by Selena Kitt
"Or napalm." He stared at that painting, trying hard not to laugh. Not that he found any part of this house particularly funny. His therapist had once called it a coping reflex. More than once he'd been known to laugh while lying face down in the dirt and sand, hands over his neck to protect it from the falling rocks and shrapnel of the latest extremist binge-bombing. In Iraq, they liked to do those first thing in the morning. Those earth-shaking booms and subsequent screams were the best alarm clocks he'd ever had. Some mornings, they still woke him up.
"Oh, but no!" Turning in a full circle, Tricia counted off the dilapidated home's many virtues on her fingers, her hot-pink fingernails sparkling with black and silver glitter. "A split-level three-story home with four bathrooms, eight bedrooms, two offices, living room and family room, 4500 square feet—which does not include the full, unfinished basement—and workshop-slash-garage, complete with the original servant's quarters above it, already updated… um, almost… into the most… um, cozy rental unit. So not only do you have all this—" She threw out both arms to encompass the whole mildewing, nesting, buzzing, breezy, quite orange and highly religious living room. Though her enthusiasm remained high, she did have the grace to blush. "—but you also have potential income property, too!"
Nolan resisted the urge to laugh again. Renters were not the kind of people he intended to bring to this house… if this was even the place he chose to buy. No, wherever he ended up, Nolan intended that house to be his return to normal. And, by God, he intended that to be his home second, and his dungeon first.
"You asked for a fixer-upper," she reminded.
"Fixer-upper implies it can be fixed," he replied. "How much is this diamond in the rough listed at?"
"That is the best question you'll ask all day." Tricia grinned. "Thirteen thousand."
"How the hell did that happen?" Pacing as far as the first closed door, he pushed it open onto a brightly lit office, the first of three bathrooms, and another paper wasps’ nest, which the bottom of the door bumped as it swung inward. Military reflexes took over. He slammed it shut again before the nest hit the floor and then stood there, listening to the tap-tap-tapping as angry wasps filled the inner hallway and bumped aggressively against the wood panels. Only two tried to crawl under the door. He stomped on one. Tricia and her high heels ground the other into the shag carpet. Snatching a sheet off the abandoned sofa, he threw it across the bottom of the door and that kept any more from creeping vengefully into the living room after them.
"Nine years' worth of back-owed taxes," she declared, clearing her throat and surreptitiously using the carpet to clean the bottom of her shoe. "All you have to do is pay it off and all this will be yours."
Nolan shook his head. She was chipper; he would give her that. "I'm surprised it hasn't gone to auction."
"It did." Her ponytail bobbed as she nodded. "Twice, in fact."
"I'm surprised nobody bought it." Except that he wasn't. Looking around, he knew exactly why both auctions had failed. Slipping past the suffering Son of God, he cautiously opened the second door. No wasps’ nest, he noted. Not really a bedroom either, since it didn't have a closet. It did, however, have a tiny cubby of a dumbwaiter in the far wall, the old sliding door yawning open on the pulley ropes that operated it. He had no idea if the actual dumbwaiter itself was currently locked into place in the basement or one of the two upper floors.
"Well," trailing unobtrusively behind him, Tricia said, "I suppose being twenty-three miles away from the nearest Wal-Mart, home improvement store, post office or, indeed, any town with a population of more than three hundred, does tend to turn off most prospective buyers. Most house-flippers want a place they can resell quickly, and considering the problems associated with this place, not to mention the expense of the repairs required, it would take a very particular buyer to move it once it hit the market again. Also, it won't pass for a bank loan, so… there's that." As if suddenly remembering she was supposed to be trying to sell this house, she added, "Oh, but Scio is a nice place to settle down. We have our own school; K all the way through twelve, and right within walking distance. People are real friendly here. It's got an incredibly low crime rate. Not a lot of people lock their doors. A real Mayberry kind of place." She stopped when he looked at her and rubbed at her scuffed knuckles again. She was stubbornly holding on to that smile of hers, although by now it had taken on an almost cringe-like quality. "Nearest grocery store is only eleven teensy little miles down the road. Kay's Gas and Deli Station." She bobbed another nod, then in a sing-song voice added, "They have Chocodiles."
"A sustainable source of Chocodiles should always factor in on anyone's smart home-buying decision," he joked, and her grin lost its cringe. Ignoring the fact that eleven miles was not teensy when it came to buying basic grocery necessities, Nolan instead focused on what had first caught his attention. "You said 'our'."
"Mm hm." She stepped into the doorway far enough to point through the bedroom's only window (two panes broken out of this one, although the entire top of original stained-glass squares was still intact). He gazed over the fence into the neighboring yard, filled to overflowing with flowers of every color, size and kind. "That's my place, right there. Which is why, when you said you were looking for a project, this house sprang immediately to mind. You know, three men founded this town and this was one of their first homes built here. It's heart-wrenching to see it just… rotting here like this."
Nolan looked at her, seeing her as he had earlier that morning and yet somehow it was like seeing her for the first time—light brown hair bound up in a ponytail that hung past her shoulders, soft grey eyes, small breasts and round hips, the former concealed within the bright red dress suit which amplified the latter. Not a classical beauty, but pretty nonetheless. Not to mention possessed of a smile incapable of admitting defeat for very long. When he'd met up with her at the realtor's office that morning, his first thought had been that she looked too eager and too nervous to have as much experience as she was trying to portray. He'd almost asked (as gently as possible, of course) for another agent. Standing in the midst of this massive living room, with one wasp nest in the corner and another still tap-tap-tapping behind Door Number One, a perpetually dying Jesus on one wall and sheetrock sagging from water damage on the other, he almost… almost… found himself regretting not having done it. And yet, there was something to be said for doing one's job with the kind of passion that so animated her face and voice.
"Want to finish showing me the house?" he asked.
Beaming, she led the way to the kitchen—a bright, brothel red, with black painted cabinets and a floor that sloped slightly toward the center. Nolan made a mental note to check the supports under this section of the house once he was shown the basement.
Leading out of the kitchen was another short hallway that led to an outer side door, a short set of stairs that went up into another wing of bedrooms and presumably the old servants' quarters, and another longer set of stairs that went down to the landing that supported the back door. To the right of this landing was the laundry room, which led to a massive garage (already outfitted with all the tables and tool space needed to double as a workshop). To the left were two more sets of stairs. One took him up to the second floor and third floor attic; the other went down into a full and unfinished basement.
The sump pump under the rickety wooden steps had stopped working, so stepping off that last stair had him standing in two inches of murky water. Sure enough, two joists under the kitchen floor had rotted out.
"Well," Tricia said proudly, fists planted on the curves of her skirt-clad hips. "Is this a project or what?"
It was something. Nolan looked at the broken joists. "It definitely is that."
He turned in a full circle, drinking it in all over again—the standing water up over the tops of his boots, the filth caused by years of neglect, the graffiti tags that littered the cement walls, a flood-soaked mattress blackened by mold and God only knew how many used condoms floating on
and around it, along with all the other flotsam the previous owners had left behind: discarded bits of broken furniture, Tupperware lids and Fisher-Price toys, bobbing in indiscernible dots of color in the murk. He ran through a silent list of everything he'd have to do just to make this rundown heap habitable. The peeling paint, the asbestos, the updates, the roof…
He was quiet for so long, by the time he turned full circle Tricia had lost her smile and her confidence. Her fists were no longer knuckled upon her hips. Instead, she stood on the bottom of those rickety steps, tapping worried fingertips and chewing at her bottom lip.
"Did…" She hesitated. "Did I get it wrong? You said you wanted a project, right? Something you could get lost in."
Nolan looked at the basement all over again. This was definitely a project he could get lost in. On the other hand, it was also the kind of nightmare project that could easily overwhelm and drown a man. Never a pleasant prospect, especially not in this water.
But then, it was only thirteen thousand to buy.
No bank in the world would offer a loan on a house in this kind of condition, as she'd already pointed out.
Fortunately, he didn't need a bank either to buy or to remodel. Fifteen years of careful money management while he'd served his country, bouncing from base to base, first around the States and then the world—Italy, Germany… Afghanistan and Iraq, before bouncing back to Connecticut before his long-awaited discharge finally, finally, brought him back to Oregon—if he was careful, he'd have more than enough.
"It does have great bones," he said, coming back to the stairs.
Tricia blinked twice. Her fingers stopped picking at one another. Cautiously at first, her smile returned. "That dumbwaiter is my favorite part. I know that probably sounds silly. Well, the dumbwaiter and the hardwood flooring in the attic. It might extend all the way through the first floor as well, although there's no way of telling what's under that horrible carpet." She stopped herself and flushed, a bright pink that under any other circumstance he would have found beguiling had he not already compartmentalized them both into the very professional relationship of real estate agent and client.
Still, it was hard not to smile back as he agreed, "Very horrible carpet. And that painting…" He tsked, and she rolled her lips in an effort to keep from laughing.
"It is a little over the top. So…" She shrugged, her hands flapping out slightly before slapping lightly back against her skirt-clad thighs. "What do you think? I've got a few other properties I could show you. Nothing quite as extreme as th—"
"No," Nolan said, startling himself as much her by the abruptness of a refusal he hadn't known until that very moment he was going to give. Belatedly he tried to soften it, but it surprised him how firm his resolve had become in such an incautious span of time. That wasn't like him. Not at all. "No, you're right. This is the perfect project."
Huge. But then, that was what he needed, wasn't it? This was going to be the project that kept him from going crazy while he struggled through the transition of military life to civilian; from G.I. Joe to Regular Joe. Someone who wouldn't hit the deck, grabbing for a non-existent sidearm every time a car backfired, and who slept on a bed instead of finding a blanket and pillow on a hard floor more familiar, comfortable… and safe. Although with the Fourth of July just around the corner, he already knew nowhere would feel safe once the fireworks started going off.
PTSD was an insidious thing. Already he could feel those cold, sick knots tightening in his guts just at the thought of night after night of nightmare-inducing, rapid gunfire-like popping. But that was in the city. Scio was a tiny little town, with neatly laid out streets (less than ten blocks in all), lined with old, but fairly-well maintained houses… except for this one, of course. He hadn't counted, but he'd be surprised if there were more than fifty homes within town limits. Fifty houses could still produce a lot of fireworks, though.
Maybe he could soundproof the basement. He was planning to build a dungeon down here anyway, a little soundproofing would fit right in. Nolan looked around him. Cement walls, high, narrow-ledged windows, exposed joists but huge, wide-open spaces—he could easily put a small room at one end, lined with acoustical panels, noise absorbers and insulation foam, and hunker down for a few weeks, listening to music and eating take-out until the popping stopped. He was army, after all. Army was good at hunkering down and waiting out the shit storms.
Finances in mind, he breathed in the dank, dark smells of the flooded basement, adding up how much work was going to have to go into this, but also seeing the potential.
"No," he said softly. "You gave me exactly what I asked for." Something he could 'lose himself in' as his therapist had put it, back when Nolan was still seeing a therapist and thought it might do him good. When his gaze finally came back to Tricia's, he found her staring back in startled pleasure.
"Really?" she asked, in a way that all but cemented in his mind the certainty that he was absolutely her first sale.
He came back to the stairs. "Take me to the paperwork. Let's do it."
"Oh, that's great!" She whipped around so fast, she almost lost her footing. One stiletto heel slipped off the edge of the rickety stairs, but almost as fast, she latched onto the very wobbly rail that was (barely) attached to the wall beside her. Nolan caught her other arm, just in case, but her enthusiasm did not diminish. "You've made a great decision. As much TLC as this place obviously requires, you're still getting a great house for the money!"
As much money as he was going to have to pour into this place to make it livable, he doubted he'd see even half back whenever it came time for him to move on. Following her up the stairs, Nolan avoided saying as much, but as Tricia reached the first landing ahead of him, he caught sight of something that up until that point he'd missed entirely.
Tricia wasn't wearing nylons. She wasn't wearing any kind of stockings at all, in fact. Her long beautiful legs were bare; the black seam lines racing from the backs of her heels all the way up under the hem of her slightly too-short business skirt had been tattooed permanently into place. It was as she turned the corner of that landing, glancing back to grin at him over her shoulder, that—between the sunlight filtering in through the dirty back door window and his following behind her at a slightly lower level—quite inadvertently, Nolan found himself looking up her skirt.
He only saw midway up her thighs, but that was enough to spy the black and blue bows that made up the upper portion of each leg's tattoo, and the word that crowned the soft flesh just below her buttocks. One word per bow: Daddy's Little.
Nolan stopped mid-step.
"This is a great town," Tricia was saying, as she continued up the next flight completely unaware that she was continuing on alone. "Friendly people, quiet neighborhood. Did I tell you about the town rooster? His name is Big Red. I guess you'd call him free range. He likes to hang around the post office. People open the door for him and he pretty much goes anywhere he pleases. He likes to roost on your porch, by the way. Hopefully, his crowing won't wake you up… um, every day."
Daddy's Little.
Afraid she would notice that he had fallen behind, Nolan hurried to catch up. He looked at that pink stripe in her hair and the makeup that was beginning to look less Goth-like and more club-like with every passing second. It would be years, if ever, before he got the memory of that tattoo out of his head.
"And just think," she was saying, as she reached the top and spun to face him again. "You might be new in town, but you're not a stranger. You already know one resident." 'Little' was all over the way she tucked one hand behind her back, raising the other to give him a wave that was equal parts shyness and welcome. "Me."
Daddy's Little. He couldn't possibly get that lucky.
Fighting hard to keep from feeling like she was a target he needed to lock into sights, he came up to the top of the stairs and stopped, just one down from where she was standing. That brought him eye-level with her breasts, but he kept his gaze on her face and steadfastly ref
used to look any lower. "Maybe once I get this place up to snuff, I'll invite you and your husband over for dinner."
"Oh." Those soft grey eyes of hers both lit and averted. She bit her bottom lip and, as if suddenly realizing they might be standing a little too close because she was blocking his way, she stepped back. "That's very Mayberry, too."
"I guess I'll fit right in." Because she'd opened the avenue, he slipped past her, leading the way back through the living room, past the painting and the diminishing aggression of the locked up wasps to the front door.
"I'm not married," she confided, taking the bait as she trailed along behind him.
"What a coincidence," he quipped, and held open the door. "Neither am I. Watch your step. I expect this porch to go any minute."
"Thank you." Slipping out of her heels, Tricia avoided the worst of the soft spots as she picked her way to the stairs. "Maybe I could meet you and your girlfriend for coffee sometime."
"I don't recall seeing a café on our drive into town."
"Probably because we don't have one." She laughed. "But upon occasion, Kay's Gas Station does a fair approximation of what good coffee should be."
"Upon occasion?"
Reaching the bottom of the steps, she bent to put her heels back on. "The rest of the time it tastes a little burnt, but it'll keep a trucker awake all day and all night long. On second thought, my kitchen's always open. Maybe once you're all moved in, you'd like to come over sometime? Bring your girlfriend," she said pointedly. "I'd love to meet her."
Nolan tsked, coming down the stairs just behind her. "No girlfriend," he said, as if it were a pity. Seven years ago, it had been, but time as they say was the ultimate healer. At least he could talk about Jesse now without getting too upset. "Military man," he explained. "She didn't seem to mind it when I was stationed in the States, but after three tours overseas, she got a little tired of being the only person sleeping in my bed." His smile felt a little flat, but at least he could smile. His therapist would say that was progress. Nolan also shrugged. "I guess I can't blame her."