by Mel Campbell
Before, she hadn’t really taken Dave’s worries all that seriously. Even now, she was still pretty sure she could find places for them to be together if she put her mind to it. Those cameras were big and bulky; there had to be plenty of gaps they couldn’t fit through. But she had just as much to lose as he did – more, even. If they were caught, there was still a chance Leary would keep Dave on the show and simply lose the incriminating footage to cover it up. Her, though, they’d fire for sure.
The more she thought about it, the more she realised she just couldn’t afford to lose this job. Her parents couldn’t support her for more than a day or two; Renton’s half-arsed job at the cinema barely paid his internet bills. And on top of everything else, they were due for a real estate inspection soon, and before that happened she’d have to rent a sander to try and get rid of the scorch marks on the floorboards from the viewing party debacle.
She hadn’t even had her first pay cheque yet, and already she was acting like she wanted it to be her last. She’d have to show some serious restraint around Dave from here on. After all, she’d made it this far – another eight weeks wouldn’t be that difficult.
Dave pulled his pants up while Rose tugged her top down.
‘We’re definitely not doing that again,’ he said as she rearranged her shorts.
‘Aw, but you’re so good at it.’ She kissed him lingeringly, taking his bottom lip between her teeth. Her fingers traced his stubbled jawline: rough yet fine, like 180-grit sandpaper. ‘Really, really good at it.’
‘Thanks. But you know, I don’t mean we’re not going to do this again.’ His hand was still cupping her butt; he gave one cheek a squeeze. ‘But we can’t do it again here.’
She looked around. Yes, it was a toilet, one of the portaloos that had been installed out the back of the site office for the crew’s use. But it had done the job; Rose had already been mentally scheduling another visit for later in the day.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘Every time I take too long doing something away from the cameras, they don’t let me do it again. Next time I need to use an outside toilet, they’ll find a reason to stop me.’
‘Shit.’
‘We’ve already used up that excuse.’
She kissed him again, her tongue insistent, their breaths seeming loud in the confined space. If they weren’t going to be able to do this again today, she was going to make the most of it. She’d tried to call Nicola last night and give her the news, but when she finally got through all she heard was Nicola shouting in the background while flapping white wings filled the screen. It sounded like Harippo-chan was attacking the laptop. Rose hadn’t called back.
‘There’ll be plenty of nooks and crannies in the house we can sneak off into, though,’ Dave said when they finally unlocked their lips. ‘I definitely haven’t finished with your nooks and crannies just yet.’
‘My crannies are all yours,’ she said, ‘and we can talk about the nooks when we get around to doing this on a real bed. But we’re not going to be able to sneak around your house.’
Dave’s face fell.
‘Leary caught me yesterday after you left. He said you’re not going to have time to sneak off the set, because after tomorrow’s judging the show goes to the next level. Which sounded a lot like they’ll be filming you in the house all day, every day.’
‘Oh shit,’ Dave said. ‘I knew at some point the producers would make us start putting everything together, but I thought we still had a week or two.’
‘Moss the Boss said next week is the start of the “down to earth” stage.’
‘Shitty shit,’ Dave said, shaking his head. ‘That’s the main construction stage. I’ll really have to lift my game now.’
‘If you’re doing construction we’ll get more time together on set,’ Rose said hopefully.
‘Only if you’re assigned to us,’ Dave said. ‘If you’re not I’ll never get to see you.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to win me every week,’ Rose said, and kissed him again.
‘We definitely do need more cupboards,’ Dave breathed into her neck. ‘Lots more cupboards. And shelves.’
‘So many shelves,’ Rose said, nipping his earlobe between her teeth. ‘So many cupboards.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ Dave said, pushing her away. ‘I really do have to go.’
‘I know you do,’ Rose said. ‘But I can’t let you go.’
‘That’s because I’m all exciting and new to you,’ he said, a new, darker tone to his voice. ‘Once you get to know me you’ll realise just how easy I am to push away.’
Rose shook her head. ‘Where’s this coming from? You know I can’t keep my hands off you.’
‘You’re amazing,’ he said. ‘I don’t deserve someone like you.’
‘I’m the judge of that,’ she said. ‘And I say you’re just what I deserve.’
Even though his hands lingered on her hips, he wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘You’re sweet, but I’ve done bad things. I haven’t always been the best guy.’
‘I don’t expect you to be perfect,’ Rose said, ‘but from what I’ve seen, you’re perfect for me.’
‘I doubt that.’ He pulled his hands away, clenching them into anxious balls.
‘Dave,’ she said, ‘even if you’d blown up a kindergarten – which I doubt, because I’ve seen how bad you are with tools – you’re a man who’s trying to better himself. You wouldn’t have wanted me to help you get better with tools if you weren’t.’
‘I’ve got a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘I used to think this kind of thing would just come naturally to me, that I could pick it up as I go along.’
‘A lot of people think that,’ Rose said, remembering any number of dates with men who assumed they could do what she did because they’d made a flower box in high-school woodwork class.
‘Not me. Not anymore.’
‘See? You want to learn.’
‘I need to learn. I need to be able to fix things.’ His voice was urgent.
‘You will,’ she said reassuringly. ‘You’re a fast learner.’
‘I’m definitely motivated. When I signed on for this, they said they were going to help me get started, but they’ve done nothing. I’ve just been bungling around, like a joke. I reckon the producers think it’s better TV if I don’t know what I’m doing.’
She hadn’t realised how important this was to him. ‘Dave, what’s wrong?’ Rose took his face in her hands. ‘All this dark talk about trying to fix what you broke in the past is getting creepy.’
He sighed. ‘I don’t want to be creepy.’
‘Then tell me what happened.’
Dave opened the portaloo door and looked around behind him. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, backing out.
He hurried off. Rose waited a few seconds, then a few seconds more. Usually she’d give him at least a minute’s head start to make sure the coast was clear, but she wasn’t going to let him leave on that note. She stepped out of the portaloo and looked around. Dave was disappearing around the corner of the site office, heading back to his house. She hurried after him, patting herself down as she went, making sure everything was back where it should be. Two more months of clutching at stray moments whenever they could didn’t seem so amazing now, but already she knew the second she was near Dave it’d take everything she had not to reach out and grab him. They’d just have to make the most of every second they had.
Dave was hurriedly striding around the back of the houses; Rose took the shorter but more public route along the court. If anyone stopped her, hustling to get back to work was all the excuse she’d need; Leary hadn’t been kidding around when he said the show was about to pick up the pace. Most of her morning had been spent in front of a camera helping Michelle install a range of hallway shelves. Michelle had even toned down the bitchiness a bit; Rose figured she was saving her quality zinger
s for when the pressure was really on.
Rose didn’t quite run up the path to Dave’s front door, but she was definitely a woman in a hurry. Which was lucky, because she was still a good ten metres from the front door when it opened and a grumpy-looking Leary stepped outside.
‘The clock’s ticking,’ he said. He literally pointed at his watch when he said it; Rose didn’t think people still wore watches now that everyone had phones.
‘Sorry,’ she said, remembering her cover story. ‘I was out at the depot trying to find some decent brackets. The only ones in the house were from Bad Bart – uh, I mean Bartletts.’
‘They are our main sponsor,’ Leary said, leaving the door open behind him as he came down the path towards her. ‘I guess they expect us to actually use what they’re giving us once in a while.’
Rose wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a joke or not – the Bad Bart’s brackets were lucky to support the weight of a shelf, let alone a shelf with something on it. But before she could react, Leary was past her and heading towards the site office.
‘See ya,’ Rose said to herself as he strode away. At least he hadn’t wanted to know where she’d been. And if Michelle wanted to know what she’d been up to, Rose could say she’d been talking to Leary, and it wouldn’t even be a lie. Win-win, she thought.
Michelle was in one of the front rooms, which was bare except for an oversized couch covered with cushions. Well, it was usually covered with cushions; for some reason today they were all on the floor. ‘Oh, that husband of mine,’ Michelle said, running a hand over the back of her neck to tidy up a few stray strands of hair. ‘He worked out all these savings to boost our cushion budget so we could get twice as many, but now we’ve got nowhere to put them all.’
The cushions looked fine to Rose, but she was no expert. Michelle suddenly dropped to her knees and started grabbing the cushions, throwing them back onto the couch. ‘They won’t even stay on the silly couch,’ Michelle said. ‘I’m constantly having to pick them up off the floor.’
‘Do you need me to help here?’ Rose said, ‘Because I thought I could start work on putting together the frame for the guest bedroom’s built-in wardrobes.’
‘I’ll need you back here soon,’ Michelle said, still on her knees, ‘I haven’t finished the hall shelves yet.’
‘Of course,’ Rose said, backing out of the room. She could hear Dave chatting to the camera crew in the kitchen; when she walked in she saw they were filming him fitting a kickboard under one of the cabinets Rose had installed a day or two earlier. It was brushed aluminium, so nothing to do with her; presumably one of the other tradies had brought it over from the depot.
A PA hurried over to Rose as she stood in the kitchen doorway, and urgently waved her away. Rose walked a few steps back down the hall, with the PA close behind.
‘I just wanted to have a word with Dave,’ Rose said.
‘Dave’s going to be installing boards all afternoon,’ the PA said. ‘Is it anything urgent?’
‘No,’ Rose said after a moment. ‘No, I guess it can wait.’
The PA looked down at the runsheet on her clipboard. ‘We’ll be needing you to work with Michelle for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe run it past her?’
Rose turned on her heel to get back to work.
Yeah, she thought as she walked back down the hall. Probably not.
When Rose arrived at work the next day the car park was already full, which was strange, considering she’d arrived a full hour earlier than usual. She’d thought that maybe if she was there early, she might have been able to grab a moment to grab Dave before the workday began. But her heart sank as she gazed across all these cars she’d never seen before. They could only mean a distinct lack of privacy on the set.
‘Shit,’ she said under her breath. She hadn’t dared to hope she and Dave would find time to have anything approaching sex first thing in the morning, but they did need to talk. She hadn’t been able to speak to him at all after their portaloo adventure yesterday, and she needed to find out what he’d meant by all that stuff about being a bad person. Dave didn’t seem like the type of guy who was prone to dark moods and exaggeration … but how well did she really know him? She hadn’t wanted to ruin the magic by Googling him. At least, she consoled herself, his skills still needed so much work that he’d never turn out to be some kind of power-tool maniac killer.
She finally squeezed her ute into a spot in the far corner of the car park, but she’d barely shut off the engine before someone was tapping on her window. It was a man she didn’t recognise, wearing a dark jumper with a white shirt peeking out around the neck. Slowly she wound down her window; thinking about power-tool maniac killers had her on edge.
‘ID please,’ the man said, holding out his hand.
‘Um, will a driver’s licence do?’ she said, taking her credit card holder out of her pocket. She held up her licence in front of him, while he looked down, scrolling through a tablet that contained a list of names. His jumper had a security company’s logo woven into the fabric over the breast, and he was wearing a lanyard with a laminated photo ID badge, and a nametag pin that read ‘DARYL’. Forget dressing up burly tradies as fake security guards – this guy checking her name off must be the real deal.
‘That’s fine,’ Daryl said eventually. ‘You’re free to go.’ He turned and walked back across the car park.
‘Go where?’ Rose called out. If the guard heard, he didn’t say anything. Over in the opposite corner of the car park, another similarly uniformed man was also standing by a car, only he seemed to be arguing with its driver. She didn’t recognise the woman in the car. As Rose watched, the guard pointed firmly away from the estate, and the driver slowly backed out of her parking spot.
‘What’s going on in the car park?’ Rose asked one of the other tradies, a skinny young guy drinking a coffee outside the food truck. ‘Did they ask you for ID when you arrived?’
‘Yep,’ he said between sips. Rose waited. He took another sip.
‘Is that normal? They’ve never asked me for ID before.’
Another sip. ‘Nope.’
‘Nope it’s not normal, or nope they’ve never asked you for ID before?’
Another sip. ‘Yep.’
‘Hard to see why they don’t put you on camera,’ Rose muttered, and started walking to Dave and Michelle’s house.
‘This’ll be your last day with us,’ Dave said cheerfully. Rose really hoped that cheery tone was put on for the camera crew standing behind him in the hall, filming her reaction. ‘So we’re going to have to make sure we get the most out of you!’
‘The more you put in, the more I put out,’ Rose said. Oh god, I can’t believe I just said that.
‘You’ve really been bending over backwards for me these last few days,’ Dave said, still smiling.
I guess we’re doing this, Rose thought. ‘You’ve been pretty flexible yourself,’ she said. ‘It really makes a big difference working with someone willing to give the kind of extensive support required to get the job done.’
‘Supporting you is –’
‘I think that’s enough,’ the field producer standing next to the cameraman said. ‘We’re probably not going to use more than a few seconds of this, anyway.’
‘If she even leaves at all,’ Michelle said loudly from somewhere behind Dave. ‘We’ve still got that Ninja Tradie wild card we won back in week three, and these shelves are nowhere near finished.’
Rose looked at Dave. If anyone but her saw the expression on his face – the way it lit up just at the mention of the possibility they might continue to work together – their secret would be a secret no more. Fortunately the camera was pointing down at the floor, and the crew were muttering to each other about where to set up next. Their love would remain theirs alone for a little while yet.
A very little while, if the rest of that morni
ng was anything to go by. Michelle and Dave were working together installing the entertainment units Rose had fabricated earlier, with Rose now in a supervisory role. Which meant that every time Dave got something wrong she had to step in and guide him, standing close behind him to show him how the shelves were meant to slide into place. She actually held his hand once or twice to help him brace himself as he pushed a heavier wall piece into place. She could smell him, his sweat and exertion, and where even a week ago those smells were just part of being on a site, now they brought with them a whole new range of connotations. Keeping her mind on the job at hand suddenly became insanely difficult.
She could tell he felt the same, and that only made it worse. Sometimes they would make eye contact and just the briefest glance was now so hot she had to force herself to look away, which then only made it worse because there were so many places for her gaze to linger. How could he possibly have sexy knees? Why couldn’t they make him wear long trousers?
She was blushing basically nonstop now, which she hoped everyone else but Dave thought was just the flush of hard work. Even her ears burned. Her skin was tingling, a vertigo rush to the head, stomach full of butterflies, and she was hyper-aware of her breasts cupped in her bra, the hard nipples brushing the fabric every time she moved. And between her legs, a warm, wet throb, a pleasurable ache that went on and on.
But then she wasn’t even embarrassed by how turned on she was, because it was taking all her mental energy to stop herself from lunging at him. At one point he was literally bending over in front of her with his butt sticking in her face. She had to laugh; if any of this made to air, it’d have to have cheesy porn music playing over it.
At least they managed to keep the double entendres to the bare minimum, though she had said ‘bare minimum’ more times than was strictly necessary. And then there was the time Dave had asked her to hold his ‘tool’, which had led to a couple minutes of flustered fumbling before he’d managed to point to a hammer.
‘I can’t believe I forgot what it was called,’ Dave had said, a little too loudly.