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Not loose. Off. Clean off, trailing a corroded spindle and about sixty years of neglect, and the pipe behind it takes this as permission to fire a jet of cold water directly into my sternum.

The scream I let out is not my proudest sound. Diesel comes skidding around the doorframe ready to fight something and finds me soaked, fully clothed, wrestling a wall.

Jamming the handle back on does nothing. The thing underneath just spins. Water’s ricocheting off me, the ceiling, the dog, and my brain finally coughs up something useful from a former life. Supply valve. Every fixture has one.

Somewhere.

I eventually find it under the sink, in the bathroom cabinet. Painted over, because of course it is. Cracking it loose takes my whole-body weight and a word my mother would not care for.

It grinds shut. The jet dies to a dribble, then nothing. The bathroom goes quiet except for me dripping on the floor, my labored breathing, and Diesel shaking himself dry all over the one towel I’d unpacked.

I sit down on the edge of the tub. Wring out my shirt hem and take stock.

It’s Saturday evening. Gus closed at noon and doesn’t reopen till Monday, per the sign downstairs, and with no shower I’ll be showing up to work Monday smelling like the inside of this bathroom.

I go fetch the receipt on the fridge door. Hopefully it wasn’t an empty offer.

Carol answers.

I’m only half done explaining when she says, “Oh, honey, don’t move,” in a tone that’s already solving it. Muffled conversation on her end, hand over the phone, Marcus’s voice going up at the end of a sentence. Then she’s back. “Somebody’ll be by soon. Did you like the chicken?”

“Loved it. The raisins made it.”

“I told him. Sit tight.”

Somebody, it turns out, is not Marcus.

The truck that pulls up under my window ten minutes later is the yard truck, and the boots on the stairs are heavier than Marcus’s, slower, the tread of a man at the end of a fourteen-hour Saturday.

Diesel’s tail starts wagging before the knock even lands. So does my pulse. I haven't even opened the door yet and every inch of me already knows.

Then I open the door.

Aiden’s on my landing with a toolbox in one hand and a shop light in the other, and he’s shirtless. Soaked past the elbows, a streak of something black up one forearm, dark hair doing whatever it wants, a balled-up T-shirt hanging out of his back pocket.

He fills the doorframe and blocks most of the light behind it, and my body forgets what it came to this door to do. It forgets everything.

The broken shower. The wet clothes plastered to my ribs. My name, briefly.

There’s a wall of bare chest six inches away and I go hot and liquid between my legs, instantly, like somebody else threw the switch.

“You’re soaked,” he says.

He really has no idea.

“The shower attacked me.”

He grunts. That’s the whole response. But his eyes have dropped to my wet shirt and stopped, one second, two, and the air on this landing goes thick enough to choke on. Cold cotton stuck to my skin, everything underneath it tightening, and he can see that. I can see him seeing it. The tingling that starts up between my thighs is strong enough to have its own heartbeat.

Then he shoulders through the doorway like none of that happened. Maybe for him it didn’t.

Diesel greets him like a war hero. Gets one rough ear-scrub for his trouble.

“Traitor,” Aiden tells him, without heat, and heads for the bathroom like he already knows the way. He owns the building, I remember from the lease, though I’m renting from Gus directly. The store’s been here longer than Aiden’s been alive. He must have inherited it after his father passed away.

Aiden picks the handle up off the sink edge, turns it over once.

“Old as the building,” he says. To the handle, not to me. “Nineteen seventy, maybe. Gus’s father put these in.”