19. LUCAS #2
A few minutes later, I’d sorted the screws from the box into piles and was trying to read the instructions, which of course were written in cartoon pictograms rather than any kind of comprehensible language.
Max dropped the last board onto the stack in front of him and chucked the box in the general direction of the doorway. “Ready to start?” he asked.
I nodded. “According to the directions, we start with piece A—that makes sense, I hope they all go on in order—and attach these cam screws to the corners.” I held up the right screws in one hand and an allen wrench in the other before heading over to him.
Working together, we got the screws wedged into the board. Then we paused, both eyeing it.
There was nothing to hold it up at this point, so Max gently let it down on the floor and looked up at me. “Next?”
Next, and then the step after that, and the one after that, proved to be easier said than done, as even between the two of us, we had trouble lining the screws up and getting them into the proper holes in the board that matched the picture.
The allen wrench kept slipping out of Max’s sweaty hand, and he was cursing up a storm each time.
“Why won’t this go?” he grumped after a few minutes of straining. “You try.”
We eventually got the rectangular frame connected, but the corners weren’t flush and the whole thing looked wrong. I stepped back and studied it. “What the fuck?”
Max leaned back in his chair and also took a look. “I don’t—wait.” He paused, then leaned down in his chair to squint at the misshapen corner. “Did you say it was piece B that went across?”
“Yeah, B,” I confirmed.
Max groaned. “I think this piece says ‘8’, not ‘B’.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said loudly, waving an exasperated hand in the air. “Who labels pieces ‘B’ and ‘8’ in the same kit? Especially when they both look like the picture? Everyone’s going to get those confused!”
With a sigh, Max picked up the allen wrench again and started undoing our work. “Stupid fucking thing,” he muttered to it as he handed me the first screw. He continued to call the bed names as he got the other three screws out and put them in my outstretched palm.
Finally, I handed them all back to him and squatted down to sort through the other pieces that had come out of the box. “D,” I read to myself, “C, 1, 2, F... Where the fuck is B?”
“Here.” Max plucked up a board I had already discarded. “Doesn’t this say ‘B’?”
I looked at it and cursed. “Fuck, it does.” I took the board from him and lined it up with board A, then accepted the first screw and the allen wrench from him and went to work with Max calling encouragement in the background.
This time, when we had all four pieces together, things lined up, and I heaved a sigh of relief as I crossed back to the directions.
We continued along, following the directions as best we could make sense of them, and eventually we had the bed base re-built.
We pushed it against one wall and decided to work on the drawers next.
Those had fewer pieces to confuse, but the fifth time Max dropped the allen wrench, he growled, “Fuck Ikea so hard.”
I couldn’t hold back a grin, less because I was laughing at him than because he’d said what I was thinking but didn’t want to spoil the peace by saying. He glared at me and picked the wrench up again, muttering darkly to himself about fucking Ikea and fucking paramedics and fucking life.
“Shit,” I said suddenly, looking down at the drawer that was taking shape under my hands.
“What?” he asked with alarm.
I winced. “I...think we put this side on inside-out.”
He considered that, eyeing the pieces we’d put together so far. “Does it matter? Like, can we just leave it?”
I squinted at the piece of wood. “I don’t think so. There’s supposed to be holes on this side of it to attach it to the cross-piece, but we put those holes on the inside, which means the holes on the outside are out of place and the whole thing is going to come out off-kilter.”
Max dropped the allen wrench and groaned. “Why the fuck didn’t you hand it to me the right way?”
“Hey,” I protested, “you’re the one who screwed it in the wrong way. You could’ve flipped it around.”
“I would have, if I’d have known that backwards was an option I needed to watch out for!” he snarked back, tearing a frustrated hand through his hair.
Even three seconds from either throwing down with me or smashing a freaking drawer, he was still gorgeous, I realized with a start.
There was a smudge of dust on the side of his nose.
I went to brush it away with my thumb, but he flinched back from me like he thought I was about to hit him.
“What the hell, Max?” I demanded as he moved away. His retreat hurt and worried me.
He had the good grace to look ashamed of his reaction, but he didn’t try to explain it. “Sorry,” he said instead. “Let’s just…” He gestured at the drawer. “Focus.”
Lacking any other explanation from Max, I drew the obvious conclusion: he didn’t want me touching him.
I felt my heart sink. Well, if I’d been wondering if he was done with me, I supposed that was my answer.
More room for Eli. “Sure,” I managed to say in a flat voice that didn’t—I thought—sound as devastated as I actually was. “Of course.”
We went back to work, both more subdued this time. The drawers came together without any other fuck-ups, and we slid them neatly under the bed and started on the headboard.
Max studied the directions, flipping to the end and then back to start again. “What?” he muttered at the cartoon man.
“What’s wrong?”
He flipped a page for the third time. “I can’t figure out where the headboard attaches to the bed. The instructions don’t show it.”
“They must show it.” I reached out and took the booklet from him, paging through it on my own. He was right. The pictograms showed it behind the bed but didn’t show how it got back there. “Ok, they don’t show it.”
“That’s what I just told you, Luc.”
“Well, now I believe you.”
He furrowed his brow and pursed his lips disapprovingly. “You didn’t believe me based on my own word? I can read instructions just as well as you can.”
Oh, shit. Now he was getting pissed. “I didn’t mean that, Max. I just meant…”
He tapped a toe impatiently and raised his eyebrows. “Hmm? You meant...?”
I groaned. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“No, I want to know why you didn’t believe me. Have I been untrustworthy to you? Have I shown myself to be particularly dim at some point that I didn’t notice?”
“You know you’re not ‘dim’ Max,” I protested. “And I trust you completely. I just...figured you’d overlooked something. It could happen to anyone.”
He didn’t look appeased, but he shrugged and reached out to take the directions from me to give them another look. “I think,” he began after thirty seconds of reading. “I think...it doesn’t attach to the bed.”
I blinked. “What?”
He turned the directions toward me and pointed to one image. “See, it shows how to attach it to the wall, but not to the bed. I think it just goes on the wall and we push the bed up to sit against it and that’s it.”
“But...then it’s a wall decoration, not a headboard,” I protested, moving to read the instructions over his shoulder. “Why wouldn’t it attach to the bed?”
“Dude, I don’t know. Do I look like an Ikea designer?” He threw up his hands, the booklet rustling with the movement. “Let’s just put it together, okay? Maybe where it attaches will become obvious as we go.”
It felt like we were doing nothing but fighting today, and that, in combination with Eli’s interest in Max, was making me feel like everything was spiralling down the drain faster than I’d been afraid it would.
“Fine,” I said tightly, giving a shrug that I attempted to make look careless. “What’s the first piece?”
“A-1,” he read off the page. I flipped through the pile of pieces until I found it. “And then that attaches to B-1 through B-4, perpendicular.”
We settled down to screw the headboard—such as it was—together, working in comfortable silence instead of snarking at each other, for a change.
Max held the cross-pieces while I screwed them to the main board with yet another allen wrench, and within minutes we had the headboard in one piece.
I picked up one of the floating nightstand pieces and studied it and then the directions.
“Looks like these just slot in from the side, no connector needed.”
“Hm.” He took the piece from me and slid it between two slats of the headboard. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So the headboard’s done,” I said unnecessarily, needing to keep the conversation going now that we were agreeing. “I guess next we attach it to the wall. You’ll need to decide where you want the bed so we know where to put it.”
Max turned slowly in a circle, examining the room. “I think against the wall, basically where we pushed the bed frame already.” Then he sighed. “I guess that means we need to move it back out into the room so we can get to the wall.”
Without comment, I walked over and gave the bed a push, forcing it back from the corner it sat in.
“I could’ve helped with that,” Max complained halfheartedly.
I shrugged. “I had it.” I reached for the bag of screws. “What do we use to attach it to the wall?”
He returned his eyes to the directions, flipping back and forth between the beginning and the end. “Oh, damn.”
That didn’t sound good. Had we screwed up yet again? “What?” I asked apprehensively.
“We need a Phillips head screwdriver for these screws.”
“What?” I yelped. We didn’t have a screwdriver, or any other tools, for that matter. “I thought everything we needed was in the box. Isn’t that how Ikea works?”
He spiked the directions booklet into the ground with a growl. “Fucking hell.”