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“Please,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Luckily she was behind him and couldn’t see him wince when she said that. All his hopes were fizzling like a wet firecracker. Why did he think he could make things right with her just by bringing her out to his house, getting her alone with him, hashing things out? Flash had already made her decision about him. If he were a gladiator and she the empress of Rome, she would have looked down on his beaten, bloodied and bruised body in the ring and given him a thumbs-down.
He led her through the living room to the rustic sitting room—oak bookcases, pine coffee table and his stone-and-iron fireplace, which was about to fall apart.
Ian pointed to a weak spot in the old irons screen.
“You can see that some of the joints are broken, and there’s some rust.” He grabbed a bar of the decorative iron grate and shook it so she could see how the central part of the design had come loose from the joints. “What do you think?”
Flash didn’t say a
nything at first. She knelt onto the wood floor and ran her hands over the iron scrollwork.
“Ian...” she breathed. “It’s beautiful.”
He grinned again, like an idiot again, but this time he didn’t chide himself for it.
“It’s ivy,” he said. “The whole thing is iron ivy. I thought you’d like it. It looks like the sort of thing you’d make.”
“I would.” Her eyes were alight with happiness and wonder as she ran her fingers all over the twisting and looping iron bars. “A real craftsman made this. Or craftswoman. This is art. Real folk art.”
“It sold me on the house.”
“It would have sold me, too,” she said. “Wow.”
“Oh, my God, did I hear Flash Redding say ‘wow’ to something? I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“I am not a hipster,” she said. “I’m an artist with high standards. There’s a difference. Hipsters pretend they aren’t impressed by stuff. I’m genuinely not impressed by stuff. But this...this is wow. You done good. You have better eyes than I gave you credit for.”
“I have a good eye for beauty,” he said. She looked up at him and said nothing. But he could have sworn he saw a ghost of a smile dance across her lips before it disappeared into the hard line of her mouth again.
“I’ll fix it,” she said. “An artist needs to fix this, not just any welder. This is delicate work.”
“Flash is on the job,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Flash again? Not Veronica?” she asked.
“You want me to call you Veronica?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll call you Flash. Why, I don’t know. I assume you flashed someone at some point in the past and the name stuck?”
She shook her head in obvious disgust at his ignorance.
“Poor Ian. You’ve never seen Flashdance, have you?”
“Flashdance? The dance movie?”
“Yes, Flashdance is a dance movie.”
“No, I haven’t seen it. Why?”
“The main character in it is a woman who works as a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. When I started welding in high school, one of my friends started calling me Flashdance. But I don’t dance so it got shortened to Flash. I’ve been Flash ever since.”
“Should I rent the movie?” They were having a good conversation. This was progress. This was an improvement. This was giving him hope.
“If you like to watch sexy girls dancing, maybe. And welding.”
