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He was still in the doorway, blocking any escape route. “You’re right, and yet somehow dousing my high school nemesis with paint suddenly seems worth it.” He turned back to the hallway. “Hey Tomas, tell the guys downstairs they can knock off for the day.”
Tomas’s voice sounded nearby in the hallway. “They already left. They finished the trim there and said it was too late to start anything else.”
Carson grunted in exasperation. “They left without telling me? I had other things for them to do.”
“You can tell them tomorrow, Jefe.” Tomas’s voice grew fainter. He was nearly to the stairs.
Carson shut the door, leaned against it, and peeled off the Velcro straps from his medical boot. “It’s so hard to find good help these days.” He tugged off the boot. “Case in point: my slave girl has gone renegade and weaponized the paint sprayer.”
His shoe came off next. He added his phone to the pile. All things he didn’t want to get paint on. He was serious about spraying her. This was going to be bad. Or good. She still had ownership of the sprayer, after all—and unresolved anger from her teen years.
She held the sprayer to her like it was a shield. “I think this would be a good time to show that you’ve grown since high school and can let bygones be bygones. Be the bigger man. Also, if you get too close to me, I’ll spray you again, and you don’t want to ruin those jeans. They look good on you.” She took more steps backward. “So distractingly good in fact, I’m going to have to ask you to leave so I can paint this room.”
“Your only hope is to put down the sprayer and beg for mercy.” He dipped his chin and smiled. “You never know, I might be in the mood for mercy.”
Oh, he wasn’t. She knew that much about him. She aimed the nozzle at his chest. Perhaps she had a death wish. Or perhaps staring at Carson’s bare chest was making rational thought harder.
He raised his hands. “I can tackle you, you know. Literally a pro at that.”
Yep. Rational thought wasn’t winning out because somehow the thought of Carson tackling her didn’t feel like that much of a deterrent.
He took slow steps toward her. She went backward. “Don’t come any closer or—”
He rushed her. She sprayed his chest. A beige spot ran down his stomach. He plowed into her, not tipping her over, but backing her up. He grabbed the nozzle even as it kept going off.
“Don’t!” she shrieked but the word was mostly nervous laughter.
He turned the sprayer on her, and she tried to turn it back on him. Paint flew everywhere, on him, on her, on the subfloor. She turned her head and was glad the goggles were protecting her eyes. Somehow she went from grabbing the paint sprayer to grabbing him, but he was slippery and hard to hold onto. In the struggle, she fell and ended up pulling him to the floor with her.
It was over in a minute, but somewhere in that minute she had been pressed against his chest and now they were tangled on the floor.
“I give up.” She was laughing and panting. “Stop. You made your point. Whatever it was.”
He sat up and away from her, the sprayer abandoned. “I obviously didn’t make my point if you don’t know what it is.”
“Give me a second…” She wiped at the paint on her face with the back of her hand. “Your point is you’re stronger than me.”
He took off his glasses and looked for a place to clean them. “I feel like we both already knew that, going in.”
“Ok, your point is that if I follow your instructions, you’re going to ruin both of our clothes.” She pulled off her gloves and dropped them on the floor. “Despite the fact that you don’t like these shorts, they were some of my favorites.”
He stood up and offered her a hand up. She’d seen him make the exact same motion to men he’d knocked to the ground in football. It felt odd that this time she was the one being pulled up. “Who said I didn’t like your shorts? I just said you shouldn’t wear them around Ricardo or Dustin or any other unmarried men on the crew.”
Her shirt and legs were covered in paint. A total mess. “We’ve got to rinse out our clothes and put them into the washing machine or they’ll be ruined.” As she spoke, she remembered that the washing machine and dryer had been unplugged and moved outside in order to put a new floor in the laundry room. Moving them back would take time and effort. How dry would the paint be by then?
A worse thought occurred to her. She had to get the paint out of her hair. If it dried there, she’d never be able to get it out. Would she have to cut it off? Carson’s hair was likewise coated. “We don’t have time to save our clothes. We’ve got to rinse out our hair.”
She headed to the hallway. Only the master bathroom shower was working. The others were in various stages of tiling. “I call dibs on the shower. You’ll have to wash your hair in the kitchen sink.”
He followed along beside her. “I’ve got a better idea.”
She was afraid his better idea would be to lock her out of the master bathroom. She picked up her pace. Fortunately, the flooring was already gone or they’d have to worry about dripping onto it. As it was, the crew would wonder how she could possibly be so bad at using a sprayer that a paint apocalypse had happened in one of the bedrooms, and a trail of beige drops led down the hallway.
They reached the master bathroom. It had two huge walk-in closets, a linen closet, and a fireplace in front of the bathtub. A spacious shower with glass doors waited for them. Her towel from yesterday still hung on the rack and her shampoo and conditioner perched on one of the shelves.
He strode to the shower, turned on the water, and motioned for her to get in.
She shook her head. “Um, I’m not going to undress with you here.”
