Chapter 11 Ours to Name #2
The outdoor bar remained exposed framing and raw lumber.
Tools covered two sawhorses. Coolers of water and sports drinks sat beneath the temporary service counter.
The pool and path lights we'd installed already worked, but everything between them still needed sanding, staining, bracing, shelving, plumbing, and several weeks of Frank finding new tasks nobody had written down.
Kit and Poppy sanded the bar top. Vina hauled trim boards from the delivery stack. Luna coordinated measurements and kept the electrical runs protected. Lucy had organized the tool station so well that borrowing a drill required returning it to a labeled square.
Jessa arrived with a toolbelt hanging low on her hips and safety glasses perched on her head.
"I heard this project lacked adult supervision."
Luna handed her a box of corner braces. "You were misinformed."
"Then it lacks entertainment."
"That part's true," Poppy said. "J, you're with me."
Jessa saluted with the brace box and joined her. Ten minutes later she had Poppy laughing, Luna correcting her language around power tools, and the first corner reinforced well enough to satisfy Bristol's level.
The women looked unfairly good doing real work.
Sweat darkened shirts. Sun caught bare legs and shoulders.
Kit left a streak of stain across her cheek.
Poppy's tied-up shirt showed the crisp edge of a bikini tan line every time she reached overhead.
Vina carried lumber against one hip and kept finding reasons to brush past me on the return trip.
Luna's competence turned every clipped instruction into a reminder of the girl who'd once rebuilt engines beside me.
Lucy moved through the site with athletic certainty, catching problems before anyone else saw them.
And Bristol stayed close enough to correct my work and touch me in the same motion.
The work fought back. Poppy and Jessa wrestled a warped board into place while Luna checked the corner with a square.
Lucy caught the far end before it slipped.
Vina drove the first screw, handed the drill to Kit, and stole a kiss from me while Kit finished the brace.
Bristol marked the next cut against my forearm, using me as a writing surface because the lumber was occupied.
"Hold still, baby."
"I'm holding a two-by-four."
"Then you've already achieved stillness."
Her pencil dragged lightly over my skin. She wrote quarter inch beside the mark, capped the pencil with her teeth, and kissed the note she'd left on my arm.
Poppy made an outraged sound from the other side of the frame. "Some of us are trying to maintain a professional work site."
"You tied your shirt above your ribs," Luna said.
"Professionally."
Three men tied a pontoon at the guest slips and walked toward the lodge. They slowed beside the work zone. None of them spoke to us, but the lake carried their voices cleanly.
"That's Brewster."
"Smoke Show?"
"Yeah. Those are Nash's Girls."
One of them counted under his breath.
"Seven today."
"Thought he had six."
"Guess he added one. Guy collects sorority women like the rest of us collect boat problems."
They laughed. It wasn't cruel enough to justify a scene. That almost made it worse. Six women's choices had become a number beside my name, and Jessa had been folded into the count because she stood close enough to them.
"Seven women building his bar for him," another man said. "Brewster figured out summer."
That erased the work in front of them too.
Luna's measurements. Lucy's system. Bristol catching my mistake.
Jessa and Poppy forcing a bad board square.
The women had chosen the project because Brewster Bay mattered to them, and three strangers had turned that choice into another thing I'd somehow acquired.
I set down the drill.
Kit caught my wrist.
"Don't."
"I'm going to tell them they're wrong."
"I know." Her thumb moved once over my pulse. "Stand with us, baby. Not in front of us. There's a difference."
The answer I wanted to give the men died where it belonged.
Kit didn't let go right away. She drew me one step back into the work area, shoulder against mine. I stayed there, bothered and quiet, while the women decided what happened next.
I looked at Jessa.
She'd heard them. Her grin arrived before she could stop it, bright and startled, then tucked itself behind a serious inspection of the corner brace in her hand.
Poppy saw it too. She slipped an arm through Jessa's and leaned against her shoulder.
Luna moved to Jessa's other side and checked the brace. "Good work."
"You're only saying that because I'm apparently sleeping with your boyfriend now."
"I'm saying it because the brace is level. Don't ruin the moment."
Jessa laughed.
Vina brought the next board over and dropped it onto the sawhorses. Lucy reclaimed the drill before I forgot her system. Bristol pressed the level into my hand, then slid her palm across the small of my back and stayed there.
Kit released my wrist and took my free hand.
Vina planted herself at Kit's shoulder, dirty work glove against her hip. Lucy stepped beside Bristol and reached across me for the next measurement instead of making room for the men to define the picture from a distance. Poppy kept Jessa tucked into her side. Luna stayed on Jessa's other flank.
We stood together for one quiet beat in sweat, sawdust, and the noise of a half-built future. Then the women went back to work on their terms.
The men continued toward the lodge, still talking about luck.
Poppy waited until their voices disappeared.
"Water break," she announced. "Far dock. All of us."
Jessa opened her mouth with a joke ready.
Poppy squeezed her arm. "You too, J."
The joke softened before it reached daylight.
"Yeah," Jessa said. "Okay."
***
Jessa sat between Poppy and Luna at the end of the quiet dock, turning a cold water bottle between both hands.
The shade had reached the far slip by then.
Poppy sat close enough that their bare knees touched.
Luna had one foot in the water and kept nudging Jessa's ankle whenever Jessa worried the bottle label too hard.
Kit and Bristol shared the bench across from them, shoulders pressed together, while Vina stretched out on the boards and Lucy leaned against a piling with her arms folded loosely over her middle.
Nobody arranged it that way. The women simply closed around Jessa and left me room at the edge of the circle.
"For the record," she said, "I looked excellent as the imaginary seventh girlfriend."
Vina lifted her bottle in salute. "Nobody questioned the casting."
"Strong work clothes. Excellent posture. I understand their confusion."
The laugh moved around the group and gave Jessa enough room to stop performing.
She peeled one corner of the bottle label, looked at Poppy's arm still linked through hers, and let out a slower breath.
"I know I'm not Nash's girlfriend," she said. "I'm not reopening anything, and I don't need the line explained again."
"Good," Luna said. "I hate repeating myself."
Jessa smiled at her, then looked at the women spread across the dock.
"That wasn't the part I liked. Being counted with you was. For a minute, those guys looked over here and saw me as part of something instead of the loud girl who wandered into it."
Poppy tightened her hold. "J, you are part of it."
"Socially," Jessa said.
"Completely."
Luna bumped Jessa's knee with hers. "You're Kappa. You make every shift louder, but you show up for the shift. That counts."
"You also make work lighter," Lucy said. "That's harder than making it loud."
Vina leaned back on her hands. "And your tool jokes are almost as good as mine."
"Almost?"
"Belonging doesn't protect you from standards."
Jessa looked at Bristol. "You have anything devastating to add?"
Bristol considered her for a second. "You don't have to earn every chair by being the funniest person beside it."
The line found the vulnerable place Jessa had been guarding. Her mouth parted, then closed. She looked down at the bottle and nodded once.
"That's inconvenient," she said. "Funny is my primary currency."
Poppy rested her temple against Jessa's. "Then spend it because you like making us laugh. Not because you think we're charging rent for the chair."
"Do I still get to make tool jokes?"
"We couldn't stop you with a court order."
Jessa's laugh came out rougher than usual, but it was real. Luna caught the loose edge of the bottle label before Jessa could peel it all the way off and smoothed it back down with her thumb.
I sat on the dock edge across from her.
"You're part of Brewster Bay," I said. "I want you here."
I nodded toward the unfinished bar behind us.
"You showed up with your own toolbelt. You knew where the braces were before I did, and Frank trusted you with his lumber after hearing three of your jokes.
Those men didn't create a place for you by counting wrong.
They only noticed the one you already had. "
Her eyes lifted to mine. No invitation hid inside the words, and she didn't look for one.
"Thanks, Brewster."
"Also, Big Brew doesn't trust anybody with his lumber," Vina said. "That's basically adoption."
"Please never say that sentence near him," Lucy said.
"I plan to say it at dinner."
The last strain left Jessa's shoulders.
Poppy rested her cheek against Jessa's shoulder. "See? Family meeting complete. Nobody cried."
"My eyes are sweating. It's humid."
"Obviously."
Bristol's phone buzzed against the bench.
She checked the screen, and every trace of warmth left her face. Kit shifted closer without asking what happened. Bristol angled the phone so the women beside her could read while keeping it in her own hand.
The message was from Jake.
*One of six isn't you, Bristol. You don't have to prove anything to these people.*
Her thumb hovered above the keyboard.
"Want company?" Kit asked.
"I have company."
Bristol leaned her shoulder into Kit's and typed.
*You never knew me well enough to tell me who I am. Don't start now.*