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“Should I be impressed it lasted this long or worried about how old it is?”

No answer.

He plonks the toolbox on the closed toilet lid, hangs the light off the towel bar, then crouches at my open sink cabinet and finds the shutoff. I watch him register that it was painted over and that I got it closed anyway. Watch his eyes come back up to me for one second, recalibrating something.

The incredible green of his eyes darkens as I stare into them.

“You shut the water off.”

“Seemed like the only logical thing to do.”

Another grunt. Different pitch. If I had to translate, I’d say huh, but I’m not fluent yet.

Then he goes to work, and I make the mistake of watching.

There’s nowhere to stand in this bathroom that isn’t in his way, so I lean in the doorway with my arms crossed like a sane, composed adult, and God help me.

He works the way he does at the workshop. No wasted motion, no second-guessing, hands finding the right tool before his eyes get there. Every time he leans on that wrench the light throws his bare back into relief, shoulders bunching, forearms cording under damp skin, the long muscle down his side flexing then letting go.

I am not okay.

My mouth has gone completely dry, my skin feels a size too small everywhere at once, and I squeeze my legs together where he can’t see it, which helps for about a second before it makes everything considerably worse.

I want my hands on him. That’s the entire thought, arriving with no decoration on it whatsoever. Palms flat on that back, feeling the muscle work under them, my mouth on the wet skin at the nape of his neck, finding out what sound he makes.

Think about the Prescott invoices, I order myself. Think about literally anything else.

It doesn’t work. Nothing works. Something seizes on him and he swears at it under his breath, one quiet syllable, and my body answers like he said it directly into my ear. That voice. Low and furious, in the dark of my crooked little bathroom, rough as the gravel in his lot.

I want him to keep talking. That’s what’s wrong with me. I want him swearing at that pipe in exactly that voice while I take his belt off.

I stand in that doorway wanting my boss with a force that frightens me.

Not the manageable kind. Not the deniable, professional, wait-it-out kind. The kind with hands and mouth and weight in it. The kind that’s already three moves ahead, working out how fast I could get his jeans open if I just walked in there and did it.

Fifteen years I’ve kept one folded shirt like a coal banked under everything else I did, and it turns out the man is so much worse for me than the memory ever was.

The old piece comes out fighting. He drops it in the sink with a wet clank, then pulls a replacement out of the toolbox.

He brought a replacement.

Somewhere between Carol’s phone call and my landing, this man went through his stock on a Saturday night hunting a part for a tap older than both of us, that nobody’s made in decades, found one, drove it over. For the office manager he’s counting the days on.

Wisely, I say nothing about that. Unwisely, I feel it everywhere, sweet and hot and completely unfair.

“Rag,” he says, hand out, not looking.

The towel Diesel ruined is right there. I put it in his hand and his fingers close over mine in the handoff. Warm, rough, callused, gone again before I’ve finished registering it, and it lights up every nerve I own. My skin keeps the shape of his hand like a hot print.

For the next thirty seconds I read the label on my shampoo bottle without absorbing a single word, pulse tapping hard at the base of my throat.

The new piece goes in while I do a very poor impression of a professional. He reaches under the sink, turns the water back on, stands, tries the tap.

Hot, even, once the tank catches up. No spray, no drip, no death rattle in the pipe.

He shuts it off. Wipes the handle down with the towel like he’s dusting for prints. Then he crouches and checks the cold side too, unprompted, finds it acceptable, closes the cabinet, starts packing up.

He hasn’t said one full sentence since the one about Gus’s father, and I’ve spent the entire repair wanting him so loudly I’m half convinced he heard it over the wrench.