That only left one other possibility. "Client?"
Gigi lifted a shoulder and I let out a low whistle. The last thing Gigi needed was to hook up with a goddamn client. Sure, it wasn't scandalous or particularly unethical, but it wasn't a wise idea. If there was one life lesson I'd learned from bartending, it was that it wasn't smart to mix sex with the exchange of goods and services. It always got weird, and never in thelet's drink all the tequila and getweirdway.
And I still didn't want to be a paternalistic son of a bitch. I truly didn't. But I'd stood by while this woman wandered into the forest with wolves who didn't even bother with the sheep's clothing. Getting involved with a client—one paying major money for a penthouse roof garden—was nodifferent.
"Before you lecture me, just know that I declined about ninety-three invitations before I accepted one," she said. "My work on his project is almostfinished,too."
"Great, so he doesn't know how to take no for answer," I said under my breath. I yanked my hat off and ran my fingers through my hair. "Fantastic."
"No, no, no," she argued. "You're reading it all wrong. He's funny and sweet, and he understood when I said I didn't date clients." She shrugged. "Okay, maybe he didn'tunderstandbut he backed off. Then he asked one last time, and…and I like him, Walsh. We've been out a couple of times, and I like this one. He's different. Or, different than what I'musedto."
I rubbed my forehead. "All right, Gigi," I said. "All right. But I expect to hear about it if things go sideways. No, don't wait for sideways. Tell me if things get a little strange. Even if it seems like nothing, I want to hear about it. I expect to hear in a timely manner, too. None of thesewe've been out a couple of times but that seemed like superfluous information until you asked me to go away for a weekendshenanigans."
"About that," she said, pointing to home plate as two runners blew past it, one after another. Sox were down by four. "I'll update you when you deliver my coffee. You remember how I like it,right?"
"Just wait," I said, draining the rest of my second beer. "The air's changing. This game isn'toveryet."
ChapterFour
Riley
The troublewith early afternoon games and day drinking was that I was thirty fucking years old and my body wasn't capable of sustaining twelve hours of drunkenness anymore. Yeah, I couldtechnicallyachieve that feat but it would require two days of recuperation. I didn't have that kind of time on my hands. It wasn't like I was resentful of this universal midlife truth either. I'd partied my ass off in college, and my oats were longsincesown.
But now it was five o'clock, the Sox had lost, and I was one or two beers past the point of strictly sober. I could've hit up the pubs to watch another game or the Lawn on D for some playground-for-adults fun, but I wasn't in the mood. With Gigi off meeting Penthouse Peter, I wasn't about to be the lonely, broody guy atthebar.
Lonely and broody pulled down far too much of the wrong kind of attention. Women could smell lonely and broody from fifteen miles away, and their vaginas always held the secret remedy. It was like they'd all beckon me closer and say, "Here. Here's the magical pussy elixir. It will chase off all those bad feelings right quick. Have ataste."
Believe me, I'd tried to fuck away that which ailed me. I'd taken every short, curvy blonde in Boston to bed with the halfhearted hope it would purge the Lauren lust from my system. It succeeded only in honing my skills with the "it's not you, it's me"conversation.
That, and dodging an assortment of flying objects. Shoes, purses, phones, open-handed slaps, glasses ofwater.
Instead of parking myself on a barstool and turning up myleave me the fuck aloneglare, I went to work. My Pinckney Street project required some tedious masonry restoration in the cellar, and I could manage that task with the remnants of my beer buzz. Noproblem.
This project was the tits. It was old as fuck (built in the 1790s), tiny (nine hundred and ninety-one square feet), and in my favorite neighborhood (on the corner of Joy Street, behind the State House). As if that wasn't good enough, the Federal-style property was remarkably well-preserved. It needed only light strokes to bring it into this century and restore some of the originalfeatures.
One of those features was the old stone wall on the eastern side of the basement. It was in better condition than most of the stone walls I encountered, but needed a bit of mortar around the joints and some replacement rocks to compensate for the ones that'd gone missing over theyears.
With my ear buds in place and A Tribe Called Quest streaming on my phone, I sat down with a bucket of mortar and sculpting tools. Most people would've used their fingers or trowels to apply the mortar, but I wanted it to look like it'd been there forcenturies.
This method took longer, but what else was I going to do tonight? Listen to the greatest hits of Sarah McLachlan while cocooned in my nephew's baby blanket? Eat cereal in my underwear? Watch the latest from the LPGA tour? Concoct another plan to steal mybrother'swife?
Okay, I'd probably do most of that. Those lady golfers had legs worthadmiring.
Once I'd worked my way through ATCQ's latest album three times and had the patchwork completed, I took stock of the missing stones. I really didn't know how a goddamn rock got up and wandered off, or how someone could look at an element of the foundation and say, "Yeah, throw those out the window. We'll be finewithoutthem."
That left me on the path of cannibalism. I poked around the dark edges of the cellar until I spotted a few rocks butting up against the ceiling at the top corner. The joists had been cut to accommodate them, even though they weren't serving any structural purpose up there. That was the way of old homes. They weren't built to precise, manufactured specifications, but the natural contours of the readily availablematerials.
With an awl and mallet in hand, I climbed a ladder and started chipping away at the mortar holding the stone in place. My back was flat against the ceiling as I balanced as best I could with tools in both hands, but that position fucked me right intheass.
I yelped and cried out as a nail punctured the skin on my lower back, invoking the names of god and Jay-Z and everyone else who deserved to be called out over this disaster, but I didn't move for a second. Moving required getting off the spike ofSatan.
"Why the fuck was that necessary?" I yelled at the cool, empty room. "I thought we were motherfucking friends. I was restoring your foundation, not selling you off for salvage, and this is how you repay me? Stabbing me in the fucking spine?" With a hand braced in front of me, I eased away while skin tore and tears burned in my eyes. "Just for that, I'm gonna paint your front door hot pink, you fucker. You take your pound of flesh, and Itakemine."
I set the stone down—I wasn't dropping that thing after it cost me my spleen—and covered the bucket of mortar before touching my fingers to thewound.
"Sarah McLachlan and lady golfers," I said, shuddering at the sight of blood on my hand. "They never would've done thistome."
* * *
