering I’m living in a house where someone got murdered.” I scoffed.
“What?” His face scrunched up.
“Yeah, I heard all about the crime that was committed in my house, so don’t even try to cover it up for the sake of tourism!”
“And what did you hear?” he deadpanned.
“About the fact that there was a murder here,” I started off confidently, “…and pretty much nothing else.”
I deflated.
“They got to you already?” Will rolled his eyes more dramatically than a Shakespearean actor would’ve been capable of. “How’d they spin it this time?”
“I mean, no one really elaborated,” I admitted. “But I’ve come to the conclusion I’d rather not know the details.”
Each gruesome scenario I’d imagined was worse than the last. My mind was too wild for its own good. I guess that’s why I became a writer.
“Well, the real story is—” he started, and I nearly jumped forward to cover his mouth with my hand.
“I said I don’t want to know!” I told him, feeling the coarse stubble of his facial hair beneath my palm. His eyes widened in surprise before I yanked my hand away.
“Sorry,” I told him, feeling my cheeks flame. “But if you tell me, I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life and be forced to sleep outside for the remainder of my time here.”
“You’re not going to have nightmares,” he said, irritated. “And you’re not going to sleep outside, because there was no murder.”
“What?” I gasped. “Are you kidding?”
“I mean, unless you count Mr. Briggs accusing Mrs. Sanders of murdering his cat after it went missing for six hours and he found rat poison in her trash.”
His cat? Damn, that could explain the orange tabby that had been persistently scratching at the door for the last few days.
“Why was he going through her trash?” I asked.
“Because people in this town have no concept of the term ‘boundaries.’”
“If there was no murder, then where is Mr. Briggs now?!”
“Dead.”
I yelped.
“Of old age,” he emphasized. “The man was ninety-four years old.”
“Please don’t tell me he died peacefully in bed.” I recoiled, feeling awful as the words came out of my mouth.
I couldn’t help it. What if his ghost was still lingering in that same room where I was supposed to sleep at night?
“Died in the nursing home, actually, but nice job with the compassion.” He gave me a thumbs up.
I rolled my eyes.
“So why did that woman make such a big deal of it? Why refer to it as ‘the murder business?’”
“She thinks the disorderly conduct between neighbors left some type of negative energy in the house or whatever, and that’s why no one’s moved in.” Will shrugged. “I can’t pretend to know how any of these people’s minds work.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Well, my condolences for Mr. Briggs…but at least I’ll be able to sleep tonight,” I chirped happily.
“Fantastic,” he retorted dryly. “Glad to be of service.”
At that, I frowned, remembering his vow to do the opposite of service me at any cost.
“Well, for the record, I didn’t ask you to dispel my fears. You offered it up yourself.”
“So?” he said, clearly not following.
“So, you made a big deal about how I shouldn’t ask you for help with anything, so I’m just clarifying that detail before you claim I’m indebted to you forever.”
He shook his head. “You have a flair for the dramatic, you know that?”
“Thanks.” I grinned cheekily. “I channel it into my writing.”
“Writing?”
“Yeah, I’m a writer,” I told him, feeling the biggest case of imposter syndrome at the admission.
Was I actually a writer if I hadn’t yet written anything I was proud of? If all that I had under my name were a couple dozen measly news articles read only by a local community near Boston?
“That’s what I’m doing here,” I further explained. “I’m on sort of a writing retreat. Just for a few months.”
“Writer, huh?” he said, looking me up and down. “That makes sense.”
I furrowed my brows. “Is that an insult?”
“No, I just meant you seemed a little free spirited, is all. Writer makes sense for you.”
Free spirited? Coming from a guy like Will Hughes, the term was no better than being referred to as some nomadic hippie, barefoot and smoking pot at Woodstock.
It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have a permanent home anymore. It wasn’t my fault I had to run off to hide in this stupid town. And it wasn’t my fault that my ex-fiance blew up my life without so much as a hint of warning—
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What? Nothing.”
“Then why are you making that face?”
I tried to compose myself, attempting to force my features back into the polite smile I’d never quite perfected for the family dinners and date nights for which it would’ve been useful.
“Maybe we should just fix the lock. I know you probably have a thousand other things you’d love to be doing right now, right?”
He fixed his eyes on me for another moment, as if I might cave under the pressure of his gaze and spill everything. When I didn’t falter, he lifted a shoulder and said, “Fine.”
Without another word, he brought in his toolbag he’d left outside and got to work fixing the lock. Unscrewing the old one and replacing it with a new and highly improved one.
A relatively simple process that I never thought would be interesting to watch, but somehow I couldn’t look away.
“All set,” he told me, tossing the discarded materials into my kitchen trash.
“How much do I owe you?”
“You don’t owe me anything. It should’ve been done before you moved in.”
I frowned. “You’re not my landlord, are you?”
I shuddered to think of the possibility.
“No, but I handle stuff like this around town,” he said.
“Shouldn’t Mr. Briggs’s family be handling it?” I asked. “They’re the ones I’m renting from, aren’t they?”
“They don’t really care about stuff like this,” he said. “As you can probably tell, they’d be happy enough to let the house fall into ruin. Clearly, it doesn’t stop people from renting.” He shot me a pointed look.
Well, he had a point. There hadn’t been an apartment for rent with a price this low since the early 2000s, let alone a whole house.
“It was sort of a hasty decision,” I admitted.
“I figured,” he said. “No one rents a place without coming to see it first.”
“In this housing market? I’d say seven out of ten people would. Besides, it doesn’t look that bad, does it?”
I was proud of it, in a way. It was the only place I’d ever lived in by myself. And despite some foundational flaws (i.e. the possible leaky roof and some insulation issues), I was settling in nicely.
“It’s not an aesthetic issue, it’s a safety hazard.”
“Why do you care so much about this stuff, anyway?” I asked. “I mean, who made you the appointed fixer-upper guy for the town?”
“Necessity,” he said. “Everyone else is—”
“Unreliable?” I grinned.
“Incompetent, mostly,” he said, and I could’ve sworn there was the hint of a smile there, if he were capable of it.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m highly competent.”
“Clearly,” he said. “I mean, you did make muffins.”
“Right. They were supposed to be a peace offering. Did they work?”
This time he did smile. It was sort of beautiful.
“They were fine,” he admitted, biting his lip as if he could hide the fact that he was feeling something other than raging indifference.
“So,” I raised my brows, outstretching my hand in his direction, “can we call a truce?”
“We were never at war.”
“Maybe not, but you have to admit what was between us could at least be worthy of the term battle.”
He sighed. I smiled at the way he rubbed a hand over his face. It was quite a feat to bring a man of his size to such a profound level of exhaustion through words alone.
“I’m starting to realize it’s easier to just go along with these bits of yours,” he said, accepting my outstretched hand. “So fine, truce.”
I looked down at our hands.
“This is legally binding, you know. It’s an official white flag.”
He rolled his eyes and pulled his hand away to reach for the tool bag on the kitchen floor. I almost felt sorry to see him go.
He might not be pleasant, but he definitely had a way of filling the room. A stark difference from the utter loneliness I’d gotten used to, long before I came to Colbridge.
“Yeah, well, my white flag will come in the form of coffee. You can stop by in the morning and grab it. On the house,” he said, and then as an afterthought added, “if you want.”
Um, yes. I did want. Very much.
“You know, you shouldn’t go flaunting free coffees around. That’s a surefire way to make a girl fall in love with you,” I warned him with a teasing lilt to my voice.
He snorted. “Somehow, I don’t think that’ll be a problem here.”
And then he was gone, off to save someone else’s day, but the smile stayed on my face long after he was gone.