“You have a raccoon problem, right?” she asked, forcing her focus back to the task at hand. “First thing we need to do is remove some of the entry points, starting with a new roof.” She gestured at the pile of metal in front of them like a game show host. “I’m thinking that we’ll want about two inches of overhang on the front. We can drill the metal panels right into the frame. The most important piece is the first one…”
From his back pocket, Elliot pulled out a small notebook and golf pencil that looked tiny in his gloved hands. He was taking notes.
“You were saying…” He gestured with the pencil for her to continue.
She wasn’t sure why she’d found the action so surprising. Maybe it was how intentional it was. He was taking the task seriously. He was takingherseriously.
“Yeah…You have to make sure the first panel is perfectly square. We’ll use that one as our guide the rest of the way, so if that one’s off…” She paused, half expecting him to interrupt her—to assume he understood the gist of what she was saying and finish her sentence for her like most people did. But he didn’t. He waited patiently, deferring to her. “…it’ll look terrible the whole way down.”
His brow furrowed. “May I ask questions?”
“Yes,” she answered with a laugh. She was enjoying this version of Elliot, and for some reason, enjoying him felt more dangerous than irritation with him ever did.
“What are we using the staple gun for?”
“Nothing,” she replied.
He lifted his pencil. “Follow-up question: Do you know why I bought a staple gun?”
She stifled her laugh. “If I had to guess, you thought you were shopping for roof shingles rather than metal panels.”
He tilted his head to one side in acknowledgment.
The two quickly found a rhythm. It helped that Elliot was exceedingly capable once he had the slightest clue what he was doing.
Elliot knew how to listen. His eyes fixed on her as she spoke, absorbing each sentence with intense brows as if he were carving her words onto the marble tablet of his mind.
“Like this? Or is it more like this?” he asked when they were positioning the second row of panels. There was no strategic ineptitude with Elliot. He wanted to learn how to do things, andhe wanted to learn from her. “I really want to make sure I’m doing it the way you want.”
All of his questions sounded dirty. All of them. Each and every thoughtful inquiry hooked hot and low in her belly. And the worst part was, he wasn’t intending to press his thumb on some highly niche kink of hers. He was merely learning a wholesome new skill. She was the one on a steaming hot tin roof all by herself.
“Where’d you learn to do all of this?” he asked her, lifting the front of his T-shirt to wipe sweat beading on his forehead, exposing a glimpse of his bare stomach.
She closed her mouth before answering. “Gran wasn’t big on rules,” she explained, resetting her balance on the slope of the roof before kneeling down to drill in another panel. “So I’ve been doing sculpture art basically since I was, like, eight, which got me comfortable with tools pretty young. That, and the fact that we never had much money and lived in an old quirky house. I spent a lot of time on YouTube figuring out how to fix stuff. And of course, from working at the retreat.” She slid another panel into place. “You know that I used to work at the Groff Retreat, right?” she asked, looking up at him.
He lifted a sheet of metal up the ladder without so much as a grunt. “No, I didn’t.”
“First job,” she said, letting the sound of the drill punctuate her sentence. “And my lastrealjob, but that’s…”
She didn’t want to get into the story of howthathad ended. Not when they’d only just found their groove three-quarters of a roof ago. The way her time at the retreat had begun was much less fraught.
“I worked with the maintenance team all through highschool. Those guys were amazing. Taught me so much, and I still don’t know a quarter of what they know. When the grid goes down, that’s where I’m headed. Immediately. No hesitation.”
He let out a low, musical laugh that warmed her cheeks. “Did you quit working there to pursue art?”
She snort-laughed so hard that had she been standing, she would’ve fallen clear off the roof. “What about my life gives you the impression I make money off of art?”
“You seem very…single-minded when you’re doing it. I assumed there was some larger goal there.”
“My projects are rooted into the ground in the property behind my house. Who could I sell them to?”
“I’m aware of where they are. I own the land, remember.” He handed her the next panel with a low grunt.
The metal bowed between their hands as it passed between them, only to flatten completely when Lainey slotted it into place. The tiny knot at the base of her spine loosened when all went as intended.
“What I enjoy about it is that Ican’tsell it. It’s doomed to remain only mine.” She looked up from her work to find Elliot’s eyes as he gazed at her, one foot on the ladder and one perched on the roof. “But what’s mine is yours now, I suppose.”
“So you’d really never want to be a full-time artist?”
