“Okay,” he says. “Well, I need to get to work.”
“What can I help with?” I ask.
“It’s cold. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m wearing warmer clothing than you are,” I say, chugging another sip of my hot chocolate. I set it down on the bumper of his truck. “Let’s work.”
Gavin has already cut the wooden frame pieces to size. We lay them out and hammer them into individual walls, just like Grandpa and I had done this summer. As we work, we don’t talk unless necessary. Like, “hand me that tape measure,” or “can you get another box of nails?”
I find myself slipping into the work. Focusing on the hammer hitting the nail, the pieces lining up at the corners. After a while, I take off my jacket because even though it’s cold outside, the work is warming me up.
Gavin works much faster than Grandpa did. Within an hour, we have all four walls built and we’re ready to raise them. It’s pretty dark outside but the headlights on his truck are keeping things lit.
“Is that going to kill your battery?” I ask after we raise one of the walls. I hold it into place while he screws it into the foundation.
“I hope not,” he says.
I give him a look. He peers up at me, socket wrench in hand. From the lighting of his headlights, he looks unusually sexy. He grins.
“It’ll be fine. That’s a new battery.”
“Good,” I say, taking a deep breath. I hold his gaze longer than I should. Moments tick by and we’re still here, me standing near the framed wall, and him sitting on the foundation, looking up at me.
“Next wall?” he says after a painfully long moment where all I want to do is talk to him like we used to.
“Sure,” I say, my voice coming out all wrong.
He gets up and helps me position the next wall into place. A little while later, we have four standing framed walls of the greenhouse. My phone goes off in my back pocket again, but I ignore it. It makes me think of TJ’s name on my phone, and how Gavin’s is now saved as Contractor.
And honestly, that’s exactly who he is tonight. He hasn’t said a word that wasn’t work related. He’s just been working hard, building this thing by memory as if he’d memorized the blueprints I gave him. Every step he does is exactly in order.
“Thank you for this,” I say because I’m dying to say something. Being here with him, close enough to smell his cologne, it makes me long for the old days, even though I shouldn’t.
“No thanks are needed. This is my job.”
Just like a contractor, I think.
“Clarissa!” Mrs. Bradley calls out from across the way. I look up and can barely see her from the dim lighting at the daycare’s entrance. “Do you still need a ride home?”
I look at Gavin. “Sorry. I don’t have a car,” I say. “I would stay the whole time if I could.
“I can give you a ride home,” he says.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I’d love to.”
My stomach flickers with something like anxiety. I cup my hands to my mouth and call back to Mrs. Bradley, “I have a ride! Thank you though!”
She waves at me. “See you tomorrow!”
And then she’s gone, and I realize we’re the only two people out here. The kids have long since been picked up by their parents, and the teachers from the school next door are at home, carrying on with their lives. It’s just us out here in the cold.
Gavin and I assemble the frame for the roof. The silence is killing me. I study his features to see if maybe it’s killing him, too, but he doesn’t ever look at me. He just focuses on the task at hand.
“Sorry I didn’t read your letter,” I say, just because I need something to say. I miss the old us. The jokes and the banter and the fun we had.
“It’s no big deal,” he says after a moment. He doesn’t meet my eyes. “We should probably wait until daylight to put the roof on. It’d be safer that way.”
