Chapter 39
BLAKE
Iscoop another handful of decomposed leaves out of the gutter and drop it into the bucket hanging off the ladder. The smell hits me—wet rot and standing water. Winter decay that sat around too long.
Matches my fucking mood.
Below me, Reid steps back studying the bush he’s hacking at. I’ll be shocked if the fucking thing survives the day.
Normal morning. Normal work. Normal Reid.
Except it's not. And we both know it.
I slept like shit. Maybe three hours, and most of that was the shallow kind where your body's down but your brain's still running laps.
Kept replaying it—her hand letting go, the way my fingers closed on nothing, the rest of the market with my hands full of bags because full hands don't reach for people who already let go.
Reid slept on the couch. Not because anyone asked him to. He just... ended up there. Said he fell asleep watching something. Maybe true. Probably not.
Laine's still inside. She was up when I came through the kitchen—sitting at the table, both hands wrapped around her coffee, staring at something I couldn't see. She said good morning. I said good morning. We were so goddamn polite I wanted to put my fist through the drywall.
I scrape the trowel along the aluminum gutter. Another handful of rot. Another wet slap in the bucket. Shoulders, arms, back. The rhythm's good. Mindless. Keeps my hands busy.
The back door opens.
Laine comes out carrying water bottles and wearing an old flannel of mine that hits her mid-thigh. Hair up in that clip that's already losing. Gardening gloves on—floral print, brand new.
She bought gloves. For yard work. At a house that isn't hers.
Don't read into it. Don't make it something. She bought gloves. That's all.
Except my brain won't leave it alone. Because yesterday she dropped my hand like it was on fire, and today she's wearing my flannel and pulling on gardening gloves like she belongs here.
Both things are true. That's the part I can't make fit.
"Where do you want me?" she asks.
She's talking to both of us. But she's looking at me.
Checking. Making sure I'm still here. Making sure last night didn't break something she can't fix.
"Flower beds along the fence," I say. "Dead stuff pulled, soil turned. Hand rake's in the shed."
"On it."
She grabs the rake, heads for the fence line, drops to her knees at the first bed, and starts pulling dead growth. No arguments. No worries about getting dirty.
I know women can be like that. I just haven't known many of them. So Laine getting her hands dirty is really fucking attractive.
I watch her for three seconds too long.
Stop it. She's pulling weeds, not writing you a fucking love letter.
But my chest does this thing anyway—this tight ache that's been sitting behind my ribs since the market. Since she let go. Since she held on to Reid and let go of me, and I stood there and took it because that's what I do. I absorb the hit, keep the line moving, make it easier for everyone else.
Reid was right about that. In the kitchen last night. He was right and I hated him for being right.
‘Blake's going to forgive you in about ten seconds because that's what he does, and then he's going to go sand something in the workshop and never bring it up again. And you'll feel better. And he won't.’
Walked right through every wall I had. Made me stand there and feel it when all I wanted to do was pack it away and move on.
I don't know if I'm grateful or pissed.
Both. Probably both.
Reid comes back with the ladder and the hedge clippers, balancing them like a circus act. "Boxwoods are out of control," he announces. "I'm going in."
"Do you actually know how to—"
"You cut the parts that stick out. How hard can it be?"
I give it ten minutes before it looks like something chewed on it.
I go back to the gutters. Wet leaves, winter rot, the smell of decomposition and standing water. I scoop it out by handfuls, missing the bucket more than once.
So sue me, I’m fucking distracted.
Shoulders, arms, back. The rhythm's good. Mindless. Keeps my hands busy. This is the shit about owning a house I could do without. But sometimes the busy work helps me deal with my shit.
Not today though.
"For about thirty seconds today, I was the thing she was ashamed of."
I said that. Out loud. To Reid. In the workshop, with sawdust on my hands and nowhere left to hide, I said the quiet thing. The thing I've been carrying since the flower stall.
And he didn't flinch. Didn't tell me I was wrong. Didn't tell me I was right. Just sat there on my workbench and said we're a fucking tricycle.
I want to believe that, as stupid as the analogy is.
I'm not sure I do.
Another handful of rot. Another wet slap in the bucket. Below me, Reid's going at the boxwoods with the confidence of a man who has never trimmed anything in his life.
"Reid."
"What."
"You've made that one look like a mushroom."
"It's avant-garde."
"It's ugly as fuck."
Laine's laugh carries across the yard—the real one, bright and loose—and something cracks in my chest. Not the bad kind. Worse. The kind that reminds me what I have and how easily I could lose it.
She's right there. She's laughing. She's wearing your shirt. Stop catastrophizing.
I climb down the ladder.
She's cleared the first bed and started on the second, sitting back on her heels to survey the damage. Dirt on her cheek. Dirt ground into the knees of her jeans. She looks up when my shadow falls across her.
"These beds haven't been touched in years," she says.
"I know."
"There's good soil underneath, though. Once you get past the dead stuff." She pulls a clump of dried root, shakes the dirt loose. "I want to plant things here. Real things. Not just clearing out the old stuff—I want to put something new in."
"Like what?"
"I don't know yet. Something that comes back every year." She glances up at me. "Would that be okay?"
She's asking my permission. To plant perennials. At a house she sleeps at six nights a week.
"You don't need to ask me that."
"It's your house, Blake."
Three words. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. And they land exactly where she doesn't mean them to—right on the bruise.
Your house. Not hers. She's still a guest. Still visiting. Still keeping that apartment like a parachute she might need to pull.
I crouch beside her. Close enough to touch. Don't.
"Plant whatever you want," I say.
Something crosses her face—not quite a smile, more like the start of a thought she can't finish yet—and then Reid wanders over, clippers dangling.
"What are we planting? I vote sunflowers. Giant ones. The kind that judge you."
"We're not planting judgmental sunflowers."
"Why not? They'd match Blake's personality."
"Get back to the boxwoods."
"The boxwoods are done."
I look past him. They look like something went through a blender.
"The boxwoods look like they were attacked with a machete."
"They look artistic. Laine, tell him they look artistic."
She glances over, presses her lips together. "They look like someone trimmed them during an earthquake."
A gasp and a dramatic slap to his chest. "How dare you. Nobody appreciates me."
He flops onto the grass beside the flower bed, grabs a water bottle. Drinks half of it. Squints up at the sky like a man who's got nowhere else to be.
We're quiet for a minute. The three of us. Dirt and sweat and the smell of cut grass and the careful distance we're all pretending isn't there.
Laine's hands are still in the soil, fingers working loose a stubborn root.
Reid's peeling the label off his water bottle.
I'm crouched between them with my forearms on my knees, trying not to bring up my shit.
Shit doesn't always have to be talked about, right? Sometimes letting shit go is smarter.
"So," Reid says. "Yesterday."
God dammit.
Laine's hands go still.
"We probably need to talk about it," he says. "Not the kitchen stuff. We did that. But the... rest of it."
"The market," I say.
"The market." He nods. "The being-out-in-public-all-three-of-us thing."
Laine pulls the root free. Sets it aside carefully, like it matters. "What about it?"
"I think—" Reid sits up, crosses his legs. "I think we need more practice."
"Practice," she repeats.
"Yeah. Like, yesterday was basically our first real outing. All three of us, holding hands, being... us. In front of people. And it went sideways. But maybe that's because we haven't done it enough."
"It went sideways because I panicked," Laine says quietly.
"It went sideways because it was new," Reid corrects. "And new things are scary. Especially when—" He gestures vaguely at the three of us. "—when there's no playbook for what we are."
I pick up a stick. Snap it in half. Snap the halves into quarters. Give my hands something to do.
"People stare," I say. "At the market. Before Joyce. A woman at the soap stall."
"The soap lady." Reid nods. "Yeah, I saw her."
"That part I can handle," Laine says. "Strangers don't bother me. It's—"
"The people who matter." I finish it before she can. Not accusing. Just repeating what she told us yesterday.
She looks at me. Something raw and sorry in her eyes.
"Yeah."
The yard is quiet except for a bird somewhere in the maple tree. Some insistent little thing that won't shut up.
"Here's what I think," Reid says, leaning back on his hands. "I think it's like... okay, this is going to sound terrible, but you know when you meet someone with a giant hairy mole?"
Laine blinks. "What?"
"Hear me out. Giant hairy mole. Right on their face. First time you see it, that's all you see. It's right there. You're trying not to look at it, which means you're definitely looking at it, which means you feel like an asshole."
"Where are you going with this?" I ask.
"But then you see that person again. And again. And by the third or fourth time, you stop seeing the mole. You just see the person. Because your brain adjusted. It filed the mole under 'normal' and moved on."