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“But Ruth says we need to decide like, tonight, between the type of meat dish we want to serve.” She started flipping through options on her phone and Reece zeroed in like he was studying for a math exam.
I just shook my head and pushed past the both of them. “I’ll be inside.”
I only realized my mistake once I opened the door and heard the sounds of Britney Spears’ tinny voice and saw Ruth Harshbarger shimmying her backside while she rolled a roller of grey paint sloppily up and down the wall.
The door shut behind me with a loud enough bang, but the music was so loud she didn’t notice and kept dancing back and forth while visible paint flecks flew off the roller in all directions.
And I took in several things at once:
One, the way she was dancing was pulling up the plastic that she’d only haphazardly laid over the newly installed carpet.
Two, she was painting the walls but the ceiling was still naked drywall.
And three and most annoying of all, her ass looked fan-fucking-tastic in those paint-smeared leggings that did absolutely nothing to hide the shapely contours of each of her plump globes and Jesus fuck, it had been way too long since I’d been laid.
“What the hell are you doing?” I barked.
Ruth shrieked and turned around, finally noticing me. As she did, her foot banged into a can of paint, knocking it over.
It spilled onto the plastic—and over the edge onto the carpet.
“Son of a bitch,” I yelled, leaping forward to try to rescue the situation. At the same time Ruth gasped and dropped to her knees.
She was trying to shove the paint back into the can with her hand, a completely fucking useless gesture at this point.
“Get out of the way,” I said, shouldering in as I dropped to my knees, trying to grasp the edges of the plastic to lift it, but it was too late. The paint had overflowed onto the carpet in a gush of gray goo.
Ruth’s eyes flashed at me, and at the same time, we both yelled, “Look at what you did!”
“What I did?” I scoffed. “You’re the one painting with an open can of paint right at your feet.”
Her mouth dropped open. “I was doing just fine until you came in and scared the shit out of me.”
“Doing just fine?” I laughed. “You were painting the goddamned walls without painting the ceiling first.”
“What?” she spat. “You don’t paint ceilings.” Then she looked up. And blinked.
“Yeah, you do, genius. What the hell else do you think you do to them?”
“I don’t know.” She looked flustered. “I’ve never painted ceilings before.”
I looked at the splotchy wall. “Because you’ve done so much painting in your life.”
She stood up and backed away, finally. I scooped up the plastic, containing as much of the paint spill disaster as I could.
“Oh, pardon, I was just trying to help your ass out,” she said. “This isn’t even my house anymore.”
I glared up at her, arms full of plastic, paint oozing out onto my shirt as I strode toward the front door. “And thank fucking Christ the tornado took care of that at least.”
“You better run,” she called after me, sounding furious, “otherwise I’d kick you in the balls for saying that!”
I slammed out the front door, startling Reece and Charlie who were still in a cozy tete-a-tete over her phone.
Reece’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “You were only in there like three minutes. How the hell did you two piss each other off that fast?”
Chapter Two
RUTH
