AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Uh,” I say, belly tightening. “You probably think all women would just die for your magic peen.”
“Not all of them.” Casually he cracks another piece of popadam. “Just the ones I’ve slept with.”
Gulp.
“And for the record, my seduction of you isn’t goal oriented. I’d seduce you if all you had was a dog bow tie Etsy store. Though, really, I should turn you in for animal cruelty. Because those bow ties you put Smuckers in? No.”
“He likes his little bow ties.”
“Trust me,” Henry says. “He doesn’t like the little bow ties.”
“I think you’re just jealous.”
His eyes sparkle. “That’s what you think?”
“Maybe I’ll make one for you.”
“My neck has a lot of girth.” He lowers his voice. “You’d need a lot of sequins.”
I snort, but I don’t look at him. I don’t want to see that on-camera smile of his turned on me.
I say, “You’re trying to make me see how important Locke is to all your family. Keeping me from killing it. You think I’ll kill Locke, but you don’t have to worry. Things are going to be okay.”
“I don’t think you’re going to kill it,” he says in the voice he sometimes uses when he feels like his communication is important.
I want to believe him. His opinion has become important to me, stupid as that sounds.
I grab the last popadam. “Right now, I’m thinking about killing this. You mind?”
I look up to find him gazing at me in his infuriatingly hot way. What is he seeing? What is he thinking?
I snap off a bit. “Crackly,” I say. My forced brightness is designed to cover the hopeless feeling.
It gets worse when he shows me his absolute favorite under-construction project, the Moreno Sky, a boutique hotel in Brooklyn that will be built in the crater of a half-crumbled-down building. It incorporates many urban ruin elements into the mod design.
He shows me support beams of reclaimed wood, the slabs of reclaimed concrete walls with graffiti from the 1970s. “This would’ve ended up in a landfill.”
I run my finger over the words Keep on Truckin’ in blue. “Did people say that?”
“Apparently.”
I can see why he likes it. The place incorporates a lot of the forward-thinking design principles from that building in Melbourne he’s so wild about. You can see it in the way the structure is mostly greenery and engaging public/private spaces at the bottom and the way the building takes on mass as it rises.
He shows me more of the construction site, how they’re folding old into new. “This is cool as hell,” I say.
He hands me a hard hat. “We’re not even in the building yet.”
“Kaleb must hate it,” I say.
“I practically had to give up my firstborn to make this happen,” he says. “Running this place, I don’t get to design and build that much anymore, or really getting my hands dirty on any level.” He says this last in a wistful tone. Like he misses it. “You have to see from the top. Come on.”
We climb a circular concrete stairway to the main floor, what will be the future lobby. Right now it’s a noisy, unfinished space full of men and women doing different jobs—the trades, he calls them.
One side is a two-story wall covered in plastic. When the place is finished, it’ll be a curtainwall, which is apparently a wall of windows.
He shows me more old timber and twisted rebar that was heading into a landfill but that Henry feels could be incorporated into lobby furniture—he needs to get the bandwidth to figure it out somehow.
That’s how he puts it. I love his lingo sometimes.
