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“Yeah? Really? I don’t mind it, but it’s my least favorite cleaning job. The food leavings are gross.”
He chuckled softly and picked up the glass she’d just put in the drainer.
“Why do you like it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always liked cleaning. I guess …” He went quiet, thinking. “I guess it’s like … putting things to rights. Making something dirty clean, making a mess neat. Undoing what should be undone. Clean slate, and all that.”
Kelsey paused with the sponge inside another glass and looked at the man standing beside her. That answer seemed to go a lot deeper than a sink full of dishes after a meal.
He glanced her way, met her eyes, and glanced away. “I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It does.” His discomfort was obvious, so she went back to washing and searched for something to say that would let him off the hook. “I like cleaning, too, mostly. Especially laundry, I guess for a similar reason. Everything’s fresh and new and back where it belongs.”
“Yeah.” He finished drying the glass and looked around. “Uh, I don’t know where any of these dishes go.”
“Right.” She set the sponge aside and dried her hands. “I’ll spread out some towels on the breakfast table and you can just put them there. I’ll put them away when we’re done.”
Plucking more tea towels from their drawer, she went to the round table by the back door and spread them out. When she turned around again, Dex stood right there, a clean glass in each hand. He leaned around her and set them upside down on the towels.
He was close to her, close enough she could feel the warmth of his body, smell the faint whiff of fabric softener at his collar.
When he stood straight again, their eyes met. Again, he looked away.
“Can I ask you something, Seth?”
He brought his eyes back to hers. “Why do you call me that?”
She thought of him as Dex, she’d always known him as Dex, but she was beginning to realize that name did not describe the whole man. “It’s your name, right?”
“Yeah, but you’re the only one who uses it.”
“Do you not like it?”
“It’s a name. It’s fine. But I’ve been called something else most of my life. Denson, or Sarge, or Dex. They all sound more familiar by now. More like me.”
On that last point, she disagreed. “Uncle Rad named you after a TV serial killer.”
Now, finally, his eyes landed on hers and stayed there. “You know why, right?”
Her father was not one to share details of his Bulls life with his family, especially not his children, most especially not his daughters. But the Bulls had lots of kids, and most of them were at least teenagers by now. The kids talked a lot. Parental types, even those who had good cause to be hyperaware, never seemed to fully realize how sneaky kids were, how many ways they had to know the things they weren’t supposed to know.
Besides, now three of those Bulls kids were Bulls themselves. And those boys gossiped.
Kelsey knew, all the kids knew, what Dex did in a kutte. Maybe not all the gory details, but enough to know they were gory.
“Yeah,” she answered. “I know why. Is that supposed to shock me? Or upset me?”
“Doesn’t it?”
She shook her head. “Why do you think it would?”
“Because you’re sweet and good, and I’m the opposite.”
He’d said something similar at the clinic the day of the snowstorm—that her goodness balanced him out. She’d pushed back on the idea at the time but obviously had not been persuasive.
“I grew up in the Bulls family. I know what you do. What my dad does, my brother. I also know that they are more than that. I knowyou’remore than that.”
“Why would you think you know what I am?”
