Page 27 of Playing With Forever

Seeing as the hallway and half of the bedroom across from the closet were flooded, I’d say it had been alerting for a while. However, I hadn’t been home to hear it.

Now I was mopping up water with every towel I owned. This was after I turned off the water, flipped the breaker to the water heater, and called a plumber to come out on a Sunday, which was going to cost an arm and a leg and possibly a kidney.

I was either going to have to go out and buy more towels or start using sheets to soak up the hours of water that had been free-flowing.

A quick check of the time told me I was going to have to cancel my date with Evan, which was disappointing in the sense that it was heartbreaking. I’d been putting off calling him for the last hour, hoping the plumber would show and it’d be a quick fix. No such luck, and if I didn’t call Evan now, it would be incredibly rude. Not that canceling a date forty-five minutes before said date wasn’t rude, but it couldn’t be helped.

I padded on wet feet into the kitchen where I’d left my phone, dreading making the call I needed to make.

Perhaps I needed to make the time to examine why over the last week Evan had consumed my thoughts, and why most of those thoughts had nothing to do with what happened during the hours I’d spent with him in his bed. When I was done with that, I needed to give serious consideration to why my stomach was clenching and despair had settled in now that I knew I wasn’t going to see him tonight.

Once I had Evan’s number pulled up, I took a deep, fortifying breath, reminded myself I was being ridiculous, and made the call.

It rang twice before he picked up.

“Josie.” His smooth voice ratcheted up my disappointment.

“Evan, sorry to do this at all, especially on such short notice, but I need to cancel tonight.”

“Everything okay?”

“I came home and found my water heater broken. The plumber is on his way—” A van pulling into my driveway caught my attention. “Actually, he just got here, but I have water⁠—”

“Do you have a shop vac?”

I was walking to the front door, hoping the flood didn’t buckle the laminate floor Kane had installed two years ago when I answered, “No.”

“I’ll bring mine.”

“Evan—”

“Josie, I’ll be there in ten minutes with my shop vac. And don’t agree to let the plumber do any work until I get there.”

The insinuation that I couldn’t handle a plumber burned my ass.

“You do know I am more than capable of dealing with a plumber.”

“No doubt. However, you are aware women get taken advantage of more than men. Even when a man cannot fix his own shit, he’s less likely to be taken to the cleaners.”

He wasn’t wrong, which also chapped my ass.

“Fine,” I ungraciously snapped.

I heard him chuckle before he disconnected, and I opened the door.

Fifteen minutes later, I was annoyed when Evan had taken over the conversation with the plumber. It wasn’t Evan stepping in to help that had me infuriated; it was that not only had Evan been correct, but this particular jerk wasn’t trying to take me to the cleaners—he wanted to take me for a very unnecessary and expensive ride. That was until Evan showed, then his tune changed, and I no longer needed to replace the cold water connector and the little fitting that screwed into the top of the water heater—he called it a ‘nipple’—which was where the expense was going to come in. I only needed the hose and not the super-flex two-hundred-and-fifty PSI heavy-duty stainless that cost more than double the standard connector.

“Think you’re done here, bud,” Evan clarified when the plumber tried to justify his recommendations.

“The service call⁠—”

“She won’t be paying the service fee. She would’ve if you hadn’t tried to upsell her without her knowledge. I get the upcharge on parts, but the upsell? No. A hundred dollars for a fifteen-dollar hose before labor? Fuck no. Let this be a lesson in manners and general decency.”

“But—”

The plumber, whose name was Ted, snapped his mouth shut when Evan pierced him with a lethal stare and waved in the general direction of the front door.

Ted saw himself out. Or more to the point, sulked out of my house.