“Brenda. She's reliable.” He says it completely straight, and I laugh, and he ducks his head and almost smiles, pleased and trying not to look pleased, and I think, not for the first time and with a small new flicker of alarm, that Logan Walker is a genuinely lovely man and I should probably stop noticing it so much.
The plan,such as it is, was to practice. The standing-close, the easy touch, the muscle memory we all agreed we needed. But Logan, it turns out, has no idea how to start that on purpose, and neither, I'm realizing, do I. So we just, don't. We circle it. We talk about the house instead.
And it takes me a while to notice he never says a client's name. He saysthe kitchen's going hereandI'm running the beam this way so the morning light comes throughandI haven't decided on the stairs yet.Every sentence has an I in itwhere a customer's name should be. And somewhere around the third one it lands on me, quiet and strange.
“Logan. Whose house is this?”
He doesn't look up from the board he's measuring. The back of his neck answers before he does, going slowly pink. “Mine.”
“You're building your own house.”
“Building it slow. Weekends, mostly. Couple of years now.” He marks the board, sets the pencil back behind his ear. “No rush on it. It's not, ah. It's not for anything yet.”
Not for anything yet.I tuck that away with all the other things about Logan I don't have room to feel today.
“My brother helped me frame the back of it,” he says, nodding at the far wall, filling the quiet the way he does, with facts instead of feelings. “Before the season started. He's better at the heavy stuff. Stronger than me, which he never shuts up about.”
“I didn't know you had a brother.” Five years in this town and you'd think I'd have met every Walker by now, but Logan keeps to himself, and so, apparently, does whoever this is.
“Nolan. He's a ranger, posted out at the basin station most of the year, so he's not around much.” He fits the next board. “We're twins.”
“You're atwin.”
“Identical.” He says it to the board, fighting the smile, like he's enjoying knowing something I don't. “It throws people. He's got the beard and about four years of extra sun on me, but it's the same face. He'll walk into the diner one day and you'll think I lost my mind and grew facial hair on the drive over.” The dimple comes out, brief, the one I'm learning means he's pleased with himself. “He's the loud one. Says all the stuff I don't. You'd like him. Everybody likes Nolan.”
There is something so guileless about a man telling you, with total sincerity, that you'd probably like his more confidentbrother better, that I have to look back down at the board so I don't do something embarrassing about it.
He hands me things. That's how it starts, in the end, not a grand practice exercise, just Logan needing a board held steady and me holding it, the two of us crouched over the deck frame, his hands and my hands an inch apart on the same length of pine. He smells like maple and warm cedarwood and sawn lumber, and I am very aware of the inch.
“Other end,” he says, low. “Can you, just, hold it level for me.”
I hold it level. He drives the screw, and his forearm brushes mine, warm, and his scent comes with it, maple and cedar and clean sweat, close enough that some old quiet part of me leans toward it before I catch myself and lean back.
He goes still for a second, just a second, like a man who walked into a doorframe in the dark. Then he keeps going like it didn't happen, and there's color climbing up out of his collar.
“Sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“I don't know.” He's looking very hard at the screw. “Reflex.”
And I should tease him. Normally I would tease him. But there's something about how careful he's being, how he's holding all his bigness so gently around me, that closes my throat a little, and I don't say anything at all.
“Can I do one?” I hear myself ask.
He looks at me like I've offered to perform surgery. “A screw?”
“I'm very capable. I run a classroom of twelve. I have driven a great many things into a great many surfaces, mostly thumbtacks, but the principle transfers.”
His mouth does the thing where it wants to smile and he won't let it all the way. “Okay.” He sets a board, hands me the drill, and it is heavier than I expect and I nearly put it through the deck. “Whoa. Two hands. Here.”
And then he's behind me, not touching, gentle as a man defusing something, one big hand hovering near mine on the grip without landing, talking me through it, low and even,line it up, let the tool do the work, don't force it, which is apparently the entire Logan Walker philosophy of everything.
The screw goes in crooked. Catastrophically crooked. It is the worst screw in the history of carpentry.
“There,” I say, triumphant.
He looks at it. He looks at me, at how pleased I am, and I watch him make a decision, watch him choose, very deliberately, not to fix it.
