11. Olivia
CHAPTER 11
OLIVIA
“T hat’s the last of that,” Charlie said, crumpling up a strip of wallpaper in his hands. “And thank goodness.”
Olivia laughed. “If I never see another cherry in my life, it’ll be too soon. I’m sure your aunt was a lovely woman, but this wallpaper…”
“Yeah, I always hated it,” Charlie agreed. “Once, when I was a kid, I came in here with my crayons?—”
“Wait, you drew on it?”
“No, she caught me before I could, and she set up an art easel for me,” Charlie recalled with a smile. “But I wanted to. I had it in my head that I could make the place look better by adding more pictures to it, so it wasn’t just wall-to-wall cherries. Of course, that would have made it look a whole lot worse.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Olivia said. “Maybe it would have convinced her that it was time to get rid of the wallpaper. That would have been an improvement.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Charlie agreed.
“Your aunt had interesting taste, I’ll give her that,” Olivia said. “Cherries in this room, lemons in the master bedroom… what’s with all the fruit?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I think it made her happy. She did always love brightly colored things. You saw that painting she has downstairs in the living room.”
The painting was an abstract one, lots of bold-colored paint on an enormous canvas. Olivia didn’t like it, but taste in art was subjective. “What are you going to do with that thing?
“I don’t know,” Charlie said again. “It doesn’t feel right to throw it out, but how could we possibly hope to sell it?”
“We could do an estate sale,” Olivia suggested. “I can set the whole thing up online, if you’d like me to, and we can list everything in the house that you don’t want to keep or that we don’t want to include when we put it up for sale.”
“No one is going to want that painting, surely.”
“You’d be surprised. Your aunt wanted it, didn’t she? Someone else will. It’s just a question of whether or not we find that person, but I think there’s every chance in the world that we will. And in the meantime, you’ll earn some extra money, which I know is something you’re very concerned about.”
She was teasing him, and he responded well to it. It had been a risk. She never knew how he would take jokes about financial matters. “Yes, I can always use the money,” he agreed. “All right, you’re on. Let me know what I can do to help.”
“I’ll just need a list of everything you want to sell,” Olivia said. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”
“I have it half-done in my head already.”
“Anyway, it’s time to paint,” Olivia said. “Can you bring the stuff in?”
They’d already covered everything important in the room with plastic, so they got right to work. Olivia filled a tray with paint and handed Charlie a roller. “You can do this, since you’re taller,” she said. “I’ll take the brush and do the detail work around the trim.”
“Cool. I’ve never used one of these before.” Charlie rolled it experimentally along the wall.
“It helps if you get paint on it first,” Olivia teased him. She had come to enjoy the gaps in his knowledge and experience. He was a very smart person who had done a lot of living, but something as basic as painting a room was brand-new to him and had the potential to bring up a sense of childlike wonder that she found frankly charming.
“Yeah, yeah.” He rolled it through the paint tray. “Do you think this color was a good choice?”
“I do. Cadet blue is popular right now. Not so bold that it would be an eyesore, but bright enough that it isn’t boring.” Olivia dragged the ladder over to the wall and climbed up high enough to reach the place where the wall met the ceiling.
Charlie watched her. “Is that safe?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never been up on a ladder before.”
“Not one like that.”
“One like what!”
“One that wasn’t attached to anything! It looks like it might fall over.”
“Charlie, what kinds of ladders have you been on?”
“Well — there’s a ladder on my yacht to climb up out of the water.”
“It is egregious that you haven’t taken me out on your yacht,” Olivia informed him. “What kind of man has a yacht and doesn’t take his own wife out on it? If you keep this up, I’m filing for divorce.”
“Sure you will,” Charlie bantered back. “You can’t divorce me before this place is sold, and you know it. And I’ll take you on the yacht, but that’s not going to happen if you fall off that ladder and break your neck.”
“It’s fine,” Olivia assured him. “I’m not going to break my neck. Even if I fell off, I’m not that high off the ground. I’d have to land on my head for it to be a serious problem.”
“Could you not joke like that?” he asked.
She looked back at him, surprised by the anxiety in his tone. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Maybe I should be the one on the ladder,” Charlie said. “That might be a smarter way to do this. You can do the paint roller.”
“No, this way makes more sense,” she said. “You can reach higher with the roller than I can.” She hesitated. “Charlie, I’m not going to fall off the ladder.”
He forced a laugh. “I’m being stupid, right?”
“A little,” she said, very gently. “It’s okay. I’ve done this dozens of times. There isn’t anything to worry about.”
“Right,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so worried about it. You’re right. Nothing is going to happen. I know that.”
Olivia looked at him for a moment. He really did look stressed, and she didn’t know why. This wasn’t very dangerous. Was it possible that he had a fear of ladders?
She turned back to the wall. She’d brought the smallest bucket of paint up with her and balanced it on top of the ladder, and now she dipped the brush in and began to work.
How odd, that Charlie would worry about her like that. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was used to from him. But then, he had just been through a loss, and grief could show up in strange ways. Maybe he was feeling fearful of losing someone else so soon after the loss of his aunt.
Maybe… but wouldn’t that mean that Olivia was someone he cared enough to try to hold on to? And she wasn’t. Their connection was intended to be temporary. He was going to have to let her go eventually. Of course he wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her — Olivia understood that. But for him to develop this paranoia about it? It would make sense for him to feel that way about his real wife if he had one, but not about her.
She bit her lip, wondering what it all meant. Wondering whether it was going to be uncommonly hard for him to say goodbye when they inevitably went their separate ways.
Surely not. He’s a player. He lets women go all the time. It’s what he’s best at.
No, she was reading into things. It made perfect sense that he wouldn’t want to see her fall off the ladder and seriously injure herself. That didn’t mean he was caught up in his feelings about her. She wouldn’t have wanted to see something like that happen to him either.
Of course, she was a little caught up in her feelings.
She was projecting. She wanted to think that she wasn’t alone in feeling this way, so she was allowing herself to imagine that his words and his actions meant that he felt the same thing. That wasn’t what it meant at all. No one would want to see another person fall off a ladder, and if he had no experience with such things, it made perfect sense that he would be nervous.
Having reasoned it out, she found it easy to push the thought out of her mind. She returned her attention to painting.
“Hey!” Charlie yelped.
Olivia looked down — and burst out laughing. A drip of paint from her brush had landed in his blond hair, dyeing it cadet blue.
“Sorry,” she giggled. “It’ll wash out, don’t worry.”
“I should have worn a hat or something! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t I tell you that it was possible for paint to drip?” She raised her eyebrows, her giggles intensifying. “Are you serious, Charlie? Is that something you needed to be told?”
“Well, I don’t know! I didn’t think of it! I can’t believe you got paint in my hair!”
“Yeah, we’ll probably have to shave it all off. I hope your head isn’t shaped funny.”
“Don’t even joke about that! Do you know how long I spend doing my hair every morning?”
“Yes, I do, since I live with you,” she said. “You’re in the bathroom for two hours every morning. It doesn’t take me that kind of time to get ready, and I actually have long hair.”
“Well if you don’t think paint in your hair is that big a deal…” He looked from his paint tray to her and back again.
“What are you going to do?” Olivia would have dodged out of the way of his attack, but she was up on the ladder and it was impossible to move quickly. Before she could fully process what was happening, he had dipped his flat palm in the paint tray, reached up, and grabbed her ponytail.
Olivia shrieked as the cold paint slapped against the back of her neck. “What are you, six years old ?” She grabbed her paintbrush and flicked it at him, sending splatters of paint all over his face.
“Oh, now it’s on.” He picked up his paint roller and ran it up the entire back side of her body.
Olivia jumped down from the ladder, brush still in hand, and went on the offensive, painting stripe after stripe across the front of the shirt he was wearing. “You — are — ridiculous!”
He caught her in his arms and held her still, laughing. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Truce. Truce?”
The brush was sandwiched between them, pressing up against both of their bodies. Olivia could feel the cold of the paint against her chest, contrasting with the warmth of Charlie. She looked up at him, suddenly captivated by his blue eyes. Not the neutral, passive blue of the paint they had chosen, but a bright blue that seemed as if it might light up the room if they were to turn out the lights.
He was electrifying.
Her heart beat double-time in her chest, the exhilaration of the moment stopping it from sinking into the pit of her stomach. She knew that would come later. She would feel the full effect of this moment, of how dreadful it was to have been caught in his embrace like this. It would hit her like a hangover.
But right now, she was flying high.
“Truce,” she breathed.
She didn’t want him to let her go, and he didn’t. He held onto her for a moment longer, his eyes searching hers as if looking for the answer to a question.
Olivia wished he would just ask.
But he won’t. Because I’m not really seeing what I think I am. I’m still projecting. Still imagining things.
She couldn’t bear the thought of him pulling away from her, so she pulled away first, stepping out of his arms. She cleared her throat. “Truce,” she said again. “No more throwing paint around. We need to have enough for the walls, after all.”
“Right.” Charlie turned back to the walls. “We should probably get back to work.”
“We definitely should.”
They stood staring at one another for a moment longer. Olivia couldn’t help feeling that there was something unsaid between the two of them, something she was waiting for.
But nothing came. Charlie turned back to the paint tray and loaded up his roller, Olivia ascended the ladder to continue what she had been doing, and the two of them worked together in silence for the rest of the afternoon.