Nine.
Rhett
I sit in my truck at the curb, engine ticking as it cools, and watch the front window glow gold against the blue-dark. The sun’s not even up yet. Frost webs the windshield at the edges, and my breath fogs the cab.
She’s here. I told her six, but being early seems to be her thing, I realize, smirking to myself.
Instead, while she’s in there turning on another light, I’m sitting here replaying a half-inch of air.
I can’t.
Two words. She’d meant them. I’m not fool enough to think she didn’t. But I’ve spent enough years reading what people don’t say to hear the rest of that sentence.
I can’t is not I don’t want to.
A man could lose his whole head in the space between those.
I grab my thermos and get out of the truck. The porch boards creak under my boots, and I add re-set the third one to a list I’m keeping in my head. Before I can knock, the door opens.
Shea’s in leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, sleeves shoved up, curls piled and clipped. No makeup. A smudge of something already on her jaw, though we haven’t started. She’s holding two cups and looks up at me with an excited energy that has me grinning.
“I made coffee,” she says. “I didn’t know how you take it, but…here.” She thrusts a paper cup at me. “It’s probably terrible.”
I take it and our fingers brush. Intentional on my end. “Thanks.”
She takes a deep breath. “About last night…”
“Where do you want to start?” I ask, moving past her into the house.
She blinks, following me. “What? Um, I mean…”
I head straight for the kitchen where she’s placed a brand-new coffeemaker on the counter with paper cups, a small cooler beside it, and a camera bag.
Goddammit, she’s fucking adorable.
I turn toward her, sipping my coffee. It’s not bad, a bit less sugar would make it better, but I don’t tell her that.
“I say we start pulling up floors, any cabinets you don’t want, and the wallpaper upstairs—that’ll be the biggest pain in the ass,” I say, toeing the peeled floor beneath my feet.
“This linoleum’s gotta go so we can see what we’re working with and you can decide if it’s what you want to save. ”
She nods as I speak, glancing around us. “Okay, yeah. I do want to help, too, just so you know. If you show me what to do with the floors, I can keep it going when you have to leave.”
I hum, setting the cup down and crouching at the curling corner from Saturday. “We pull it careful and slow. If we pull it stupid, we’re sourcing hundred-year-old oak from a salvage yard in Bozeman for eight bucks a board foot.”
Tyler comes down the stairs a moment later with a huge yawn and the same camera in hand I’ve seen him carrying around the last few days.
I know fifteen, and fifteen doesn’t voluntarily wake up before dawn.
He doesn’t say good morning, but films the linoleum and me showing him where the seam is, how to score it, why to pull with the grain and not against.
“Slow,” I tell him. “Let the blade do it.”
He rolls his eyes, but slows down.
We get the first full sheet up in one piece and underneath is honey oak, hundred years old, dulled under decades of linoleum, but whole. Shea makes a sound I feel in my sternum and drops to her knees on the subfloor to run her hand over it.
“Look at it,” she breathes. “Tyler, are you getting this?”
He yawns. “Yeah.”
“Look at it, though…”
“Uh huh,” he deadpans.
She looks up at me instead, eyes bright, and for a second, I forget the resort job, the clock, and her words from last night. Go hard.
I bite down on a smile and reach for the next sheet of linoleum.
By 7:37 AM we’ve got the whole living room floor bared and swept, and the light’s fully up, and I’m running out of morning. Twenty minutes to load out, twenty up the mountain.
“I’ve gotta head up to the resort,” I say, wiping my hands. “I’ll be back by six tonight. We can keep going after, unless you want to get after the kitchen and half-bath on your own.”
“The resort?” she questions, brow furrowed. “You took a job at the resort…doing what, exactly?”
“Top floor renovation. There are three suites up there right now. We’re taking the two end units and expanding them out, absorbing the middle. Two presidentials, twenty-two hundred square feet apiece.”
Her brows climb. “You’re doing that?”
“Me and Levi. Sixteen weeks, start to finish.”
She sits back on her heels. “That’s a huge job.”
“It’s the biggest one we’ve ever landed,” I say, a hint of pride seeping into my voice. “Twenty years we’ve been building sheds and kitchens and back decks for people who knew us since we were sixteen. This is the first one where nobody in the room knew our mother.”
Something moves across her face at that. She looks down at the newly exposed oak. Tyler bangs the pry bar against the doorframe from the hall. “Are we doing the kitchen or not?”
“Yes! One minute, please,” she hollers back, then glances up at me. “So, you’re doing a full day up there and then coming back here?”
“That’s the deal.”
“That’s not a deal, Rhett, that’s—” She frowns. “When do you sleep?”
I haven’t since I met you.
“I’ll sleep in January,” I say, and shoulder my bag.
She follows me to the porch. The maple in the front yard has gone full fire-orange overnight, it feels like, and the whole street is quiet and cold and gold, and she stands there hugging her elbows with her breath clouding in front of her, and I have to physically turn toward my truck to keep from doing something about it.
“Hey,” she says.
I stop. Turn back.
She’s looking at me with something careful in her face. “See you later?”
I could cross the porch right now and finish the half-inch I didn’t take on the dance floor last night. But not like this. Not on my way out the door with one eye on a clock. When I take it, if I take it, I’m not going to be leaving twenty minutes later.
“I’ll see you at six,” I say instead.
Her smile is small and knowing and it follows me all the way up the mountain.
I’m signing in at the resort at 8:29 AM, one minute to spare, when Levi rolls up and hands me a gas station breakfast burrito.
“Thanks,” I say, taking the burrito as we head up for the day.
“How was your morning?” he asks, all too curious.
“Floors are up at the Hargrove place. Saved the oak.”
“Uh-huh.” He unwraps his own burrito, watching me over it. “That why you’re smiling for no reason on a Monday?”
Am I? “I’m not.”
“Brother.” He claps me on the shoulder as we enter the elevator. “You’re grinning like a man who took your wisest brother’s advice.”
I scoff, shaking my head. I don’t tell him he’s right.
But I don’t tell him he’s wrong, either.