Page 58 of How To Not Need You

“They can if you believe.”

Freya is on her knees by the far wall with a power drill, installing shelf brackets with irritating competence.

She measures twice. Drills once. Everything is straight.

Show-off.

It makes the rest of us look like amateurs. I’m fine with that. Drills and I do not go together, for the sake of everyone.

Elsie trails behind everyone with a damp cloth, intercepting paint drips before they hit the drop cloth. Her muttering has become the room's soundtrack. “No, no, no,” every time somebody gets too close to the fresh paint. She’s wearing Noah’s old flannel with the sleeves rolled past her elbows, and there’s a smudge of yellow on her cheek that nobody’s mentioned because Elsie would then spend twenty minutes trying to fix it.

Harper is attempting to cut in along the ceiling trim with the focus of someone who has absolutely no idea what she’s doing and is determined to pretend otherwise. Her brush wavers. The line she’s painting looks like it’s trying to escape. And there, just above her left ear, a thick streak of buttercream paint that she hasn’t noticed yet, drying into her dark hair.

“Harper,” I say.

“Mm.”

“You’ve got paint in your hair.”

Her brush pauses mid-stroke. She reaches up, fingers finding the streak, and her expression changes from concentration to mild horror.

“Well,” she says. “That’s not coming out easily.”

“Alexander’s going to love it,” Luca calls from his throne.

Which is not a throne. It’s a barstool he dragged in from somewhere and positioned directly in front of the front window, where the morning light comes in across the half-finished floor. He’s holding a takeaway coffee, legs crossed at the ankle, watching the rest of us destroy Natalie’s bakery with the serene satisfaction of a man who has been expressly forbidden from participating.

“Why isn’t Luca painting?” Freya asks, without looking up from her drill.

Natalie’s face changes into what I can only explain as horror. “He lost painting privileges after last time.”

Luca throws his head back with dramatic flair. “It was one blue penis. ONE.”

The room erupts into laughter. Harper’s brush hits the drop cloth. Elsie presses the damp cloth to her mouth to muffle a laugh that comes out as a snort anyway. Freya’s drill whines to a stop as her shoulders shake. I lean against the wall and try not to smile, which fails completely.

“It was the size of a dinner plate,” Natalie says, deadpan. “On the entry wall.”

“I was expressing myself.”

“You were expressing something.”

“The client specifically requested ‘personal touches.’”

“The client was me, and I did NOT request that!”

Luca waves a dismissive hand. “Art is subjective.”

The bell above the door jingles. Alexander steps in, one hand still on the handle, and takes in the scene with the calm assessment of a man who has learned to expect chaos whenever Harper is involved. He's wearing a crisp shirt with the sleeves rolled up and looks like he walked out of a magazine that has never heard of paint splatter.

Luca gestures grandly at the room, the half-painted walls, the drop cloths, the women wielding various tools with questionable technique, and says, “Sorry, no men allowed. It’s a whole thing.”

Alexander’s mouth curves. Dry. Warm. The kind of smile that says he’s heard this before and finds it amusing rather than exclusionary. He crosses to Harper, presses a kiss to her temple, directly beside the paint streak, and looks to Luca before opening his mouth to say something.

Luca’s hand shoots up. “I don’t count!”

Alexander looks at him. “You do.”

“I’m an exception.”