She’d had one lover since Meredith, a bar hookup named Katie after a rough day at work and enduring a particularly loud silence in her house. The loneliness had gotten to her, and she just needed another voice in her house other than her own. But as soon Katie was in her bed, as soon as they’d right and truly fucked and Katie was ready to leave, Jordan felt thatneedrise in her.
Don’t go.
That’s what she’d wanted to say to a complete stranger, the desperation for someone to justlookat her so strong she gave in, let the words tumble out of her mouth.
Katie had looked at her then, but not in the way Jordan wanted. She’d smirked, pulled on her clothes, and said, “We both know that’s not what this is,” and left without another word.
Jordan spent the next week in bed, Bri Dalloway blowing up her phone and finally roping Simon into the mix, and he’d left Jordan a voice mail threatening to come and kidnap her cat if she didn’t go to work.
That was six months ago. Suffice it to say, Jordan was no longer built for casual sex. And anythingotherthan casual would surely just lead to more evidence that Jordan wasn’t anyone’s idea of a life partner, which pretty much left her alone with her fingers.
But if Jordan was honest with herself, that’s what she really wanted. A partner. She always had, the solidity of a family around her, creating the kind of life with and for someone else that her grandmother and brother had created for her. But after Meredith, she didn’t think that was possible anymore. She was terrified to even dream about it.
After Katie, she’d invested in numerous sex toys—three different vibrators and two different clitoral stimulators, a couple of dildos—and she’d been fine ever since. At home, she always had music on, a show or a movie, always had another voice in there with her. With regular orgasms—and pretty damn great ones, thank you, technology—she hadn’t thought about hooking up in a long while. Even when her sensesnoticed an attractive person, she simply observed, imagined a nice long session with her Satisfyer 3000 later that night, and moved on.
Until Astrid-fucking-Parker.
Until her shaggy bangs and buttoned-up outfits and adorable ignorance over what a clitoris looked like.
Jordan could educate her. She could teach her all about how the clit—
Sweet Jesus,no.
That was sure as shit not going to happen.
She scrubbed her hands over her face, most likely smearing her eyeliner, and looked down at the cabinet she was building. A lot of times, she ordered the cabinets the client wanted. There were several great local manufacturers in Savannah that Dalloway and Daughters had used, and Josh had mentioned one he often employed up in Winter Lake, even for his Bright Falls jobs.
But Jordan had a plan.
And if they ordered the white shaker cabinets Astrid wanted, her plan was fucked.
So she’d convinced Josh that she could build a better cabinet—that was true, she could—and it would save them money on the budget—also true—and he’d agreed. He was so trusting, a good old boy raised in a small town, and Jordan was fully prepared to take the brunt of Astrid’s wrath when the cabinets were finished and installed.
In fact, Astrid’s wrath was half the draw here.
She set to work, sliding on her goggles again, measuring and cutting the doors to make room for the vintage mullioned glass she had on order. The Everwood kitchen was huge, so this was a big job. An assistant would be nice, she wasn’t going to lie, but it would be worth it.
For the next hour, she lost herself in the work. She loved this part of her job, the creating. She hadn’t built something from scratch in so long, she’d forgotten the thrill of it, the way her whole body felt alive as she watched something take shape and come into being. Andthis project was even more invigorating, picturing the kitchen that actually fit what the Everwood was, modernizing while honoring history and story.
She paused, switching off her saw and shaking off her gloves to open up her laptop. Astrid had emailed her digital plan to both Jordan and Josh just last week. Jordan had promptly made a copy in her design program, then used all the same schematics so she could redesign the Everwood room by room, the way it should be. Now, she smiled at her plan for the kitchen.
It was beautiful. Jordan let Astrid keep her precious gray paint. She left the stainless steel appliances, left the rough-hewn wooden table Astrid had included for texture. Everything else though... well, let’s just say it wasn’t white and gray. It was darker than Astrid’s design, with sage-green cabinets and inlaid mullioned glass, copper pots dangling from the iron pot rack above the ceiling. There was a farmhouse sink, just like Astrid wanted, and Jordan could admit that white fit nicely here, but instead of white marble counters, Jordan had instead ordered butcher block throughout.
The effect—at least in her mind and in the image on her computer—was vintage and cozy. It was the Everwood.
She smiled at the room on her screen, shoving away everyone’s reactions when they saw the finished product. She didn’t think this was exactly what Natasha meant when she said lean into the tension between carpenter and designer. Natasha meant snark, banter, which she and Astrid seemed to be handling pretty well, but these cabinets, her whole redesign... well, this was something else altogether.
Jordan wasn’t sure if she would be able to carry any of it through. With everything on film, she’d have to work at night, off camera, but once the cabinets were in, once the paint was on, what could anyone really do? She was counting on that ratings factor, the fact that Natasha wanted authenticity and tension to increase the excitement for the show.
She was also counting on Astrid’s very obvious pride. The woman was practically vibrating with... well, it wasn’t passion, necessarily. It was dimmer than that, a desperation for approval, for success maybe. Whatever it was, Jordan was ninety-nine percent positive it would prevent Astrid from ever admitting that she’d lost control of her carpenter or her design.
Honestly, Jordan didn’t really care how it got done, as long as the Everwood didn’t become a West Elm showroom and the episode still aired, so she had to be careful here. Very careful. Walking on eggshells kind of careful, not letting her brother—who already thought she was a bit of a fuckup—find out what she was doing.
For now, though, her heart slowed, that curtain of loss had lifted, and Astrid Parker was nothing but a nuisance in the very back of her mind.
THE NEXT WEEKwent by just like any other job. Well, mostly. If Jordan completely ignored the cameras, the lights, Darcy fluttering around to make sure she exuded the right mix of glamorous and work-worn, Natasha and her clit necklace directing and commenting, the infuriating way her stomach fluttered like a nervous preteen when she heard Astrid click-clacking through the halls, it went by like so many jobs before it.
Jordan lost herself in the work, in saws and drills and the slow forming of a kitchen cabinet, in surreptitious trips to the home store in Sotheby for paint that was most definitelynoton Astrid’s design plan. She spent long nights scouring Pinterest for ideas, constructing her own plan in her design software, room by room—a copper tub in the master bath, white-and-silver damask drapes, built-in bookshelves in the exact same shade of sage as the kitchen cabinets.
