17
After Christmas, everything started moving faster.
We were counting down the days to the holiday house tour, and it was the final push to make sure everything was perfect. Better than perfect.
And Noah, to his credit, showed up for me and Si. As soon as the paint was dry in a room, he started moving in furniture, hanging pictures, adding the little touches that transformed it from an old house with good bones into something, well, beautiful.
For my part, I was busy with my punch list—first making it, and then fixing everything.
One thing I’d learned from Si was that this was the stage that separated a decent contractor from a good one.
This was what made people come back and hire you again.
This was what made you someone they could count on.
I’d learned a lot of the basics from my dad, but he was also the same guy who’d told me, if he didn’t know how to fix something, to slap duct tape on it or paint over it.
On the other hand, this part of the job was also a pain in the ass.
Making the punch list meant touching everything.
Every. Fucking. Thing. I started with the fucking doorbell—because one house we’d worked on, we’d had the whole place ready to go, and the inspector had rung the doorbell and tripped the main breaker.
That had been fun. And then, from the doorbell, I worked my way in.
I checked every door. Not just once. You opened the door hard.
You opened it slow. You shoved it to see how it wobbled.
You tested the locks. And then you tested them again.
And then again. Every cabinet door. Every pull.
Every light. Every light switch. Every window.
Every faucet. It meant crawling around on the floor to see if the toe kicks had been installed properly.
It meant getting up on a ladder to discover that one of the subs Noah had hired to help us finish this place had left the remote for the ceiling fan taped to one of the blades.
It meant making my way through the house on my fucking knees to scrape up every paint drip, drop, and spatter.
It meant—in one case—finding out somebody hadn’t bothered to finish screwing in the toilet paper holder, and it fell off the wall as soon as I touched it.
It took time. A lot of time. And in a business where time meant money, this was the place people cut corners.
But not Si. That had been the whole point, after all. That this wasn’t a lipstick flip.
And, so, I didn’t cut corners either. Even though it’d be nice if once—just once—I could do things the easy way.
Noah couldn’t be there all the time, of course.
He still had his job. He still had his family in town.
A few nights, I managed to squeeze in a quick dinner with them.
Fortunately, Jonathan had a workaholic’s appreciation for crunch time, and that went a long way toward smoothing things over.
I thought, maybe, that it was a good thing for Noah, too.
Because it gave Noah a reason to be at the house, helping me, instead of with his family.
And it seemed like whenever Noah wasn’t at his actual job, he was working on the house.
Part of that was the decorating, arranging furniture, setting up the candles and books and whatever else he’d bought—in one room, he’d put what looked like a giant stainless-steel dildo, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what it really was.
And part of the work was, well, shopping.
Which was why my phone was constantly blowing up with messages from Noah.
Some of them were questions about the house, or decisions he wanted me to make.
Are we going with hunter green for the study?
Which of these candlesticks do you like?
I want a throw that’s got some texture, but is this too much texture?
Answers: Yes, it’s already painted, and we can’t change it, so don’t ask. Don’t care. And no fucking idea what you’re talking about.
But some of the messages were just…Noah.
There was the message he sent me one day that was just a photo.
He was in a store I didn’t recognize, which probably meant it was expensive.
And the photo had been taken low, as though Noah were holding the phone at his hip.
The woman standing in front of Noah was carrying a huge purse, and poking its head out of the purse was something that could only generously be called a dog.
It was bad enough that I forgot about this bitch of a light switch that wasn’t working, and I texted, What the fuck is that?
It’s a dog!!! And then Her name is Princess. Isn’t she cute?
She looks like a Chihuahua crossed with a lizard.
Don’t say that! She’s exactly the way God made her.
God was having a bad day.
Howie!!!!!
Another day, it was a picture of Noah wearing a pair of sunglasses that still had the tag on them. The glasses were huge, and the frames were almost an inch thick and studded with rhinestones.
Put them back, I responded.
I like them!
So does Elton John.
Howie!!!
And another day it was just a photo of a tray of food. And I didn’t even have to take a moment because I knew what it was, and I knew why he was sending it to me.
I texted back the throwing-up emoji.
Stop, Noah replied. It’s your favorite.
It wasn’t my favorite. It was turkey loaf.
And it was the single worst meal at MagnaCare—everyone agreed on it, the entire building except, of course, Noah.
Sometimes, I swear to God, I was sure the only reason I’d recovered from that gunshot wound was because if I didn’t, I was going to spend the rest of my life eating turkey loaf.
I texted back a string of the throwing-up emojis.
I’m bringing you some for lunch, Noah replied.
Bring that shit anywhere near me, and I’ll string you up by that pretty little thong.
And of course that was when he sent me a picture of himself, and the waistband of his scrubs was riding so low on his hips that a lacy red scrap was visible.
When we weren’t working on the house—well, the sex was good.
The sex was fantastic.
I shouldn’t have had time for sex. I definitely shouldn’t have had energy.
We were working long days, both of us. I worked until ten or eleven at night, trying to get everything done before the tour, and Noah was there with me.
If he had to work that day, he came over after his shift ended—even though I told him he needed to go home and rest.
But somehow, we found time and energy. One night, when it was just the two of us, Noah pressed me up against the wall in the kitchen and sucked me off, jerking himself through an O while he did it.
Another day, he came by with lunch, and the next thing I knew, he was straddling my lap, pushing my toolbelt out of the way so he could fish my dick out.
He jerked us both off and then cleaned up the come with those shitty fast food napkins.
And one morning, he’d barely been there fifteen minutes, the coffee still hot, when somehow I had him bent over the fucking chaise, railing him like I was trying to pin him to the fucking furniture.
It was like nothing had ever gone wrong.
Like nothing had ever been bad. How it had been at the beginning.
Not just the funny texts. Not just the fucking.
Not just the need to have my hands on him whenever he was around, like he was going to turn into smoke if I didn’t hold on to him.
The way he sat cross-legged, talking to me while I worked, asking me what I thought about this, or my opinion about that, like somehow I was the smartest son of a bitch he’d ever met.
Or the way he jumped and clapped his hands when I finally—finally—fixed that fucking light switch, and he screamed like I’d won the fucking Handyman of the Year award.
Or the way he said, at the end of the night, “I had a nice day with you, Howie.” Or “Today was fun.” Or “Thanks for a good day.”
Like somehow I was doing him a favor, instead of the other way around.
It was one of those conversations, with me working on the laundry room door, trying to figure out if I needed to rehang the damn thing or if I could muscle it into place, when I answered a half-heard question with “I don’t know.”
Swear to God, there was a fucking light in Noah’s eyes.
And that was when I realized I’d walked into a trap.
“You don’t know what you’re going to wear for the tour?”
“A sweater,” I said. But it sounded bullshitty even to me.
“Which sweater?”
“I don’t know, Noah. I’m working on this right now.”
“You have to have a cute outfit.”
I decided to try closing the door. With Noah on the other side.
He laughed. And then he knocked on the door. And then he said, “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
“I’m not trying to get rid of you. I’m trying to fix this door.”
“The door is fine.”
“It’s not fine. It sticks—”
The door opened—and yeah, it still stuck a little—and Noah stood there, hands on hips. “This is your debut.”
“Oh my God, please do not call it a fucking debut.”
“Fine, it’s your—your big, manly macho event.”
“It sounds like I’m going to get plowed by a guy in a harness.”
“Howie, this is important!”
I recognized that tone from when we’d been married. That tone meant I was about to lose a fight.
“Okay,” I said. “Tonight—”
“What if we have to buy you something? What if the stores are closed?” Something like actual panic filled his face. “Oh my God, Howie, what if we have to order you something? What if it doesn’t get here in time?”
“What a fucking tragedy,” I muttered. “Tomorrow—”
“No, tomorrow you’ve got the HVAC guy coming, and then we’ve got to do a deep clean, and then there’s only one more day until the tour. We’ve got to figure this out right now.”
I went for the Hail Mary. “Maybe you should figure out what you’re wearing.”
Noah sniffed. “I planned that last week. Come on, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Which was how I ended up in my bedroom, in my house, with my sort-of husband tearing a new asshole in my wardrobe.