by Anna Martin
“Will should be back in the next few days.”
Dad nodded. “You said.”
“I’ll wait for him until I make any decisions.”
DAD AND I were out on the front porch with a couple of beers. I liked this time of day best of all: when the sun was sinking and turning the sky all different colors, the crickets chirping away, the heat rising out of the air. Dad wasn’t a big talker at the best of times, and I had to learn how to be settled in his silence, knowing he wanted (or maybe needed) just my company.
Jennifer was out with Baby before she settled back in to study more for the next round of qualifications she was chipping away at. I wanted to ask my dad about so many things: if he was okay, if he was coping with it all, if he still wanted Will and me to hang around. He had Jennifer, and that was good, and I didn’t want to impose or outstay our welcome.
The front yard was pretty big, and the house was set back from the road, so when a car I didn’t recognize pulled up, I didn’t immediately worry. People were coming and going all the time at the moment.
There was no mistaking Will, though, not when he unfolded himself from the sporty car and stretched his neck from side to side before turning around.
“I thought he wasn’t due back yet,” Dad said.
“Me too.”
Ten days. It had been ten days, and I’d been expecting a few more.
I risked glancing over, and Dad nodded, almost imperceptibly. I carefully set my bottle of beer down, then leaped off the front of the porch and ran up the yard to him. He met me halfway and pulled me into a hard hug, squeezing the air out of my lungs as I wrapped my arms around him and inhaled deeply.
“You’re back.”
“M-hmm. I got things fixed earlier than I thought.”
My lips stretched into a smile against his neck, and I gently kissed his cheek, aware we had an audience. Will reached for my hand and held it as we walked back down to the house.
“Good to see you again, David,” Will said with a nod.
“You too. I’ll give you some privacy.”
“You don’t have to do that, Dad,” I said, objecting to the fact he felt the need to leave.
He gave me a smile and shook his head. “You haven’t seen each other in a time. I don’t mind.”
I watched, feeling helpless again as he collected the beer bottles and headed back inside. The damn guiltiness was eating away at me again—that I had Will, and he didn’t have my mom. We still had our whole lives together to look forward to, and he couldn’t see as far as tomorrow.
Will seemed to sense my despondency and ran his hand up and down my arm a few times before I folded myself back into his embrace. There was nothing better than holding each other, especially after we’d been separated by such a big distance.
“Love you,” Will murmured into my hair.
“God. I love you too.”
“Can I show you something? It’s not far.”
Not sure where this was going (or if it was vaguely sexual), I nodded and let him lead me back up to the car.
“We need to drive there?”
“Yeah.”
I frowned but got into the rental anyway.
Will took us to the edge of the town and pulled to a stop in a much more sparsely populated area than the one where my parents’ house was.
He stood behind me on the sidewalk and wrapped his arms around my waist. We were looking at a house—a small, one-story house with a wide wraparound porch and peeling yellow paint. The yard was little more than scrub grass. It was beautiful.
“So, what do you think?” he murmured.
“It’s cute.”
“Well, then, it’s yours. Ours.”
I turned in his arms and frowned. “What did you do?” I asked. Demanded.
“Well, you need to be here,” he started cautiously, giving me a sheepish look which was a little adorable. “And I need to be with you. And if we’re going to be here for any length of time, we need to have somewhere we can be ourselves….”
“Okay….”
“So I bought us a house.”
I blinked a few times, then shook my head, laughing. “Is that really the solution?”
“Mm,” he hummed, leaning down to kiss my neck. “It’s about twenty minutes’ walk from your dad’s house, according to the Realtor, so you’re still close to him. But the neighbors on either side are really far away.”
His meaning was pretty clear. We needed to be alone together in a place where people wouldn’t overhear us.
“Do you want to look inside?”
I really did. He held my hand as we walked through the yard. He unlocked the front door with a key from his pocket. Inside, the house was slightly neater than the outside, but not by much. There were a few sparse pieces of furniture the last owner had left behind; a welsh dresser, a well-padded leather armchair that needed reupholstering, a broken side table in the hall.
It turned out not to be a single-story house; there was an attic area, although the ceilings weren’t high enough for it to be converted into a playroom, like we’d done back home. Standing in there, I had to crouch slightly, too tall to straighten up.
“The Realtor said it hasn’t been lived in for some time,” Will said as we made our way down to the main living area in the house. “You wanna know the best bit, though?”
“Go on.”
“One of the last things the previous owner did was install air-con throughout.”
I looked up and found the telltale panels in the ceiling and smirked at him. There wasn’t air-con in my room back at Dad’s house. I’d always just made do with a standing fan. “I knew the heat was killing you.”
“That wasn’t the reason I picked this house,” he said, protesting a little. “I thought it was beautiful and you’d love it.”
“And you were right. As always.”
“The air-con is just a perk.”
I leaned in and lightly kissed his cheek. “It needs some fixing up,” I said as he wrapped his arm around my waist.
“A little, yeah. Inside and out.”
“I bet my dad would help me out. I know he helped my uncle out quite a bit when he was younger. Uncle Hank is in property—he used to flip houses all the time.”
Will hummed in agreement. “That sounds good. You could spend more time with him that way. Or—I mean—you spend a lot of time together now, but it’s not really productive. You’re just together. This way you’ve got something to work on.”
“Yeah.”
The project was starting to come together in my mind; I knew the yellow paint on the outside of the house needed to be redone, as well as redecorating most of the interior. If we had the budget, the kitchen could be replaced too, or the counters and cupboard doors, anyway. I’d done that before and knew it wasn’t too hard a job.
The more I thought on it, the bigger the project became.
There wasn’t exactly anything wrong with the bathroom, it just needed cleaning up some. If we replaced some of the tiles, though, it would make the room a lot nicer. Since it was only a one-story house with one master and one guest bedroom, there wasn’t a master bath, just one family bathroom. I didn’t mind. One bedroom meant we didn’t have to invite guests to stay. I wanted to turn the second bedroom into an office space for Will. That way he’d have a place to work from that was separate from the living area.
There was no way I was going to IKEA for the furniture for the house, even if it was the easiest and cheapest way of getting started. That’s the way the IKEA invasion always begins—a few essentials, that’s all, then you end up with multicolored kitchenware and an eight-foot picture of the Empire State Building on your wall.
We have standards.
If I had my way (and I would, eventually), all the pieces in our house would come from local dealers. Will had introduced me to auctions, either for antiques or good-quality secondhand furniture, and I much preferred that to the mass-produced, falls-apart-if-you-exhale-at-it, cheap crap. Ther
e was some pride to be taken in buying and restoring, reusing and recycling, rather than ignoring local crafts and getting something generic instead.
In short, he’d turned me into a gay, interior design stereotype. I found I didn’t care.
“What do you think?” Will asked as we stood in what would be our bedroom. “The offer hasn’t been finalized yet. If you hate it, say now, because it’ll be ours in a day or so otherwise.”
“I love it,” I said, turning to him.
“Then it’s yours,” he said and grinned. I let him pull me into his arms and pressed my face to his shoulder.
There was more, I could tell, but he needed to let go of the information in his own time, rather than all at once. There was a little diner on the edge of town my dad liked; I gave Will directions, and we settled down with mugs of coffee and burgers on their way.
“There’s more,” he said as soon as we were comfortable. I smiled to myself and raised an eyebrow, prompting him to continue.
“Okay.”
“I spoke to my boss when I was back in Seattle. I’ve been pushing for a promotion for a while, but now more than ever, I really need more flexibility in my job.”
I knew all of this already and nodded, letting him paint a picture for me.
“I’ve been made ‘location independent,’” he said, making air quotes around the words.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t have a fixed office anymore. I’m not tied to Seattle. I can work anywhere in the country now. Including Atlanta.”
“So… you’re moving?”
“Yeah. If it’s all right with you, we’ll live here in the yellow house, and I’ll work from the office in Atlanta two or three days a week. The other days, I’ll work from home.”
“I… I can’t believe you’ve arranged all this in a few days.”
He grinned at me, then waited for our burgers to be served before continuing the conversation.
“This is all dependent on what you want, though,” he said and dunked a fry into his little pot of ketchup. “If you want to move back to Seattle, we’ll do that. I just wanted to give you some options. I know you want to be with your dad at the moment.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think we all need to stick together, for now.”
“I agree. The only thing is, I think I’ll end up staying in a hotel in Atlanta when I’m working there for a few days in a row. I won’t come home every night.”
“Oh.” I thought on that for a moment. “That’s fine,” I said cautiously.
“Really?”
“Yeah… I think so. I mean, it’s a few hours’ drive to get there and back, it makes sense for you to stay there if you can. Did you really get a promotion?”
Will’s face lit up as he nodded. “It’s good too. That’s how we can afford to own a second house.”
“So you’re not going to sell our house?”
He looked at me funny for a moment. “No, baby. We’ll have both. You really thought I’d sell it?”
“You didn’t say.”
“It’s our home,” he said, sounding defensive and hurt at the same time. “I would never sell without asking you first. Not even to buy somewhere for you.”
I reached over the table and squeezed his hand gently. “Thanks. I think I knew that really.”
He smirked and poked me with a french fry.
It was our home… but his house. Will had already owned it when we’d met, and I’d never earned enough to be able to share the mortgage. Instead, I paid my way on several bills, and things worked out just fine for us both.
We’d always planned to grow old together in that house, and even though I was having trouble seeing past the end of the week at the moment, that was still the plan. In my heart, I knew Georgia was a temporary thing. It was good there was no pressure for us to rush home anymore.
It was late by the time we got back to my parents’ house, and I made sure to lock up before we went up to bed. While Will took a shower, I unpacked his few things and added his dirty clothes to my laundry pile, then set the fans on to cool the room down.
When he emerged from the bathroom, a towel riding low on his hips and his skin still softly steaming, I had to swallow hard. As we’d both gotten older, he’d broadened out some, and I had known for a while I probably had an unhealthy infatuation with his back and shoulders. There were still droplets of water clinging to the dark hairs on his chest, and the whole picture made the breath catch in my throat.
“What?” he said, rubbing his hair dry with another, smaller towel.
“Nothing.” I turned away, feeling my face heat from being caught.
When we finally crawled into bed together, I rolled onto my side and let him press close behind me. Will skimmed a hand from my ribs down to my knee, then back up, coming to rest on my stomach. I leaned back into him, feeling the reassuring bulk of his chest against my back, smiling to myself when he rested his lips on my neck.
I knew we needed to be together, alone together, and this was all I was likely to get for a while longer. Knowing things were changing, though, was enough to keep me going. Having him with me was enough. For now.
Chapter 4
THE NEXT day, Will and I took my dad to see the new house and get his opinion on fixing it up. Out of everyone I knew, I wanted his ideas first.
“Oh. This is the old Miller place,” he said as Will pulled to a stop in front of the yellow house. “You went to school with one of those kids, Jess.”
“Really? Who?”
“I don’t remember the names. There were three or four of them. Redheaded kids, all of them.”
I shrugged.
“They moved out of town, oh, about ten years ago now. This place went up for sale and it’s changed hands a few times now. It’ll take some work, but there’s no reason why we can’t make it nice. Especially if you’re willing to put the work in, Jesse.”
“Yessir,” I said.
Since Will was starting his new location-independent job with a three-day stint at the Atlanta office, meeting all his new colleagues and learning his way around the building, my dad and I had a chance to get a head start on the house. It sucked that Will had only got back on the weekend and was going away again for a few days, and it would keep sucking until we got settled into something more regular.
Still, we decided on our priorities, and the first day was spent mostly ripping out old carpets and stripping wallpaper from the walls. Needless to say, the AC was cranked up fairly early in the day.
My dad seemed to be happier while ordering me about, and I bitched and moaned appropriately as we hauled stuff out of the house and into the back of his pickup, ready to go to the dump. The floors under the carpets weren’t in a great condition, and I was worried about having to replace floorboards.
“There’s nothing rotting there,” Dad said as we surveyed the living space at the beginning of day two. “It’s just not looking great. You wanna put carpet down again?”
“No. Wooden floors, I think.”
“That’ll cost you more.”
“I know,” I said, bracing my hands on my hips as we looked around. The room seemed bigger already, what with the crappy furniture, nasty wallpaper, and bad carpet all gone. I wanted wood floors and light-colored walls.
“You sure you can afford all this? I can help y’all out if you need it, Jess. You just gotta say.”
I didn’t talk money with my dad that often. He knew we were doing okay, since he asked a couple of times a year. It wasn’t something we needed to talk about. I knew he helped Jennifer with her school fees, so he wanted us to know he could do the same for Will and me.
“We’re good, Dad. Thanks.”
“All right. I know you’re not working at the moment….”
I smiled. “I promise. We’ve got some savings, and Will just got a promotion at work.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. He heads up whole departments now, not just teams.”
“Is
that so. I guess he’s an important man, then.”
“I guess. He still can’t tell me about a lot of his projects because of the military connection. It’s all very secretive, even when they’re only designing radios and stuff like that.”
Dad hummed, and I knew what he was thinking. He was distrustful of the government, the military in particular, and held highly controversial views on America’s position as a global power. I knew he’d been brought up Republican and had supported the party for years, until recently when his attitude toward the Tea Party got more and more derisive. These days, he registered as an independent and considered himself completely moderate: he hated everyone equally.
There wasn’t a lot I could tell him about Will’s work since I didn’t know much myself. Will would talk in the abstract about projects that had code names like Sunflower and Peacock and Grapefruit. Peacock had been a big deal. They’d made a lot of money on that one, and we’d taken a trip to the Caribbean on his bonus.
“Come on,” Dad said. “Let’s get on with it.”
There was plenty of work still to be done on cleaning the place up before I could start on the decorating part of it. My plan was to get the bedroom in good shape, and I could make do with a mess in other areas while we worked on them. Will and I needed a bedroom again. That was a priority.
While my dad did some of the more detailed work in the kitchen and bathroom, I got on with the grunt work in the two bigger rooms. It was hard, sweaty work, and it actually felt quite cleansing to do something physical for once.
For years, I’d worked in academia in one way or another. I had never seen myself as a particularly intelligent person, even when my career took me on a path to museum work and teaching. I had definitely never seen myself as a teacher.
When my life felt settled again and my ribs had healed from the car accident, I’d started looking around for a new job. My master’s degree was in history, so the move to the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle felt like a good fit. I liked the energy there and the chance for me to expand my horizons, which was how I had come to teaching.