I hear him grunt as a big piece of drywall comes loose and crashes to the floor. I look up again and he's wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. His chest is heaving and his jeans are riding low on his hips and there's a smear of white drywall dust across his stomach. I can see the dark line of hair below his navel trailing down andoh, fuck, I cannot do this.
Not now.
I physically turn around so the doorway is behind me. My face is hot. My hands are shaking, which makes them useless for writing. I set the clipboard down and press my palms flat on the shelf in front of me and breathe.
This isn't fear. I know what fear feels like in my body. Fear is cold. Fear is tight. Fear lives in my throat and my shoulders and the backs of my knees.
This isn't fear. This is want. This is warm and low and it's making my skin feel like it's been turned up a degree, like the temperature in the room changed when I wasn't paying attention.
I don't know how to handle this feeling. My entire system is built around threat assessment and this isn't a threat. It's just a man with a sexy back, pulling drywall off a wall, existing in the same building as me.
That's all it is. That's all it can be.
I count the hot sauce again. Fourteen. Still fourteen. The hot sauce is stable. Everything else is falling apart, but the hot sauce is good.
What is wrong with me?
By noon, I've finished the inventory and moved on to helping Tex with the drywall. Working beside him is both better and worse than watching him from another room. Better because I'm focused on the task, using my hands, pulling and carrying debris to the parking lot. Worse because we're in the same space now, moving around each other, and the bar's first floor isn't that big.
He squeezes past me in the narrow hallway behind the bar. "Excuse me," he says, turning sideways to fit, and his chest passes maybe two inches from my shoulder. "I really need to make this hallway wider. Or myself narrower. One of those is a construction project and the other is a diet and I'm not doing either."
I can feel the heat coming off him, can smell the sweat and the drywall dust and underneath it that soap thing that's just him, and I hold my ground.
I don't step back. I don't flinch. I don't move.
He passes close by. He doesn't notice. Or if he notices, he doesn't say anything. At this point, I've learned that Tex notices everything and says nothing about the things that matter.
Later, he hands me a bottle of water. His fingers are right there, inches from mine on the plastic, and I take the bottle. Our hands don't touch but the near-miss sends a charge up my arm that's so vivid I almost drop the water.
I don't. I drink it. My hand is steady. My heartbeat is not.
In the afternoon, Tex is sitting on the second-floor landing going through the signed photos we carried upstairs before the hurricane. We'd stacked them against the wall in the hallway, away from the windows. Or what we thought was away from the windows. But the storm had ripped the plywood off the second-floor window frame at the end of the hall, and the rain blew in before we could cover it up.
The photos closest to the window took the worst of it. A few are destroyed, the frames warped, the photos bloated and ruined. He's been going through them, checking each one. Most are fine, and those he sets aside carefully.
But there's one that's giving him trouble. It was at the bottom of the stack, right where the rain blew in. The glass frame is cracked, and the photo inside is stuck to the backing. I can see from across the landing that it matters to him because he's been working on it for ten minutes with a focus and care that's completely different from how he handles everything else. Everything else gets tossed and dealt with in big movements. This, he's handling like brain surgery.
I walk over. He's sitting on an overturned bucket, hunched over the frame, trying to work the back panel off with his fingers. His hands are too big. That's the problem. His fingers, thick and calloused from a week of manual labor, can'tget a grip on the tiny metal tabs that hold the backing in place. He's trying to be gentle and his hands won't let him. He bends a tab too far and winces.
"What is it?" I ask.
He looks up. His face is unguarded in a way I haven't seen before. Vulnerable. That's the word. He looks vulnerable, and on a man his size, the vulnerability is unexpected. It hurts me to see it.
"Photo of my dad," he says. "Opening night. All those years ago. He's standing behind the bar with a bottle of champagne and the biggest damn smile you've ever seen. It's the only copy. My mama took it."
He turns the frame so I can see through the cracked glass. The photo is water-stained but not destroyed. I can make out a man behind a bar, big like Tex but leaner, dark-haired, holding a bottle up like a trophy. The grin is visible even through the damage. It looks like Tex's big grin.
"The tabs are stuck," he says. "I can't get the backing off without bending them and I'm going to tear the photo if I force it. My fingers are too damn big for this."
I crouch down next to him. I can feel the size of him, the way the air changes when you're near someone this large. My pulse picks up but I don't move away.
"Let me try," I say.
He looks at my hands. Mine are tiny next to his. Thin fingers, narrow palms. The hands of someone who was built for different work than pulling drywall and hammering plywood.
"Yeah," he says, quietly. "You'd be better at this."
He holds the frame steady and I work the tabs. My fingers fit where his couldn't, sliding under the tiny metalclasps and bending them up one at a time. I can feel him holding his breath. Not because of me, because of the photo. Because of his dad. His hands are wrapped around the edges of the frame and they're completely still. Those huge, rough hands, holding this fragile thing with more care than I've ever seen anyone hold anything.
