I still have a ton of things to do, like go grocery shopping, buy a new coffee maker to replace mine that broke in the move, and order a bed frame. But the weight of this deadline is hanging over my head, so even though it’s super early in the morning, I decide to get some writing done before I go run errands, that way I can start my day off on the right foot. Maybe getting a few chapters written will help crush the weight of this deadline that’s been heavy on my shoulders.
I sit on my squishy new mattress, laptop in front of me. I open a blank document and place my hands on the keyboard.You can do this, I think.Don’t stress about life. Just get to work.
The jarring sound of a power tool rips through the air the second my hands land on the keyboard. My eyes widen. Seriously?
I type: Chapter One.
The sound continues.
In a huff, I close my laptop, crawl off my on-the-floor mattress and step out into the chaos of the renovations. A large blue tarp is spread out on the kitchen floor. The windows are open, the back door has been propped open with a brick, and Max the handyman stands on the back porch doing some weird thing with a drill and a bucket.
“Good morning,” I say, hands on my hips as I stand just inside the house watching him. The bucket has a chalky substance, and I can see now that his power drill is attached to some kind of metal mixing wand that’s stirring the stuff in the bucket. It’s like a cake mixer but for construction.
“Good morning,” Max says over the whirring of his drill. He glances over and flashes me a bright welcoming smile.
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Huh?” he calls out over the noise.
“I was being sarcastic!” I yell back—only he shuts off the drill in the middle of my sentence so I end up yelling the last word.
His lips quirk into a smile. “Sarcasm this early in the morning?”
“I’m trying to work, and this…” I gesture toward the junk on the back porch. A bucket, boxes of tile and other things that belong on a construction job site. “It’s really loud.”
Will I ever get my dream house all to myself? This looks like it’ll take forever.
“Sorry,” he says, wiping his brow with the back of a gloved hand. “I’m almost finished mixing the grout, then it’ll be quieter while I tile the kitchen.”
“Great!” I turn around and go back to my bedroom.
And then the music starts.
I stand in the hallway watching him for at least a full minute and he doesn’t even notice. Max is dancing. He’sactuallydancing around my kitchen, his feet shuffling and his head bopping to the music while he scoops out grout from the bucket and scrapes it across the kitchen backsplash.
I walk over and wave my hand to get his attention. He grins, nodding his head at me.
“Are you seriously dancing right now?”
“You only get one life,” he says, grabbing my hand. Before I know what’s happening, he spins me around on the plastic-covered kitchen floor. “Why not make it fun?”
He lets me go after one spin and I put my hands on my hips. “What are you, two?”
“I’m almost thirty,” he says, swaying his head from left to right. Now that I’m watching him, he’s getting all groovy with the music, even more than before. “Let me guess... you’re in your late twenties but you have the personality of an eighty-year old school marm.”
“You think you’re funny but you’re not.”
He grins. “I don’t think I’m funny.”
I can sense his stupid punchline before he says it.
“I know I’m funny.”
Yep. There it is. I roll my eyes so epically that they’re in danger of getting stuck in the back of my head. I reach over and turn off the Bluetooth speaker.
“I have to work. You want to listen to music? Get headphones.”
“Aww, that’s no fun,” he says. “Headphones get sweaty.”
