Chapter 10
“You want me to kill it,” Gino says, his giant salt-and-pepper eyebrows skewed in opposing directions.
“No, I don’t want to kill it,” I say, trying to maintain my smile, though it’s becoming more difficult than it was fifteen minutes ago when the building super arrived at my apartment.
As promised, Gino rang my buzzer promptly at nine a.m. Wednesday, then hobbled down the hall from the stairwell with a canvas bag almost as big as him.
Despite being well into his seventies, Gino’s full head of hair is the same shade as his eyebrows, an even mix of black and white and gray, all perfectly combed back the same way it probably has been since he was eighteen.
He dropped his bag inside my apartment with a thud and waited patiently while I explained exactly what had happened a couple of days before. I tried to be concise, and he seemed to follow. There was a wave of the hand, a nod, and a confident “Okay.”
But since then, we’ve barely made it past the front door. It’s been propped open, letting in the draft and forcing me into what’s swiftly becoming my favorite oversized wool sweater and a scarf, as I’ve described the mouse three times and we’re only just getting to follow-up questions.
“You already killed it?” Gino asks.
“No,” I sigh, tethering together the last of my patience. “I don’t want anything dead. I just want you to go through the apartment and see where he’s coming in.”
“And set traps?”
“I don’t know.” I gnaw on my bottom lip. “Do you have traps that are humane? Ones that catch them, but won’t kill them?”
“Yes.”
I smile, relieved. “Oh, that would be great. Are they the ones that have a trapdoor so when the mouse crawls in, they—”
“They’re glue traps.”
My expression flattens. “Glue traps.”
Gino nods. “Yes.”
“Those don’t kill them?”
“Nope. They just stick,” he replies, illustrating how with one of his hands playing the part of the glue trap and the other the struggling mouse. “Sometimes they start chewing through their little legs to break free but—”
“No, no. No,” I cut him off, squeezing my eyes shut to somehow erase that image from my mind. “Absolutely not. No glue traps.”
“Okay. No glue traps.” He holds up both his hands in surrender. I can tell he’s starting to get annoyed. “So what do you want me to do?”
I steal a quick glance around the apartment.
However unfamiliar everything still is, the idea of a mouse crawling over any of it tightens a knot in my stomach.
But not as much as hurting said mouse. Maybe it was my grandmother’s insistence that every living thing was important, or maybe it was because I saw Cinderella too many times as a child. Either way, traps are a no go.
I turn back to him. “Is there a mouse rescue we can call or something?”
Gino frowns and starts back toward his canvas bag.
“What?” I ask, following him.
He’s mumbling now in what I’m pretty sure is Italian, shaking his head as he gathers up his things and heads through the door.
“Wait!” I follow him out into the hall. “What about the mouse?”
“Dio aiutami!” he calls out, looking up at the ceiling as if the fluorescent light there might help.
He disappears down the hall toward the stairwell just as I hear another set of footsteps, an odd shuffle.
Then the door across from mine swings open and Ben is there on the threshold, disheveled in a way that’s entirely too vulnerable for a random Wednesday morning.
His hair sticks up as if he just lifted it from his pillow, and his beard stubble is scruffy and uneven.
Even more distracting, his sweatpants are dangerously low on his hips, creating a gap between the waistband and his T-shirt so a flash of skin peeks through.
“Hi. Hello,” I say, my eyes snapping to the hallway, the doorframe, the piece of fuzz in his hair. “Hi.”
He stares at me from under his brow, then turns as Gino disappears down the stairwell. “Was that Gino?”
“Yeah. We didn’t wake you up, did we?” I wince, my eyes darting over his shoulder, waiting for the mysterious girlfriend I saw through the peephole last night.
“Did he put down some traps?” Ben asks, completely ignoring my question.
My stomach does an odd stumble at the sound of his voice. It’s somehow even rougher than before, like sleep left it with a serrated edge.
“We decided to go in a different direction,” I reply carefully.
Ben’s mouth flattens.
I offer him an apologetic smile, hoping it offsets any irritation at not following his advice, then quickly add, “Hey, while I have you, do you know where the Brattle Book Shop is?”
His brows knit together. “The Brattle Book Shop?”
Good God, his voice is borderline pornographic right now.
I clear my throat. “You don’t need to go with me or anything like that. I just need to know how to get there and the map on my burner phone is really hard to see, so maybe you could write the route down like you did before?”
I think he might be about to ask me why it’s urgent to go to a bookstore on a random weekday morning, and I have no idea how to answer without sounding slightly insane.
But instead, after a few beats of silence, he just sighs. “Give me five minutes.”
Five minutes later, there’s a rap on the door.
I smooth down my hair, which had gone wild when I tried to change quickly by pulling off my sweater and scarf at the same time and finally gave up.
The left side of my bangs are still sitting at a weird angle against my forehead, so I hide them under a knit hat just before I open the door.
Ben’s standing in the hall, his broad frame filling my field of vision. The sweatpants are gone, replaced by a pair of dark olive-green chinos and work boots, and he has his canvas jacket pulled over a thick gray sweater.
“Ready?” he asks. His voice has smoothed out a bit but is still deep enough to lodge somewhere low in my belly.
“Yup.” I step into the hall, my attempt at nonchalance coming out a bit too high-pitched, then lock the door behind me.
We emerge onto the sidewalk and take a left, passing two drivers who are hanging out their windows, yelling obscenities to each other while pointing their cars into the same spot on the street.
“No work today?” I ask when we reach the corner.
He itches at the stubble along his jaw as he waits for a car to pass. “Not today, no. I just wrapped up a project, so I have the day off.”
“What was the project?”
“A building over in the Back Bay.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he seems happy enough to leave his involvement ambiguous.
“Did you build said building?” I press.
“No. Said building is two hundred years old. They’re renovating it and needed someone to come in to supervise the framing and staircases.”
My eyes narrow as my brain ties together each strand of information.
“Do you work in construction?”
“Not exactly,” he replies as if he doesn’t want to answer at all. “I’m a carpenter.”
I blink. “A carpenter?”
He nods once. “Mostly on historical restoration projects. I also teach a preservation carpentry workshop twice a week. Sometimes on the weekend.”
I don’t know why I feel completely blindsided by this information, but I am. It’s like living next to Clark Kent and finding out he’s Superman. Or, in this case, some other very hot lumberjack-type superhero.
He catches my shocked expression and frowns. “What?”
“You’re like… Paul Bunyan. Or Dean Proffitt,” I say. It comes out almost wistful.
“Who’s Dean Proffitt?”
“Kurt Russell’s character in Overboard.”
Ben’s brow furrows.
“You know the movie Overboard,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It was on TV in my hospital room when you were there.”
“Watching TV wasn’t my main concern at that moment,” he replies offhandedly.
“Right,” I say, working hard to play it cool even while praying that the chill in the morning air curbs my flushed cheeks.
“Well, it’s a classic. Kurt Russell plays a carpenter who is barely scraping by in this small town, and he wears this T-shirt without sleeves, so his arms are showing…
” I realize that my rambling is only making this conversation more awkward, so I clear my throat and move on.
“Then, Goldie Hawn arrives and hires him to redo the closet on the yacht.”
“As one does,” Ben deadpans.
“And he ends up making the most amazing closet with this little lever thing for her shoes and everything, except he makes it out of oak, which Goldie isn’t happy about. Then she delivers that iconic line: ‘The entire civilized world knows that all closets are made of cedar.’ ”
He frowns as he cocks his head to the side. “I’m pretty sure that’s not true.”
“No, obviously that’s not true. That’s the joke,” I say.
His expression tells me he doubts that very much.
I wave my hand in front of us in an effort to move on. “Anyway, she ends up falling off the boat and getting retrograde amnesia, except instead of just forgetting a year like me, she forgets everything, so she has to move in with Kurt Russell as a domestic servant.”
Ben’s eyebrows bob up. “This was on while you were in the hospital?”
“To be fair, it’s hard to avoid. Overboard is always on basic cable,” I say with a sigh. “Long story short, Goldie and Kurt end up falling in love, and from that moment on, Kurt Russell has been America’s favorite carpenter.”
Ben stares down at me, like he’s trying to figure me out. It’s a look that’s becoming familiar: eyes slightly narrowed, mouth quirked at an odd angle. Like he’s mildly suspicious, but also too intrigued to question it. “I’m not sure he’s America’s favorite carpenter.”
I scoff. “What other famous carpenters are there?”
His head tilts slightly like he’s not sure if I’m kidding. “Jesus is the usual go-to.”
Oh. Right.
I nod, considering. “Well, equally as impressive.”
The corner of his mouth quirks up again, close to that almost-smile I caught the other day, and my pulse trips.