Page 23 of Liquids

“Yeah, and by the way, babe, your landlord turned up today asking about the rent, and I had words with him about how bad the outside of this building is because it’s not bein’ properly looked after. He’s coming by tomorrow to fix the shower drain and the window.”

“Did he ask who you were?”

“Said I was a friend of yours, and I told him he needed to get his shit together or he’d be getting a visit.”

Christ. Bending down, I open and shut every drawer. Holy shit. My throat tightens. This is like a normal apartment, a normal life. Someone looking after me. He needs to go back to telling me what a fuckup I am.

I find the mats and set the table, and he pulls the casserole from the oven and puts it on the mat in the center, heaping out huge spoonfuls of meat, potatoes, and gravy onto the plates.

He places a loaf on the table and hacks a chunk off it with a blunt knife.

He smiles. “You need a new bread knife, babe.”

“Is that homemade, too?” I say.

“Like I said, nothing to do.”

He places a hunk of bread on my plate next to the meat and another one on his own, sits down, and picks it up, piling the food onto it and taking a huge bite, closing his eyes.

“Fuckin’ bliss. Good food. Nowhere to be, nowhere to go. No howling gale I have to go out in to fix some gears that some idiot didn’t grease right and have seized up. No fucking guys trying to rile me up or on my back giving me grief to fight.”

“You don’t like working on the rigs?”

“It’s difficult but it pays well. Can’t complain. It gets lonely. Different people come and go all the time because people can’t hack the cold, the weather, or the sheer hard physical labor. Some men are okay, some are assholes. A lot of ’em aren’t right in the head. A few I’ve known for a long while. Wouldn’t say they’re friends exactly, but I don’t hate ’em.”

I pick up my fork and pop some stew in my mouth. The gravy is rich, and the meat melts on my tongue. God, that’s delicious. We eat in quiet companionship for a minute.

“I’m already wondering what I’m going to do when you move out,” I say, and immediately I want to clamp my hand over my mouth. Not the right comment to make, Carl. But all this help is overwhelming. I already liked him, the sex has been stellar, and he’s made it completely clear he doesn’t want anything more.

“Well, brace, because I could be here for a while.”

I don’t like how warmth radiates through my gut at that. Knock it off. “Why’s that?”

“Someone torched my trailer.”

My head snaps up. “You’re kidding me?”

“When I find the assholes who did it, I’m taking them apart limb by limb.”

“How do you know it was torched if you were holed up here?”

He holds up his phone and shows me a picture of a burned-out trailer.

“My buddy, Jake. He knows I’m lying low, but he’s keeping an eye on things for me. He brought some food around that they didn’t have at that store downstairs so I could make a decent meal. My truck’s stashed at his house. Luckily, I took everything out of the trailer and put it in the truck because I had a feeling something like this might happen given the assholes in this place. I lost people a lot of money with that fight. Jake tells me there’s no end of chatter about a rematch, so I’ve got that hassle coming down the line, and Marco’ll want that because it’ll make him a shitload of money. Jake’s getting aggravation because people are looking for me, and he’s telling them I’ve left town.”

I stare at him. How could I ever have thought he wasn’t very communicative?

“God, I’m sorry about your trailer, Rig.”

He shakes his head. “It was a shithole. Don’t want to think about it now or I’ll get mad. Let’s have this. Quiet night, good sex.”

I grin at him. “Bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”

He smiles at me over his plate. “Babe, I fixed your cabinets.”

I burst out laughing. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

“And your drawers.”