"I want some coffee."
"On it!" He was on his feet in an instant, entirely too pleased with himself. On the way out the door, his palm landed across my ass with a crack that echoed off the bare walls.
I looked at the empty doorway for a moment, shaking my head, then grabbed my toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom.
From somewhere downstairs came the cheerful clatter of him rooting around in the kitchen, followed by the banging of a man who could not locate a coffee filter under any circumstances.
I could only hope like hell he found one because dealing with a man who acted as if the sun had personally asked him to fill in for it today would require more than one cup.
Twenty minutes later, hair damp and human again, I followed the sound of him down the stairs and found my first hit of caffeine waiting at the edge of the counter. The kitchen was coming together in that same slow, stubborn way the whole house was: new countertop on one side, subfloor still exposed on the other, a stack of hardwood planks lined up against the wall waiting for today.
Brody was already crouched over the layout, tape measure in one hand, pencil tucked behind his ear, reading glasses that he would die before acknowledging he needed perched on his nose. I'd found them in a kitchen drawer the second week and hadn't said a single word, which was, I felt, one of my more generous contributions to this relationship.
If that's even what this was.
Hell if I know.
I picked up my mug and drank half of it standing at the counter before I picked up a plank.
"You done your starting line yet?"
He looked up. Looked back down. "Almost."
"It's crooked."
"It is not."
I knelt beside him and sighted down the chalk line. Said nothing. Let the geometry speak for itself.
He paused for a beat before admitting, "It's a little crooked."
"Mm." I snapped the line then stood.
He watched me do it with the expression of a man recalibrating several assumptions at once. I was used to that look by now—the moment people stopped seeing the Docs and the attitude and started seeing what was underneath them. My daddy may not have given me much, but he gave me a childhood spent learning every job on the circuit that needed doing. And I'd turned that into sixteen years of doing a little of this and a little of that.
I picked up the first plank and fitted it to the line.
Brody reached for his mallet.
We fell into it—the rhythm of the work settling over us the way it always did, easier than it had any right to be. The knock of the mallet. The satisfying click of tongue and groove. The smell of fresh-cut wood and sawdust. I called out measurements and he cut them and neither of us said much beyond that.
About forty minutes in, I became aware that it had been a while since I'd heard the mallet.
I looked up.
Brody was sitting back on his heels, mallet hanging loose from one hand, watching me work with an expression I recognized from the barn—soft and unguarded and not bothering to hide itself.
"You're not working," I said.
"I'm supervising."
"You're staring."
"That too."
I set the next plank in place and held out my hand for the mallet without looking at him. After a beat, he put it in my palm.
"Cat's not down here," he said.
