by Sybil Swift
She pointed toward the list and snatched up her tool belt before circling an item on the list.
“That’s what we’re doing today. Nothing naughty until it’s done.”
“Is that a hard and fast rule? Something I can knock you out of maybe?”
“Doubtful. I’m making choices, you’re listening to them. It’s a new fad in my life, one I should have tried a long while ago, so go with it, okay?”
“Will it help your emotional growth?”
“Yeah and it’ll hurt your physical one. It’s a win-win.”
“So we’re installing metal shutters today? On all the windows?”
“Yup, I want to be so tired by the end of the day that I can’t think straight.”
“Too much journaling last night?”
Time for a well-timed distraction away from her innermost thoughts. But she also wanted Noah to know that she’d enjoyed the gift—even if it was for her eyes only.
Chloe smiled and walked toward him before pressing her lips to Noah’s in a sweet, lingering kiss that swept warmth up her body until her head was fuzzy. His hand meandered down her shoulder, until his palm caressed her hip and pressed them closer together. She inhaled a deep breath, enjoying Noah’s scent. But she had to pull back before she got too comfortable, otherwise she would succumb to confused bliss.
“Thanks for that.”
“The good kissing or the journal?”
“Both. Although we should probably have a conversation while we work. One that’s emotionally revealing and explains our past, while outlining things with our…relationship, I guess.”
“So you want me to run the drill at max volume until you shut up?”
Chloe hit him again and he made an “oomph” before kissing her forehead and retreating a few steps back before she could slap him again.
“I’m not entirely sure our level of sexual intimacy demands twenty questions, but if it’ll help you when you leave here, we’ll see what we can do together.”
“If you adapt the role of “know-it-all therapist” I will throw you off the roof.”
“Noted. Although I don’t know how you expect me to make a difference without my hoity-toity attitude and my ho-hum horn rimmed glasses.”
“Enough banter, we’re going to work.”
“Captain, my captain.” Noah saluted.
“Do you want to make me cry?” Chloe cried out, went outside, and walked down all three flights toward the opened the shed to pull out the storm metal shutters.
“I got the tape measure and the drill. You’re acting like you know exactly what to do with those. Do you?” Noah called out from the second landing.
“Did you get the pencil and drill? We’ll start with the first floor and work our way down.” Chloe looked up at the large house, squinting through the slant of the hot sun.
“Grab the rest of the supplies, I’ll take the heavy stuff. We’re about to unload enough on each other for you to carry any extra weight.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?” She still balanced one of the shutters with both hands ready to climb up the stairs and be a warrior woman, independent to the core.
“I know you can, that’s not a question. I just want to spare you the burden.”
His closed off expression made her stomach twinge. She suspected he wasn’t only talking about the shutters. She licked her lips and leaned her load against the railing of the stairs. Chloe succumbed to the inevitable, picking up the extra tools they needed on the ground before shooting Noah a look that implied more than she was willing to say without regretting the actual, out loud words.
“Sometimes the agony is worth it in the end. Once you work through it, you feel like you can move mountains.”
Without looking back she climbed the stairs with the shutter until she got to the first window and started her measuring work. Two could play the cryptic game. But she wouldn’t let their “relationship” be confusing anymore. They both had a lot of explaining to do. Fun times in the shower weren’t going to keep them distracted for her whole stay.
Part of being with him casually was being open, letting whatever could be, be without bias. And in order to avoid any future messiness, she needed to air out her laundry. So she didn’t take the nasty, emotional stink into his bed every night and think about her doubts when she woke up in the morning.
It wasn’t that easy—but she’d always gone for easy in the past and this was her new life. Chloe had to earn the hard stuff so she knew Noah—or any guy—was what she really wanted, not what she was settling for because they were there. With an inward sigh, she continued measuring the window to find the center so she could divide that by two. Once that number was taken care of she only had to measure three inches above the center and make the spot with a pencil on both sides of the window. That served as an indication of where the bolts and nails needed to go to make the shutter correct.
While Noah had been gone she’d found a carpenter’s book stashed away in his office and had tried to correspond their to-do list with the index. And she’d hit the nail on the head when it came to storm shutters. In control and ready to rock for the first time in days—maybe months—Chloe took her time measuring, writing, and marking everything, really enjoying being in the moment with her sense of surety that she was doing the right things.
Once she heard Noah trudge up and down the stairs several times too many, she looked back, and watched him. Looked as if he’d been watching her too. She swallowed and went back to her small square of calculations.
“Looks like you’ve got everything handled. It’s kind of sexy.”
“Rosie the Riveter ain’t got nothing on me. Could you measure the center of the shutter header?” She threw him the tape measure which he caught with an impressed smile. “Then we’ll need to match the shutter’s header center with the window’s center to make sure everything is in proportion.”
“If you knew this all along, why did you act as if a little dirt under your nails made you skittish?” He recited off measurements and she wrote them down.
“I guess I didn’t give myself enough credit.”
When she stepped back away from the window, Noah moved in with the shutter and matched up the two centers as they both stared at the match. As concentrated on the work as she was, Chloe still couldn’t wrestle her eyes away from his thick forearms as they strained beneath the shutter’s heavy weight. She was half-tempted to keep him in the position to see how long his Herculean feat would hold out. But he didn’t seem to have any intention of moving a muscle until she told him to—which was a little disconcerting, to say the least.
“We got it,” she spat out in a rush and leaned back against the railing while Noah took the rest of the measurements for the side alignments. “If we’re going to continue this thing, I need to know more. I don’t mean baring of the soul, deep darkest secret stuff…but I can’t be sleeping with you while you’re so intensely nice to me, wondering whether it’s all an act to placate me. Whether you have some divine plan you haven’t included me in because you plan to lure me into your arms and leave me hanging when this is all over—”
“I thought that was the textbook definition of casual?” He grunted and hefted the metal shutter against the wall of the house. “If you want something else, I can’t make any promises.”
“I don’t want your promises, Noah. I just need to know I can trust you. My last relationship left me a little paranoid and he put in a real ridiculous spot…”
“He cheated?”
Chloe frowned and couldn’t meet his eyes. But she supposed that was all the confirmation he needed from her side of things.
“You want to know if you can trust me now? After we slept together? Anyone ever tell you you’re kind of backward? Anyway, I don’t see any other women here, do you?”
Chloe sputtered.
“Yeah, that’s not the point.” Noah crossed his arms over his chest and looked up into the still, cloudless blue sky. “You know, every time I thin
k I have a bead on you, you throw me for another loop. I get it, you’re nervous, but why would I go through the trouble of being nice to you when…I’m not doing any of this to fuck with you, I just, well, I like you.”
“Why do you want something casual? What in your life means you can’t have a real relationship right now, Noah?”
“Hand me the drill.”
“Answer the question. You can’t think or talk with the drill whishing away.”
He cleared his throat and put both hands on his hips.
“Here’s an easier question, if you can’t get to the root of the problem. Is it me? Because of me being in relationship rehab you don’t want to get too involved?”
“I thought that was the agreement, Chloe. You don’t want to get too involved either.”
“What if things changed?”
Noah made a frustrated noise and paced across the deck rubbing his hand through his hair until it spiked up everywhere before he let out a long breath.
“You aren’t the only one trying to get their head on straight in relationship rehab, alright?”
She blinked, leaned heavily against the railing, and waited for him to continue. When he didn’t—and didn’t stop pacing—Chloe glanced down at the once weathered boards. They were stained a gorgeous mahogany, thanks to their handiwork the other day. But they didn’t hold any more answers after Noah’s revelation.
He’d betrayed nothing of his secret hurt. If anything, the past two days had been full of playful banter, romance, and anything but the more severe emotions that he’d guarded. She had no idea that he had been hurt—that he’d been doing anything but watching his sister’s beach house during the off-season.
And now that she did have some inkling…the fact that he withheld his own pain…it changed things. Only a little, but the shift was enough. Maybe they could relate more than she’d previously thought possible.
“Fine, I’ll start off our little group therapy session.” Chloe kept her eyes focused away from him and took the plunge. How she could expect to trust him, when he needed the same potential for emotional growth from her too? What psychological nut cases they both were, only he was better at hiding it. “I languished in a three year relationship that I secretly didn’t want, but was too terrified to admit it. We were engaged and getting married in a few months. Everything was ordered and he’d gone along with it hook, line, and sinker. Until he had to travel abroad for work and I caught him balls deep in another woman’s throat via webcam.”
Her fingers clenched so tight she worried about splinters, yet she couldn’t summon the courage to relax. The story wasn’t finished.
“But I still wanted to marry him. My first thought after such blatant disrespect was, how can I salvage this marriage? How can I save my relationship? And our sham of an engagement paled in comparison to anything you’ve shown me over the past two days. I’d been so complacent for so long, I didn’t know how to do anything else but fix what was broken, so I could walk around again in my farce of a world. I would rather lie to myself than make a firm decision about my own life. If everyone else was happy, it was easy for me to pretend to be happy too. I lived for other people.”
She faced the water, unable to even breathe in his scent while she uttered the next few words.
“Noah, when you convinced me to sleep with you and take my life by the balls maybe I was just going along with it. Cowed by everything else in life, why would that be any different? But I need you to know that even with your issues, whatever the hell you’re actually here for…I’m choosing you now. I need to know my first real choice isn’t wasted on someone who’s going to play games and throw me away like the last man in my life. If we’re playing games, I want the rule book. I want control. I won’t be blindsided again and I sure as shit won’t regret my choice if you come clean with me.”
There was a long pause where she was forced to turn around to face him.
“Talk to me, please.”
“No one hurt me.”
“Don’t lie to me—” Chloe moved toward him watching the menace draw low over his gaze before he cornered her back against the railing with his hands on either side of her body.
“I’m not, let me finish!”
He was visibly shaking, and she hesitated before placing her palm over his chest. His heart sped a mile a minute and she couldn’t look away from his chilling stare. When his lips twisted, corners of his eyes creasing as if he were in pain she wanted more than anything to take back her demands. But she narrowed her mouth into a firm line, and let him say his piece.
“No one hurt me. I loved one girl since freshman year of high school, one girl who rocked my world and formed me into the man I am today. She was…she was my everything.” His eyes closed and he blinked, sliding his tongue over his lips before he cleared his throat. “I promised I would love her forever and I was able to keep to my word until a year after college. A year, three months, and two days. We’d been together eight years. But people change and one day I woke up from my lovesick dream and I didn’t know my everything anymore. In fact, I didn’t know anything about my world. As if a switch flipped, all of the little niggling issues in our relationship roared to life and my love, my everlasting, true blue, white knight love withered in my chest and started making me decay from the inside out every second I was with her and couldn’t speak the truth.”
When he kissed her cheek she shuddered and swallowed back her odd fear of him. This was a side of Noah she’d never experienced and she wasn’t sure if what she’d asked for, was what she wanted, at the end of it all. His warm lips skimmed down her jaw, along her throat. Delicate little kisses that rocked Chloe from the tips of her toes to her shaking fingertips and fuzzy, unfocused head. When he started talking again it took all of her willpower to stay focused on his words. They didn’t match the context of his gentle restraint, his arms vibrating from emotion less than an inch away.
“My love for her died and when I told her, it was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he whispered against the upper curve of her ear as if he was saying the sweetest nothings. “I promised myself I’d never do a relationship again. Not when love fades away like everything else and I’m left hurting the only thing I’ve ever wanted to protect. Love is a lie, a bedtime story. And I won’t fiddle with a useless emotion that will make me its bitch on a whim. I won’t let anything else inside, Chloe. Because I have the capacity to crush people. I could crush you in a second and walk away unchanged.”
He pulled away and gave her the chastest of kisses. Barely enough pressure, but enough promise to make her lose her capacity for breath. Until she was rocked to her core and unable to hide it.
Noah took two steps backward with a look she couldn’t read.
“It can’t be anything but casual, Chloe. Because I won’t let it. Take the fun, the banter, and the little gifts as the treatment you deserve, but don’t think it’s the road that leads to anything more than keeping you happy and in my bed. Making you happy makes me happy, so we have the same objective.”
His words twisted in her gut and she clenched her hands around her abdomen. He was a grade A commitmentphobe. As much as she wanted to pretend she could dismiss his story as pure stupid paranoia, the idea that two people in love could grow sick of each other accounted for a majority of the divorce rates in the country. Though it had only happened to Noah once, she imagined he was as jaded as she was after her breakup. At his least his torn apart relationship had been honorable.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” His hand reached out for her, but he let it flit back to his side with a grimace. “But I can see I didn’t help either.”
Chloe tried to shrug herself out of her own skin with Noah’s kisses tingling against her flesh. Even with his darkness, she was drawn to him.
And therein laid the problem—her choice. Ignore her emotions and plunge headfirst into lust or be pragmatic and trust the man who was terrified of intimacy. Their eyes locked, held, and she swallowed despite he
r fingers digging into his shirt. He nodded, must have seen a trace of her thoughts flit across her expression. Inside her head she swore a blue streak while outside she schooled herself.
Noah turned back toward the window and snatched up the cordless drill.
“If you need a minute I’ll be up here and I won’t come downstairs to bother you. Take as long as you want with the information. I want you. But I also want you certain of the road we’re walking down and of what I can and cannot provide for you.”
“Sure, I understand.” Chloe spoke ignoring the cracks in her voice. “I’ll be back.”
“We’ll break for lunch after we’re done with this level. Any requests?”
“Something comforting.”
And she somehow managed to get her legs to work through the pudding phase, long enough to get back into the house through the back sliding glass door and throw herself on her bed face down. Not as if the teenage pose would sort out her melodrama. But choices were choices for a reason—because she couldn’t ignore them.
Was sleeping with Noah worth the emotional muddle? Regardless of whether every good deed he did for her knitted her faith in mankind back together, his treatment was temporary. A balm for her emotional pain. Could she accept a Band-Aid without hating herself later for the help when they separated and only the sharp sting of his memory was left?
She’d gone into their sexual adventures with the intent that it would be strictly casual and she didn’t dare jump into a relationship—had she been lying to herself? God, she couldn’t even get what she wanted unmuddled without a crystal ball. She rubbed her temples in soothing circles with both fingers. Maybe she was making everything too complicated. When she’d accepted Noah’s invitation to get physical it had felt right, like the next step to distraction. But distraction might not be the answer to putting away all of her past. It was a temporary fix.
Okay, so she had to find a balance. A little bit of soul searching with a little bit of life empowerment, tit for tat, until she felt as if she was giving her healing process a turbo boost like in the video game with the blue hedgehog. What did that mean for Noah? Well, she didn’t want to stop sleeping with him. That was an instant electric response and her hands clamped into tight fists in the bedding at the thought of cutting off their fun time. Sex took away introspection and made her surer of herself, two things that were sorely lacking in her everyday life. Maybe the answer was to strip away all the tropes of a relationship.