By the time he set things in order, Luke dropped into the chair across from him. “When’s the last time you took a weekend off?You’ve moved beyond bags under your eyes. That shit’s checked-bag-sized suitcases at this point. It’s a miracle you can hold your head upright.”
Keaton didn’t look up. “I don’t need a weekend off.”
“You’re right. You need at least a week or two, but that’s not what I asked.”
“It’s been a while,” he admitted. Luke was so blissfully partnered up now that he didn’t remember how he used to climb the walls when he didn’t have anything to do on his days off. Hell, his own need to fill every minute of his free time was part of how he’d wound up with his little ready-made family. He’d been unable to resist the urge to help Noah, who at the time was nothing more than the guy he’d crushed on when he was a teen, fix up the money pit of a house he’d bought.
The thought sent a pang through him—not quite regret, but something close to it. When had he stopped making time for anything but work?
Luke scoffed. “Exactly.”
“There’s too much shit going on here,” he grumbled. “I need the weekends to catch up on everything I don’t get done during the week, and now I’ll have these new units to fix up.”
Finn, ever the strategist, took a different approach. “You could delegate more. Luke could pick up more of the project management tasks, and I wouldn’t mind doing more of the bid write-ups. I could even look over the land surveys and report back to you. And it’s not like you’re going to be single-handedly renovating the apartments. I already have a crew put together for as soon as the permits are in order.”
Keaton sighed. “I delegate plenty.”
Luke snorted. “Sure. If by ‘delegate,’ you mean ‘micromanage from a distance.’”
Keaton scowled. His parents had done just fine with his dad handling the crews and jobsite management while his mom kept the office running smoothly. He was already a step beyond that and didn’t want to hand off even more. Otherwise, he’d hear about it from his dad. His parents were amazing people, but sometimes they set impossibly high standards.
Or maybe that was just the voice in his head, the one that never let him rest. Maybehewas the one setting the bar so high that he had no chance of clearing it.
“Thursday night,” Finn said. “Brew & Barrel. You’re going.”
Keaton hesitated.
Luke grinned. “That wasn’t a question. You’ve bailed on me the past three weeks. I haven’t said anything because you were trying to get your place in order, but now that it’s done, you have no excuse.”
“Fine.” Keaton knew it wasn’t worth arguing. If he tried to get out of it again, Luke would just show up and drag him out of the apartment. And maybe a night out would help quiet the restlessness that had been building inside him.
A while later, Keaton stood in the middle of his apartment with his friends. It wasn’t the best time, and he still worried Luke wouldn’t be able to resist sharing his opinions about what Keaton had done with the place, but if he hadn’t let them in, they’d have kept giving him shit. And really, he had nothing to worry about. The apartment was exactly what he wanted. Cleanlines, efficient storage solutions, and as much natural light as possible.
Except—
His eyes landed on a thin crack in the drywall near the window. It wasn’t structural. Just cosmetic. It could be patched, painted over.
But it bugged him. It was like a flaw in his armor, a reminder that no matter how hard he tried, perfection was always just out of reach.
Luke followed his gaze. “You know, not everything has to be perfect. This isn’t one of our jobs to scour over with a fine-tooth comb. You can fix it later.”
Keaton exhaled. “I know that.”
Finn just gave him a knowing look. “It looks great, Keaton. No one but you will notice that little crack.”
“You guys did,” he pointed out.
Luke scoffed. “Yeah, because you were glaring at it, which made both of us start looking for what was wrong. Seriously, this place looks better than I thought it could. I still think it’s a bad idea for you to live where you work, but there’s no talking you out of that.” He wandered over to the thermostat, which connected to an app on Keaton’s phone. “Do you like this? I was thinking about installing one at our place. If we heat the house while no one’s there, the electric bill is through the roof, but it’d be nice to not freeze my ass off for the first hour after getting home.”
“I do. I probably went overboard, but I’ve got the entire apartment connected. That’s the way things are moving in the future, and I figured it made sense to do it while I wasremodeling.” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to justify his decisions to his friends.
“Smart thinking. Otherwise, you’d wind up doing it down the road, and that would be an added cost.” Leave it to Finn to be the practical one. Part of what made him good at his job was his natural tendency to pinch pennies without sacrificing quality wherever possible. “Forget about the crack. It’s tiny and gives the place character.”
Character. That was what his mother used to say about the house he grew up in—the creaky third stair, the door that stuck in humid weather. His father would have fixed them in a heartbeat, but she insisted they were part of what made a house a home. Keaton had never understood that. What was so charming about imperfection?
They finished walking through the apartment, Keaton showing them the changes he’d made to the original layout and Luke asking a million questions. By the time he ushered them out, he hoped they trusted he was here because it was where he wanted to be, not just because it allowed him to spend even more time at work.
Later, as he locked up and headed out for the walk-through downtown, the crack lingered in his mind.
