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I grimaced.
“Yes, because making sure you have everything would’ve been so freakin’ easy,” I drawled.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “And everything was in some weird sort of code that didn’t match up with the master list that I had in my hand. It was awful. And I’d just sort of loaded the boxes wherever they fit, as you can tell by the picture. When I got to checking shit off the list, everything was so jumbled up that I couldn’t make sense of any of it.”
I ran my hands over the stainless-steel countertops.
“Well,” I said. “Regardless of what trouble you went through, this place is really remarkable. You’ve done an amazing job.”
He looked at the kitchen with pride.
“It was rough at first, but honestly it really was easy,” he said. “My dad and I did it. We built the cabinets. Once we had that done, IKEA has this railing system that you just hang the cabinets onto the wall with. Everything was really user-friendly, to be honest.”
I grinned. “Did y’all do the countertops, too?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Those were done by one of my dad’s buddies. I got them for a sweet deal.”
I walked over to my cake box and started pulling out all my ingredients.
“You come with your own cake pan?” he teased as he watched.
I pulled out a large circular one and nodded.
“More now than usual,” I admitted. “Normally I would only have the ones in here I’d be using for the day, but with me moving, I’d already packed everything in here that I wanted to make sure that I kept together.”
There was a long silence. So long that I almost had all of my ingredients, utensils, and other needed essentials onto his amazing countertop before I looked up and saw him watching me.
“Royal said that you couldn’t find a job here,” he said.
I grimaced.
“I had three or four interviews lined up in the upcoming months after I moved here.” I paused. “But then the fight at the baseball fields happened.”
He grimaced.
“They refused to hire you because of an altercation with the fuckwit date you were with?” he asked incredulously.
I nodded.
“They did,” I confirmed. “Apparently the image of me punching that guy in the nuts went viral.” I flushed. “My face and my hand going right toward his nuts is everywhere.” I paused. “The one thing it did do was amp up the traffic to my cake page.”
“I’ve seen the memes,” he said, sounding like he was fighting laughter. “Some of them are pretty damn good.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I try to avoid Facebook at all costs,” I said as I pulled the largest mixing bowl I owned into the middle of my ingredients and got to work. “The only reason I get on it at all is to answer private messages or deal with my cake page. And if I didn’t have to do that, I wouldn’t. Sadly, that was the thing that kept me here as long as I was able. Selling my cakes while I continued to look for jobs.”
“You didn’t find any jobs?” he pushed.
I shrugged. “I found some. I just don’t want to work as a waitress or in an office job. Too much sound or having to talk on the phone really messes with me.”
He frowned. “Messes with you how?”
I pointed toward my ear.
“I’m deaf,” I said, pulling my hair away from my ear to show him my transmitter. “I have cochlear implants. And sometimes, the large crowds mess with my hearing. Things get jumbled and my head starts to hurt. It’s exhausting to the point that sometimes I just straight up turn it off so I can’t hear at all. I’m fairly decent at reading lips, but I got my implants when I was a young kid so reading lips was never really necessary to me.”
“You don’t talk like you’re deaf,” he blurted.
I grinned.
“Tons of speech therapy,” I said. “Tons, and tons, and tons.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at me.
“You look normal.”
I burst out laughing.
“I am normal.”
He winced.
“I meant you don’t look like you have hearing issues. You don’t talk like you have any, either. It just came as a surprise, that’s all.” He paused. “Do you need any help?”
I pointed at his double ovens.
“You can turn those on to three-fifty,” I said as I started measuring out my dry ingredients. “And you don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”
He shook his head and walked over to his double ovens, turning both on.
I took the moment to check out his fine ass, and the muscles in his back that rippled beneath his t-shirt.
Jesus, it’d been six months, and the man hadn’t changed a bit.
Me, on the other hand? I’d gained fifteen pounds, going on twenty.
I’d refused to step on the scale before I’d left this morning, and based on what I’d had for dinner last night with Royal and Justice, I definitely wasn’t losing any.
