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“Best how?”
“The one with the best idea behind it.”
He frowned.
Surely she knew.
Surely she didn’t want him to tell her that the best house he’d built was the one he built for their family. For her.
But she was looking at him guilelessly, legs crossed, leaning forward in the chair enough to give him a view down her dress that he didn’t think was an accident.
She really seemed to want to hear this.
“I built one for this couple,” he said. “Two kids, and a third one on the way.”
“What was special about it?”
“It wasn’t any one thing. It was all the details, added together. The skylight in the mudroom, so it’s not gloomy where they come in from the garage. Cork floors in the kitchen so her feet won’t ache when she’s cooking. The laundry room has a built-in table, long and narrow, for folding clothes on, and deep enough underneath so the baskets fit.”
But none of that was why it was special. He’d built the house as proof of how much he loved her. Proof that he could take care of her, that he had something to give her and the kids. Proof that he was worthy of her.
He’d built it because he wanted to be able to think of her inside it, surrounded by walls he’d had put up, windows he’d had installed. He’d wanted her to look around that house and think about him and feel safe and loved, even when he wasn’t there.
He didn’t know how to put that into words that made sense for Jennifer and Steve—or even into words that didn’t sound so stupid that he couldn’t say them out loud.
It was just a house.
He was just a guy who knew how to work and fuck and grill a decent steak.
And anyway, he wasn’t going to be building houses like that anymore. Not if things kept slipping away from him.
Amber’s eyes had lost focus. He’d been sitting there, brooding over her question, and she’d gone somewhere else in her head.
“I’m boring you, sorry. Too much shop talk.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a trainer,” she said. “I work at a gym.”
He saw her in yoga pants and a sports top, walking some poor besotted sap through his weight routine.
She’d gone to school for sports management, been working at the community center when he met her, and in the past couple years since Jake started preschool she’d found her love of exercise again. Lost some weight that was bothering her, put on some muscle.
She looked like a trainer now, out for a night of fun. Lean body, trim and muscular. Those fingernails, and the dress.
The haircut, too. Her haircut kept startling him. She’d never had short hair, not once since he met her or in any picture of her he’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just short, it was short—half an inch long in some places, maybe two inches in others, revealing the shape of her head and the length of her neck. There was something choppy about the way it had been cut, so that it looked like somebody’s hands had been in it. Fingers skimming the crown of her head, pulling a slick line to a point in the tender space before her ear.
It made him notice how her eyebrows arched and how enormous and luminous her eyes were. How her face wasn’t as round as it had been when they met, because the years had drawn hollows where she hadn’t always had them.
The dress hung suspended from glittery straps, draped in front in a way that exposed her collarbones.
She couldn’t be wearing a bra.
He looked at her mouth, painted red, and wondered if the lipstick would be sticky or dry. If her mouth would taste like Amber. What her skin would smell like tonight.
How it was possible that she’d looked like this all along, and he’d known it, but he hadn’t been taking the time to really look.
