Foundation

by Lainey Davis

  “I had to be rough with them,” I explain to Isaac. “Nobody there would listen to me if I was anything other than intimidating. I had to choose between being liked and being effective.”

  Isaac looks over at me, his expression unreadable, and after awhile he says, “I think you’re effective and I like you.”

  I stumble over a crack in the pathway when he says that, caught off guard by his earnest admission. “Well, I like you, I guess,” I retort.

  I’m filled with lust for him, and the chemistry between us is great, but as I run by his side, setting the pace and venting to him about my frustrations at work, I realize that I really am coming to enjoy Isaac Brady as a…”what are we exactly?” I blurt.

  “What are we?” He stops running and stares at me, hands on his hips.

  I nod. “Yes, I mean I know I’m your client and you’re my running coach and your dad is strangely entwined with my boss. But what are we?” He doesn’t answer, his eyes wide. “Are we fuck buddies? Are we dating?”

  Isaac scratches at his chin, considering. “Do we have to decide?” he asks. “I’ve been enjoying the spontaneity of…whatever this is.”

  I start running again, thinking about what he asked. “I think I might feel better about it all if there was a time limit or parameters.” I pick up the pace a tiny bit and find I’m still able to talk as I run. I’m getting pretty good at this. “How fast are we running right now?”

  He checks his watch. “About ten minute miles. That’s a massive improvement from a month ago, Nicole!”

  He gives me a high five and then says, “Hmmm. Parameters.”

  I’m about to tell him we should wrap up our adventures by the time he breaks ground on my yard, or something, so we can both avoid catching feelings and getting ensnared in each other’s bullshit. But then, the heavens open and it starts pouring buckets.

  I curse, but the change in the weather seems to delight Isaac for some reason. “Are you insane?” He turns for my house and starts sprinting to get back. I’m able to almost keep up with him for a bit, until he turns to face me and slows. I’m breathing heavy in front of him and not even embarrassed, and that just starts to worry me as well.

  “I’ve been waiting for it to rain again,” he shouts above the crashing water sounds. “I want to go and stare at the apartment complexes and see about their stormwater runoff.” He starts explaining technical terms to me about the dirt and the water and I don’t understand a word of it.

  I focus instead on the way his shirt clings to him in the rain and the way it looks when he brushes the curtain of dark hair back from his eyes with his forearm. Sexy as sin.

  When we get near my house, he runs around back and makes a beeline for the building next door, and stares. He squints. And then he picks me up and starts to spin me around in the rain, kissing me. It takes my breath away, the cold, salty feel of his lips against mine in the downpour.

  I gasp when he sets me down and points at the hip condo building that’s only partially inhabited. “Look at the downspouts,” he says. “Do you have your phone on you? Can I make a video?”

  Wide eyed, I pull my phone from my leggings and hand it to him. He struggles to pull up the camera icon with the wet screen, but gets it to work and narrates while he records. “Despite trendy stormwater mitigation systems written into the building plans, the downspouts are overrun,” he says. I watch over his shoulder to see what he’s filming, to see from his perspective. Storm water is gushing from the eaves of the building, pouring from the roof.

  “It’s all flowing directly into the soil of your and Valerie’s yard,” he says, turning and recording the water. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “This is it!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Zack

  JUST AS MY brother predicted, the work done by the Meyer construction crew is subpar. Who even knows how many thousand gallons of rainwater are dislodging the soil in Nicole’s yard? Jesus, she’s lucky her whole house didn’t slide into the river.

  I hand her back her phone and grab her hand, sprinting toward her house. My clothes are soaked and heavy, and I’m fucking elated.

  Nicole’s fingers shake as she tries to type the code on the keypad at her house, and I kiss her neck, guiding her fingers with my hand. As soon as we get inside, I start stripping her, peeling off the wet layers. I was going to fuck her after our run anyway, and now I find I can’t wait to get her naked.

  “I want to celebrate this,” I say, nipping at the sensitive skin below her ear. I love that I know she gets goosebumps when I do that.

  “The torrent?” She asks, moaning softly as I pull the wet bra up and over her cold rack. Her nipples stand painfully erect, so tight and perky as she shivers.

  “Yes. The torrent of water. It’s so bad for them.” I move on to stripping off my own clothes, but I notice that she’s really shivering. “Hot shower?”

  “God, yes, please,” she shouts, and then squeals when I toss her over one shoulder and bound up her stairs.

  I head into the bathroom and turn on her shower full blast while she digs some towels out from the linen closet. The white tile gleams under the heat lamp in the ceiling. “This room is amazing,” I mutter, as always imagining her on her hands and knees doing the work of restoring it. “Did you do the tile?”

  I turn to see her answer, but she’s already stepped into the spray. I stare as she rubs the hot water along her skin, trying to chase out the cold. “Isaac,” she says, pinching her nipples in the steam. “I don’t want to talk about tile or torrents right now.”

  After, in her bed, limbs tangled with mine around the damp mess of her sheets, she says, “Explain it now. About the water and my trench.”

  “It’s a headscarp,” I correct, tracing my finger along the curve of her hip. I love how soft she is, how warm and present. “And anyway, that condo building has been slowly eroding your soil foundation since that roof went up.”

  She chews her lip and twirls a finger through my chest hair. “Sooo this means…”

  I smack her butt and cup the flesh in my palm, squeezing. “We’re going to sue the fuck out of them and you won’t have to pay me out of pocket.”

  I feel her limbs relax, melt into mine a little more. “What comes next?” She breathes.

  I grin again. “Next comes my favorite part. I let Jason do his thing to get the funds in line and I start engineering the solution to your problem. You’re not going to see much of me for awhile because I’ll be in my happy place.”

  “Where’s that? Buried in a bunch of computer monitors?” She squints at me in the fading light. I shake my head.

  “Nah. I’ll be standing in the mud in your yard using my favorite tools to do calculations.” She smiles, content. I like this. I like that I’ve made her happy. I like that I’ve solved a geotechnical mystery. Most of all, I like that the rain bought me more time with her.

  She stretches and stares at me, considering something. “I have shit to do, Isaac.”

  “Oh.” I can’t mask my disappointment. I know by now that she’s not a cuddler, and neither am I normally. But I wasn’t expecting her to kick me out of her bed again so soon.

  I feel her fingers curl around my arm and I look down at her hand. “You can stay,” she says, “and do your math here. But I’ve got to do some work. Is what I’m saying.”

  This seems like a pretty big deal, especially considering we hadn’t gotten around to talking about her parameters before the rain storm. But I’m not going to argue with her and I’m sure as shit not going to leave if she’s letting me stay.

  She tosses on a ratty old bathrobe and I cram myself into an old pair of her mesh shorts to go downstairs and grab my bag and change. When I come out of the bathroom, I find her curled up on her couch with her laptop open, biting her lip as she types furiously and mutters to herself.

  I set myself up at the kitchen counter where I don’t think I’ll disturb her, and call up my brother Liam on video chat. He answers with a confused look.
“Aren’t you down the hall from me in your office right now?”

  “Nope.” I spin around, showing him my surroundings, before stopping to consider the questions this might inspire. “I made headway in Nicole Kennedy’s landslide situation,” I tell Liam once I realize he’s staring at me and waiting.

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nod. “Meyer,” I tell him. His eyes go wide. “They were the contractor on the condo building next to Nicole and Valerie’s property—Valerie is the old lady who owns the other half of Nicole’s duplex.”

  Liam gives me a ‘yeah, yeah,’ gesture, and I tell him about the video. “I was out there taking some calculations, looking over the building design compared with the construction sketches, when it started to rain.”

  He snorts. “I was caught out in that, too, on my way to lunch with Granny.”

  I email him the video. “Take a look at the fine craftsmanship on their roof garden.” Liam’s eyes bulge as he watches the streams of water pouring off the roof, running along the ground toward Nicole’s property.

  “Holy shit!” He says, leaning in to stare. “I guess you got them. Hell, even I know that amount of water runoff can’t be good for the soil integrity.”

  I grin and thank my brother again for his insight that led me to this discovery. “I need to call Jared so he can work his lawyer magic.”

  “Not so fast,” Liam starts to protest. “We need to talk about why you’re not wearing a shirt and whose house you’re sitting in right now.”

  “What’s that?” I stall. “Bad connection, bro. Sorry. Talk to you later.”

  I hang up abruptly and get together an email for Jared. Lawyers have a special gift for taking something cut and dry and making it take an entire day to document and spin into paperwork for an insurance claim and lawsuit.

  I keep thinking about Nicole, how she’d smiled when I told her the news. I keep thinking about lying in her bedroom, where the original beams are exposed in her ceiling and I know she stripped off generations of paint to salvage the trim and repair the transoms above the windows.

  I look over at her, still working away happily. I don’t want to interrupt her, so I send her a text from where I sit.

  Jared the lawyer is going to send you enough paperwork to fill in your yard.

  When her phone bings she looks over at it, and then over at me. I wave. She laughs, but picks her computer back up. “You gonna leave me hanging?” I wad up a napkin from the holder on the counter and toss it toward her, but it doesn’t quite make it.

  Like a loon, I grin at her until she picks up her phone and starts tapping.

  After what seems like forever, she writes Just make sure you clear that with Valerie first or else she’ll accuse me of burning her plant roots. Again.

  The rest of the day is all calculations and paperwork, seething phone calls from the crew at Meyer Construction, vowing to never work with Beltane ever again. Good riddance, I say. I know I have nothing to do with that aspect of the business, but my uncle does.

  My stomach rumbles, and I decide I’ve had enough work for one day. I start opening cabinets noisily, looking for something I can slap together and call it a meal, but Nicole basically has no food here.

  “What are you doing out there?” She shouts from the living room, where she doesn’t look up from her laptop.

  “Well I was going to make you dinner, but you don’t have any food in this house.”

  “Accurate,” she says, finally closing the lid and looking at me. “We can’t go out with you looking like that.”

  I run my hands over my chest, dancing, “what, like this? You can’t handle all this?” I feel light and facetious. Is this, maybe, happiness creeping in on me? I run over to where she’s sitting and dive onto her on the couch, making her squeal. “Don’t worry,” I murmur into her ear, tickling her and loving when she laughs. “It can be a private show.”

  We place an order for delivery and miss the doorbell when the food arrives, but I’m too wrapped up in her to care.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Nicole

  A FEW DAYS later, I come in to work to discover Mark looking smug. He’s smirking at me when I reach for the coffee he’s pretending to hold out of my reach. “What in the hell do you know?” I chide him. “Spill.”

  “Two things,” he says, settling in to the chair opposite my desk and crossing his ankle up onto the opposite knee so I can see his brightly colored socks.

  “Mark, we’re not in tech anymore. You can wear normal socks to work,” I tell him, dying to know what he knows.

  “I like the fun ones,” he says, spreading out his papers and pulling out his fancy gel pen. “So, first, your mother called to remind you that her birthday party is coming soon. Don’t roll your eyes at me. I also talked to Alice in the kitchen, and she mentioned how Emma has been practicing saying no to everyone and everything. Something about being swamped with revisions for her new novel and also having to take care of the babies.”

  I groan. Emma is always my date to my mother’s fancy birthday brunch. This year, the entire thing has more gravitas because Mom is turning 50. In reality, she’s turning 52, but she’s been lying about her age for decades and would rather people think she had me as a teenager than admit she’s getting older.

  “So why does that make you smirk like a smug asshole?”

  Mark grins. “Because now you have to find an actual date or else tell Mama she should change the headcount because you don’t have a plus one.”

  “It’s really cruel that you revel so much in my mother’s nonsense.” I chug the coffee. Mark knows exactly what color I like it—just a splash of milk to cut the bitterness. He also knows I’m mostly full of shit, because his own parents treat him like garbage, too. I was glad to bring him with me when Tim recruited me to Stag Law, and glad to give him enough of a raise that Mark doesn’t have to worry about asking his parents for money ever again.

  “So, thing two is that we had a call from Beltane Engineering this morning.”

  I arch a brow. I haven’t seen Isaac in a few days, but I see traces of him in the yard. Marks from him placing a ladder. Spray painted lines on the ground. Sometimes I go out there before work, hoping I’ll catch him, but I always have to leave before he gets there and he’s gone by the time I get home.

  Mark looks over his notes. “Seems like the asshole contractor is going to settle. It’s possible Zack Brady mentioned that you work with high profile professional athletes with lots of media connections. I guess that building has been struggling to sell condo units? Anyway! Everything is coming up roses for you in the back yard department.”

  “Hm.” I tap my nails on the desk. This feels too easy. Like the threat was too great for the amount of work involved in the solution. Something isn’t right, but I can’t place what it might be. “Was it Isaac who called?”

  I try very hard to keep the anticipation out of my voice and control my facial features. I don’t think Mark is buying it, though, because he grins. “It was indeed. Which reminded me how much time you two are spending together training for the run. I might have suggested you’d be stopping by Beltane in person to thank him.”

  “Jesus, Mark. You’re impossible.”

  “No, honey, you’re impossible to work with when you’re not getting laid. And it’s been a long ass time since you’ve had me block off any evenings or arrange for any dry cleaning that wasn’t work appropriate.” He looks me up and down, frowning.

  I’m not about to let him know I’ve been getting plenty of penis. “Can we transition from personal updates to actual work yet?”

  Mark snorts. “He’s going along to Paraguay, right? This is work. So you’re going over there with this briefing after you and I hash out the itinerary and strategy for your meetings with Augusto’s contacts.”

  And so, two hours later, I find myself calling a car service to drive me to the Beltane Engineering building, with a thick file of meeting strategies I feel uncomfortable about. Despite the focus g
roups and the information I pulled together about other foundations, Tim is fully convinced we need to create a charity dedicated to landslide mitigation…for a pro baseball player who can’t even say the word mitigation.

  Tim has fully drunk Mick Brady’s kool-aid and is dead set on us diving into the infrastructure approach to Augusto’s foundation.

  I’m so conflicted, because helping to improve roads and access to school buildings feels like a cause that’s fascinating and obviously meaningful to Augusto personally, but all of our numbers and market research indicates that donors just aren’t enthused about their tax write-off going toward construction projects…unless it’s constructing sports facilities.

  The whole situation makes me wish I hadn’t pushed Tim to delve into foundation work at all.

  I enter the lobby of Beltane, admiring the original woodwork and exquisite tile patterns on the floors. Someone had taken great care to restore this space, honoring its original splendor. “Hey, I know you!” Mick Brady himself emerges from a side door before I can approach the receptionist. “Not honey, right?” My nostrils flare at him, but he smiles. “Ms. Kennedy, what brings you down here?”

  “Just coming by to finalize some things with my landslide situation,” I tell him with a shrug. I don’t really feel like delving into trip details with him and trust that Isaac will pass along the pertinent information. I also suspect Mick won’t read it anyway.

  Mick smiles and leans on the reception desk. “Emily,” he says. “Ms. Kennedy here is a very important person. Can you make sure she gets the good coffee? I’m going to walk her up to Zack myself.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Emily and I both say at once, causing us both to smile. But Mick waves us off and gestures toward another door. I’m surprised that we’re taking the stairs, but then I remember that the Bradys are a family who run ten miles a day. Mick doesn’t even hesitate as he hops up two flights. Something tells me he doesn’t mask his age like my mother does, but then again, Isaac said he dates women closer to my age than his own.