He rolled his eyes, leaned in close, and inspected the stripped screws. Then he walked out to the kitchen and returned with a tiny tool kit like it was the most normal thing in the world.
“You keep tools?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Grew up in a house where everything broke every other week.” He knelt beside the wall. “If you wanted something fixed, you learned to do it yourself. So now I keep tools around. Saves time. And money.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Not because I didn’t understand the words, but because I’d grown up in a house where nothing ever stayed broken. Where someone else handled it. I’d never had to learn how tofix things, because someone was always paid to do it for me.
Watching him line up the screws and tighten them with practiced ease did something weird to my throat anyway. Like admiration mixed with something quieter and heavier. Respect, maybe. Or the sudden awareness of how differently we’d learned to survive.
And then he wiped the bar clean with the hem of his shirt, lifting it just enough to reveal a strip of his stomach—his stupidly defined six-pack—and my brain promptly short-circuited.
Heat climbed up my neck, completely betraying me.
By the time he stepped back, I realized I’d been staring at him like he’d just built a house with his bare hands.
“There,” he said. “Safe from all towel-related violence.”
I nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
His expression changed, barely, but enough to tell me the gratitude hit differently than our usual snark.
He shrugged. “It was nothing.”
Except it wasn’t nothing. Things were changing between us, and I didn’t know how I felt about it.
But I obviously was feeling semi-good about it since the next night I was doing something I’d never done before. Something I hadn’t thought I’d ever do.
It was eight thirty. Ledger had left for practice again after his afternoon weights, something about lactate sets that sounded illegal. He wasn’t home yet, and I knew he was going to be dead when he walked in.
So I made pasta.
Just pasta. Nothing special.
But I made enough for two.
When the door opened, I looked up from the table.
Ledger walked in still wet from a second shower and visibly limping from exhaustion. He froze when he saw the food.
“I ate already,” he blurted.
I raised a brow. “You ate two hours ago. An apple does not count as a meal.” I actually didn’t know that, but I assumed that whatever he had eaten right before practice couldn’t have been a meal.
“An appleanda protein bar,” he countered.
He hesitated in the doorway, like approaching the table was a trap. I recognized the look now, the instinctive recoil from anything that felt like help. Ledger didn’t do handouts. He tolerated assistance only if it came dressed up as something else.
Then he stepped forward slowly, closing the door, his voice quieter. “You, uh, made this?”
“Yes.” I held up a hand before he could retreat. “And before you start, it’s not charity. It’s basic human survival. Eat.”
He stared at the bowl, then at me, then back at the bowl.
And then he sat.
When he took the first bite, his shoulders dropped, like the weight of the entire campus let go of him. He didn’t moan or anything dramatic like that, but his eyes closed briefly.
And that was worse.
