He was the one who hadn’t. But, dammit, it wasn’t his fault!
Jamal walked out onto the porch to find Phylicia getting her tools out of the back of her truck. He’d try for a bit of civility; maybe then he could smooth things over and regain some ground with her.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” she answered, and moved right past him.
Jamal closed his eyes and let his chin fall to his chest.So much for that.
The rest of the day inched by in an excruciating stretch of long hours that were peppered with awkward silences and the occasional monosyllabic response whenever he asked her a question. The only time she spoke more than one word to him was when he asked her if she wanted to stop for lunch.
“I didn’t bring my lunch with me,” she told him.
“You want to go to Jessie’s? My treat,” Jamal offered.
“No thanks. I’ll just go home.” She turned away from him and went back to work. Twenty minutes later, she climbed into her pickup truck and left him to eat alone.
Jamal sat on his truck’s lowered tailgate, eating the ham sandwich he’d packed. He tried not to think of the lunches he and Phylicia had shared in this very spot. It was like asking the sun not to come up. He thought about herconstantly.
But it was the things they had done together sans clothing that occupied his mind more than anything else.
“Damn, this is messed up,” he said. He forced himself to swallow several more bites of his sandwich, purely for sustenance. His appetite had been nonexistent these past couple of days.
He couldn’t go on like this much longer. Something had to give.
Maybe once they were no longer occupying the same uncomfortable space, his life could regain a semblance of normalcy. With that goal in mind, Jamal gathered the remnants of his lunch and headed for the house. The sooner the bed-and-breakfast was finished, the better off he’d be. He cranked up the volume on his Bluetooth speaker and returned to working on the downstairs bathroom.
He heard Phylicia’s truck pull into the driveway, but he didn’t bother to acknowledge her return from lunch. He had his work; she had hers. If this was how she wanted it, they could get their jobs done without speaking for the duration of this project.
Using her smallest chisel, Phil carved the dirt that had built up in the crevices of the ornately carved banister with painstaking gentleness. This would be, by far, the most time-consuming aspect of her work on the Victorian, and unlike the wainscoting, unfortunately, it was immovable.
Over the past three weeks, she’d hauled whatever she could back to her workshop, preferring to work there instead of suffering under the weight of Jamal’s brooding stares. The air between them was thick with tension, the silences louder than she could have ever thought possible.
Phil had come to the conclusion that the destruction of her mother’s painting room had, more than likely, been a mistake. But it didn’t change anything between them. Jamal was, first and foremost, a client. Getting involved with him had been foolhardy and dangerous. She was a professional, and professionals could not make such colossal errors in judgment if they wanted their businesses to succeed.
Of course, if she were arealprofessional, she never would have put herself in such an awkward work situation in the first place.
Phil heard the footsteps seconds before Jamal arrived in the foyer. She studied him through the slim balusters of the banister from her vantage point at the top of the stairs. His shoulders were rigid, as they had been for the past few weeks. Neither of them had been able to relax much.
She watched him lay out his tools on the floor, then drop to his haunches to shuffle through them.
Despite all the reasons she shouldn’t, she had the strongest urge to walk downstairs, wrap her arms around his waist, and beg him to come home with her right now. She missed the banter they shared. She missed the feel of his naked skin against hers.
“You are pathetic,” she whispered.
Her cellphone rang, startling her. Jamal’s head turned sharply, and he caught her staring down at him. Phil quickly pulled back from the banister, her phone nearly falling out of her hands as she clumsily pulled it from her pocket.
“Hello,” she answered in a rushed breath.
As the person on the other side of the line spoke, Phil felt the blood drain from her face.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. Dropping everything, she raced down the stairs. “I have to go,” she called over her shoulder as she jerked open the front door.
“Wait! What’s going on?” Jamal grabbed her by the arm. “What’s wrong?”
“It was Mossy Oaks. There’s been some type of incident with my mom. I need to get over there.” Phil realized she was shaking from head to toe, but she couldn’t help it.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
