“The app on my phone isn’t giving me an error.”
“Your dishwasher has an app?”
She nods. “Don’t they all?”
I grunt and shake my head. “No. They don’t all have apps. We didn’t have apps back in the day.”
She touches her chest and gasps. “How did you do things?” she teases and smacks my shoulders. “I’m not that young that I don’t remember those days, Oli. But whoever had the house before me made sure every appliance had an app to make things easier. Technology can do that for people.”
“Does it really?” I ask her, peering up at her pretty face as I kneel on the floor, wishing I were in this position for another reason and not just to fix her dishwasher.
“I got us some takeout from the bar. You hungry?”
“I could eat,” I tell her as I pull out the empty dishrack and set it to the side. But in reality, I am starving. I didn’t have time to grab something to eat before I came over here. I didn’t want to keep her waiting and figured I’d stop on the way back home.
“I’ll heat everything up while you do your thing.”
“You got a deal,” I tell her, already knowing what the issue is. It’s a simple fix. Something she could’ve done without any real mechanical skill. And I’m sure this isn’t the first time she’s had this problem with the machine, but I’m not about to split hairs and call her out for it.
I need to make it clear to her that she doesn’t need to come up with a reason to get me to come over. I’llcome for any reason because I want to spend time with her, even if that means painting another one of her ceilings black, and I hate doing that shit.
“I had my cousin give me everything to make Italian beef sandwiches. Is that okay?”
Is it okay? The girl totally speaks my language when it comes to food. First, we had killer burgers, then the best damn pizza in the world, and now we’re having Italian beef? “Perfect.”
“Excellent,” she says, sounding a little like Bill and Ted from their excellent adventure because the girl is so blissfully happy even when shit is going wrong.
“You got a bowl and something to scoop out this water?”
“Sure. One sec.”
I watch her over the island as she moves around the kitchen like she’s floating across the floor. Within a few seconds, she has a bowl and a few options for me to remove the water from the bottom of her fancy-ass dishwasher.
“This good?”
I peer up at her, meeting her gaze. “Perfect,” I whisper, but I could be talking more about her than the actual shit she brought me.
The sound of pebbles pinging against glass draws our attention toward the bank of windows near her table. “Is that…”
“Ice,” she says. “The storm’s started.”
“Shit,” I mumble, knowing it’s going to be a bitchto get home if the roads are icy. My truck is great in the snow, but the tires turn into skates when there isn’t any traction. “I should’ve known when I passed a few salt trucks out there, but it didn’t register.”
Nothing registered on my drive over. I was too busy trying to follow the GPS to her place and too damn excited about seeing her to notice much of anything. The world could’ve been on fire all around me, and I wouldn’t have seen the flames. I was laser-focused on my goal, which was to get here and spend time with Lulu, even if that meant fixing her shit.
“Ice is the worst,” she says as she moves back around the island, leaving me to work.
“No car in the world can handle it, but everyone sure as hell tries.” I pick up the biggest measuring cup, using it to fish out as much water as I can before having to go down a size.
“You’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“Yep. I hate it more than snow.” I am thankful I have the night off, and it’s now George and Kramer’s issue. I am fairly certain they are cursing me for it too. They won’t be spending the night playing video games like they do most graveyard shifts when things are calm.
“If it gets too bad, you can stay here.”
My arm freezes in midair as my stomach flips over. “You’d be okay with that?”
“Of course. Can’t have my hero driving home on dangerous roads.”
