Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
BECKETT
BECKETT
Waking up in Desi's bed is becoming a habit I can't afford to examine too closely.
A week. Seven mornings of her alarm going off at five thirty because she's a psychopath who starts her day before the sun does.
Seven mornings of reaching for her and finding warm skin, sleep-soft braids fanned across the pillow, her body curling back into mine for the ten minutes she allows before she's up, pulling on jeans, heading to the garden beds before coffee even finishes brewing.
Seven nights. Her kitchen table covered in her landscape plans and my laptop, both of us working in comfortable silence. Her feet in my lap on the couch while she reads soil composition reports. My hand on her ankle absentmindedly, thumb tracing circles while I answer emails from my security team.
Seven mornings, seven nights, and every hour between.
Tuesday she hands me a shovel and says "Dig."
A trench for the irrigation line connecting her new beds to the main water supply.
Eighteen inches deep, forty feet long, following the grade she's marked with stakes and twine.
She explains the slope calculation while I stand there holding a shovel I've never used for anything beyond scraping ice off a sidewalk.
"One percent grade. That means the trench drops one inch for every eight feet. Too shallow and the water pools. Too steep and it erodes the base."
"What if I just dig a straight line?"
She looks at me the way she looks at her stove when it clicks four times instead of three.
"Then you flood my lavender bed and I bury you in it."
So I dig. Badly. My first section is too deep on the left and too shallow on the right, which she points out by standing at the far end with her level and shaking her head slowly without speaking.
My blisters form by the third hour. She notices but doesn't comment until lunch, when she takes my hands, turns them palm up, examines the raw pink skin at the base of each finger.
"Gloves."
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding."
"Slightly."
She disappears into the cabin. Comes back with a first aid kit and a pair of leather work gloves that are too small for my hands but better than nothing.
Sits on the edge of the trench and cleans the blisters with antiseptic while I try not to flinch, because flinching in front of Desireen Laurent feels like conceding a point in an argument I didn't know we were having.
"You could hire someone for this."
"You could've hired someone for your porch railing."
"My porch railing is my property."
"And right now I'm standing in your trench. So this is where I am."
Her fingers pause on my palm. She looks up at me, kneeling in the dirt, hands in hers. Something crosses her face. Soft, unguarded, gone before I can name it. Then she puts the bandages on, hands me the gloves, and walks back to her end of the trench to check the grade again.
The trench takes two days. My back is destroyed.
My hands look like they belong to someone who's actually worked a day in his life.
Desi runs the irrigation line herself, connecting the fittings with the quiet efficiency of a woman who's done this a hundred times.
But she lets me backfill. Lets me pack the soil.
Lets me stand at the end when the water test runs clean through every emitter and hear her say "Not bad, Rhodes. "
Not bad. From Desi, that's a standing ovation.
Wednesday we drive into Crimson Hollow for groceries.
Her hand on my thigh while I take the switchbacks because her pickup needs new brake pads she hasn't had time to install.
The grocery store is small, one of those places where the cashier knows everyone's name.
The woman at the register calls Desi "sweetheart" and looks at me with open curiosity.
"New neighbour," Desi says.
"Mmhm." The cashier doesn't buy it for a second.
In the produce section, the argument happens. Butternut squash. She picks one up, examines it, puts it in the cart.
"That's not a soup vegetable."
Her head turns slowly. "Excuse me?"
"Butternut squash. It's a roasting vegetable. You roast it in halves with brown sugar and butter."
"Beckett. I'm Haitian. My mother put squash in soup before you knew what a vegetable was. Soup joumou. National dish. You're telling me how to use squash?"
"I'm saying structurally, from a density standpoint, it holds up better roasted."
"Structurally." She puts a hand on her hip. "You're applying engineering principles to my soup."
"I'm applying heat transfer logic to a gourd."
"Get out of the produce section."
"Make me."
Her lips press together. Fighting a smile. Losing. The laugh breaks through and she shoves my chest with one hand, which moves me approximately zero inches because I've got six inches and eighty pounds on her.
"You're impossible."
"You love it."
The word love. Said casually, in a grocery store, between the squash display and the lettuce bin. Her eyes flicker. Something warm. Something careful.
"I tolerate it. There's a huge gap."
But she lets me push the cart for the rest of the trip. And when we get home, she makes soup joumou with the squash just to prove her point. It's the best soup I've ever tasted in my life and I tell her so three times, which she receives with a single raised eyebrow and a "Obviously."
Thursday morning she wakes me up by putting her cold feet on my calves. Dawn light coming through the curtains. Her body curled against my back, small and warm except for those ice-block feet.
"Your feet are freezing."
"Your body is warm. Stop complaining."
"This is assault."
"This is efficient heat transfer. You should appreciate that, Mr. Engineering Principles."
Rolling over to face her, I pull her against my chest. Her leg hooks over my hip. Face to face on the pillow, noses almost touching. Her braids are messy from sleep, her eyes half-lidded, a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase.
"You're beautiful." I say it because it's true and because at six in the morning she can't deflect it the way she does in daylight.
"You need glasses."
"I have twenty-twenty vision."
"Then you need better standards."
My hand cups her face. Thumb across her cheekbone. "My standards are fine. My standards are lying in this bed telling me my feet are cold and my soup opinions are wrong."
Her mouth opens. Closes. She blinks twice.
Then she kisses me, morning breath and all, long and slow.
Her hand slides into my hair. My palm travels down her spine to her ass, pulling her flush against me.
The kiss deepens. She can feel me getting hard against her thigh and she rocks into it, deliberate, humming against my mouth.
"We don't have time," she murmurs. "I have a client call at seven thirty."
"It's six oh four."
"That's not enough time for what you're thinking."
"You don't know what I'm thinking."
"You're pressing your dick against my leg, Beck. I have a general idea."
Fair point. But she doesn't move away. Her hips keep rocking. Slow. The friction building between us until the client call becomes a problem neither of us wants to solve.
She pulls back. Groans. "Seven thirty. On the porch. I can't do it in bed or I'll look flushed on camera."
"I'll make coffee."
"You'll make terrible coffee."
"And you'll drink it anyway."
"Obviously." She kisses me once more. Quick, firm. Rolls out of bed. "Fix the ratio. Less grounds, more water."
The coffee is bad. She drinks it without complaint, takes her client call on the porch, lands the meeting. I watch through the window while pretending to read industry reports, and the pride in my chest when she closes the deal is bigger than anything I've felt about my own company in years.
That's the week. Trenches and squash arguments and cold feet at six a.m. Her world folding around mine, mine folding around hers. Two separate lives braiding together so naturally I stop noticing where hers ends and mine begins.
Which is exactly how I fuck everything up.
The roof. Her roof leaks in at least four places.
She's patched two with tar sealant and determination, but the south slope has damaged shingles that need replacing before winter.
She mentioned it once, said she'd get to it when her Nelson client paid the final invoice.
Wasn't complaining. Just stating a fact.
Friday morning, while she's in Crimson Hollow meeting with a potential client Margot referred from her restaurant contacts, I call a roofing company from Nelson. Give them the address. Ask for an estimate to reshingle the south slope. Tell them to send the quote to my email.
I also order a tankless water heater. The one she has is twenty years old, undersized for the cabin, and the reason she runs out of hot water at eleven minutes.
A replacement costs eight hundred dollars including installation.
That's nothing to me. Less than what I spent on the espresso machine sitting in my half-built kitchen.
The unit would give her unlimited hot water.
She'd never have to time her showers again.
The delivery is scheduled for Thursday.
When she gets home at four, I'm on her porch. Her truck rolls up the gravel drive, the brake pads squealing. She gets out with her portfolio under one arm, face bright. The meeting went well.
"Margot's client wants a full property redesign. Terracing, native plantings, drainage. It's a big one, Beck." She's smiling so wide her dimple shows. My chest does its thing.
"That's amazing."
"Could be my biggest contract yet. If the proposal goes through." She drops the portfolio on the porch table, stretches, rolls her neck. "What've you been up to?"
My mouth opens. Closes. The roofing estimate probably arrived in my email an hour ago. The water heater is arriving in two days.
"Had the roofer come by for an estimate on your south slope."
The smile fades. Slowly, then all at once.
"You what?"
"The shingles are damaged. Before the rain season gets worse, it makes sense to—"
"You called a roofer for my house."