I’m so centered and focused on what I’m doing that I don’t even hear it when Nils comes back. His throat clearing startles me mid-chorus of an Eminem rap that I only know one of every dozen words to. I don’t drop anything, thankfully, but a little puff of flour hits the front of my hoodie when I jostle the bowl.
“Sorry,” Nils says, coming to lean against the counter a goodfive feet away from me.
“You move like a ninja.” I slide the bowl across the counter so there is less space between us. He talks so quietly, it’s sometimes hard to hear. I don’t want to miss anything.
“Heat is working again,” he says, and indeed, it’s so soft I can barely hear the words over the sound of me folding the dough in the metal bowl. I pause. Sure enough, I can hear the soft click and feel warm air against the back of my neck as it blows from the vent.
“Wow, thank you. What was it? Was it the…pilot light?” I ask in the hopes I’ll sound a bit like I know what I’m talking about. I’m pretty sure pilot lights are a thing. Although, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if I heard that phrase on one of the HVAC videos I watched or another one. Shoot, pilot lights are on boats, not houses, right? Clearing my throat, I continue talking before he can answer or correct me. “Thanks for doing that. I think I’ll have to replace it, eventually. It seems to be ready for retirement.”
I pat the counter so my haunted mansion knows I don’t have any hard feelings.
“You can’t stay here without-ou-ou-ou-t heat,” Nils says, finishing with an annoyed twitch of his shoulder and a glare at the wall over my shoulder. I watch him from the corner of my eye, drinking in the sight of him in my kitchen.
We’re about the same size, but something about Nils always makes me thinkbig, and something about myself seems to make other people thinksmall. When I worked at the Mirage in New York as a line chef, my friend Simon told me I had “twinkenergy.” He’d said it with something of a sneer in his voice, clueing me in to the fact that it wasn’t a compliment. It’s possible I don’t have a good grasp of what kind of person a twink actually is, because I don’t see one when I look in the mirror. Not that it matters, I suppose, although working in such close proximity to Nils and Shiloh this past year has made me think of the twink energy comment more often than I used to. Maybe twink is a vibe, not an aesthetic. In which case, I probably am one. Sure, I’m tall and muscular like them, but while Nils and Shiloh look like grizzled Vikings fresh from a day of plundering, I’m fair-skinned, pink-cheeked, and prone to breaking out in song.
“What?” Nils says, snapping me back to attention. It takes me a second to figure out that look on his face—wide-eyed and a little confused—is because I’ve just said all of that out loud. I grimace.Inside thoughts, I remind myself, once more managing to sound like my father. My cheeks feel hot. I turn my face away from him.
“Oh, sorry, that…” I probably won’t do myself any favors by admitting I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Instead, I utilize an old standby and say, “That was a joke.”
Nils doesn’t laugh, which I’m appreciative of. If he had, he’d have been laughing at me. Puffing out my cheeks, I scoop the cookies and start placing them on a pan. I wonder what he was expecting when he got into his truck to bring me eggs. Probably not home repairs, a twink identity crisis, and baking.
“All right,” I tell him cheerfully, sliding the baking sheet into the oven. “In twelve minutes, there will be fresh-baked cookies to exchange for all the hard work you did fixing myheat.”
Nils smiles and makes a vague hand gesture toward the front door that I interpret as an offer to leave. I shake my head and fill in the blanks.
“You don’t have to leave! Unless you’re busy or need to get back to the chickens. Is the winter hard on them? Do they roam around free, or are they locked up? I really don’t know anything about keeping chickens, if I’m honest. I’ll have to watch some videos. Or”—I perk up—“you could teach me. Then, if you ever need to go out of town or something, I can pop over and take care of them while you’re gone. It’s kind of wild that we’re neighbors, and yet we rarely see one another. Well, other than work, obviously. But that doesn’t count. I mean like this”—I wave a hand around the unfinished kitchen, Nils watching me with steady, brown eyes—“when you come over for fun.”
Nils makes a soft noise like a laugh caught in his throat. Likely thinking of how he’s never once come over for fun before. I don’t correct myself, because by now I think he’s fully aware that words come out of my mouth long before I’ve thought them through. He doesn’t seem to mind. Thankfully.
“You can meet the chickens,” he confirms. I beam. Today might be the first time he’s ventured my way for fun, but it sure as heck will not be the last.
I open my mouth to reply, but my gaze catches on Nils’ throat. Sometimes, before he speaks, he swallows a couple of times or moves his jaw like he’s chewing on the words and getting a feel for them. It usually means he’s got more to say. Snapping my own overworked jaw closed, I wait.
“They stay locked up where it’s warm,” Nils says, giving me a slightly stern look that I have no trouble interpreting asbecause their heat actually functions.
“It was only one night,” I tell him in my own defense, not bringing up the dozens of other nights this winter where the unit stopped working and I had to sleep in a parka. “And it really wasn’t that cold last night. Maybe for a chicken, but I’ve got plenty to keep me warm.”
I pat my stomach. Nils’ eyes follow the movement, another very small smile curving the corners of his lips. I wonder how many people miss out on his microexpressions simply because they aren’t staring hard enough at him. Dryden Roy—who, admittedly, doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about anyone—says Nils is the cardboard man. But he’s not. You only have to know where to look.
It’s not until later—when we’re sitting on my plastic-sheeting-covered couch, feet propped up on the crate I use for a coffee table, plates of warm cookies in our hands—that Nils speaks again.
“Call me the next time you lose heat.”
Chapter Three
NILS
Oliver tips his head back and laughs, pale throat exposed and bright in the sun. Fog puffs from his mouth in the freezing morning air. Whatever Shiloh said to him must have been hilarious, because the smile remains on his face and only draws attention to the rosiness of his cheeks and the red of his nose. The tips of his hair are stuck out around the beanie pulled down over his ears, the dark green bringing the ocean hues out in his eyes. He looks chilly and adorable and distracting. Winter is pretty on him.
Of course, so is summer. I loved lobster fishing when it was Shiloh, his dad, and I working theDrifter. I loved it the seasons Shiloh and I hauled traps alone. But nothing can compare to how much I love this job now that Oliver is here—standing next to me as we empty the traps, verifying the size, checking to make sure the lobster isn’t an egger, giving them a V-notch and tossing them back if they are, all while singing along to a melody only he can hear. I love how last season he’d startedhanding the lobsters covered in barnacles over to me.
“This old gal needs a Nils special,” he’d say, grinning, and I would dutifully pinch off the barnacles with pliers. Before tossing them back, he’d hand me a pogie to tuck into their claw and joke, “A snack for the swim down.”
We all do that—clean off the lobster’s shells before tossing them back in the water. Barnacles can impact the lobster’s ability to molt. Oliver can clean them off just as easily as me, but somehow, he figured out that I like the task and stopped doing it for himself in order to share with me. Thinking about it now, I wish it weren’t the low season and that we were hauling.
The day is, by all accounts, pretty uneventful. Shiloh pines for the water and work in the winter months, and I’m no different. I wish we were hauling instead of doing repairs in the workshop, too. But even without lobstering to perk him up, lately, Shiloh’s been as outwardly joyful as Oliver, happily living in his honeymoon phase with Ewan Fate. I shake my head, still unable to fathom how the pair of them danced around what was so obvious to everyone else for so long. Even I—high school dropout and chronic loner that I am—could see the attraction. It was evident, even back in our school days. Except, apparently, to them.
I’m happy for him, though. Both of them, but mostly Shiloh. Ewan’s been gone for so long, and we had so little to do with one another when we were younger that I don’t feel as though I know the man. I knowofhim, sure, but I’m neither friendly nor intelligent enough to manage more. Ewan is a bit of a celebrity, and there’s nothing quite like being in his vicinity to remind mejust how low on the food chain I really am.
