AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So, yeah, Rye would make it for him. What could possibly go wrong?
Answer: everything.
When he’d begun the week before, he’d thought it would be the work of four or five hours. Six hours in and he had a hunk of wood that jutted at an obscene and useless angle and was liable to stab Charlie as soon as hold his laptop.
So much for winging it.
But no problem, he’d just look up some plans online. A tutorial. You could learn anything online.
And he had found plans. And tutorials. But the problem with YouTube woodworking tutorials was that although they only ran twelve minutes, they never really told you the full working time of the project. He’d barred Charlie from the woodshop all of Sunday while he worked on the desk, pausing and rewinding the video on his phone so many times that he ended up with a drained battery and a damning film of wood glue on the screen.
But today was the day. Tomorrow was their anniversary, so this was his last chance. If he could just figure out how to calculate the angle for the miter saw, he’d be fine. Right? Well and he had to figure out the whole adjustable part. And sand it. Oil it. Shit.
The rain was coming down hard now, spattering his windshield, gusting from tree branches when the wind blew.
He rolled the window down just a bit, just enough to smell the rain on the air. When Charlie’s house—their house—came into view, Rye knew he was smiling. It still happened every time. He saw the big pine tree, then the corner of the house, then there it was.
Home.
He parked off to the side, leaving room for Charlie’s truck when he got home. He wouldn’t listen to Theo Decker’s new album while he worked in the woodshop. Too much noise; the album deserved his full attention.
He wiped off his shoes outside, then opened the front door slowly because—Blam!
The second he could see inside he was hit with a fuzzy black projectile. She was still a kitten, really. Not even nine months old. Charlie had let him adopt her from the shelter after he’d fallen in love with her at the launch.
Once she was big enough to explore on her own, she’d revealed herself to be a bit of a hell-raiser, accelerating Charlie’s construction of the cat ramps and tunnels in their own house to keep her from tearing things apart.
Murder cat, Charlie had started to call her, since he’d stopped calling Marmot that long ago.
“What’s with you and the murder cats?” he’d asked.
“Guess I’m just attracted to trouble,” Rye’d said, winked, and kissed him.
Rye had begun to call her Redrum instead, and Charlie had been confused. Which was how Rye realized Charlie had never seen The Shining, which led them down a weekend-long Stephen King movie marathon that reminded Rye that Stephen King was awesome and reminded Charlie that he didn’t care for horror movies.
Still, she was Redrum. Red, or Rum, or Rummie, or Drumbot, or Asshole for short.
Redrum liked to perch atop tall things and drop down on unsuspecting passersby. She also liked to perch atop tall things and remain as still as a statue until you panicked because you couldn’t find her and thought she’d somehow gotten outside and been hit by a car or been eaten by a bear. Then she’d drop down on you unawares, when you were so grateful she hadn’t died that you couldn’t be mad at her for scaring the shit out of you.
Murder cat for real.
But she also slept curled up in between Rye and Charlie’s pillows, purring sweetly, licked Charlie’s beard like it was a kitten of her own, and had been thoroughly adopted by Marmot and Jane so that Charlie and Rye were now outnumbered. They stalked the house in a phalanx of paws and tails and eyes that saw everything and Rye was pretty sure that he and Charlie were living at their pleasure.
“Hi, Murderbaby,” Rye said, stroking her ears. “Where are your comrades?”
Jane sauntered down the hallway, then gave Rye a quick mrow and went into the living room when she saw he wasn’t Charlie. Marmot was no doubt off running the ramps and would emerge in time.
“You wanna come play in the woodshop?”
Charlie had originally wanted Redrum kept out of the woodshop at all costs. He’d had visions of her getting so amped up she tried to jump into a saw or something. But it turned out the one thing Redrum feared was loud noises, so if a tool was running she wouldn’t get anywhere near it.
She yipped and Rye took that as assent. He dropped his stuff on the table inside the door, hung up his coat without dislodging her, and walked into the woodshop.
He hung the Stay the Fuck Out sign (handmade by him) on the door in case Charlie came home before he was done, and got down to work.
