But fun wasn’t enough. Not anymore.
I decided that if I couldn’t improve my mood, I could at least get the house in better shape. Another day of rain was the perfect excuse to stay inside and clean. I tackled the bathroom first. Best to get the most hated job out of the way. Then I did some dishes.
After a snack break, I gathered up an armful of things sitting at the top of the steps, waiting to be put away downstairs. I rarely went in the basement; it was so dank and musty. And with most of Jake’s stuff down there, it held painful reminders.
I opened the door and stepped down to the first step, trying to hit the light switch with my elbow since my hands were full. Then the load in my arms shifted, and I felt something drop—I think it was the ice bucket. It hit the stairs with a bang and rolled downward, hitting each step with a clunk. Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, splash.
I froze, hearing that last sound. That couldn’t be good. I finally managed to hit the light switch. Blinking, I looked down. The ice bucket floated at the base of the stairs in what appeared to be about three or four inches of water.
Crap.
* * *
“We got the gas and the electricity off, so it’s safe to go down there,” Mike said. He and Lisa lived the closest, so I’d called them first. They’d come right over, followed shortly by Alison and Drew. Even though I hadn’t seen them in ages, they’d dropped everything and hurried over. It made me realize how stupid I’d been for not keeping up with them after Jake and I broke up. They were good friends, and I’d missed them.
I hadn’t called Jake. I’d thought about it, but I just—I didn’t know if I could handle that right now. I hadn’t yet worked through my feelings about him and about the way we’d been playing together lately. And now wasn’t a great time to figure it out, not with the lower part of my house underwater.
“What do we do?” I asked Mike. Lisa had told me that he’d grown up in an area where basements flooded a lot. He seemed like he knew what he was doing.
“Let’s get all your stuff up first. No point in setting up a pump until the water level in the surrounding ground goes down. Drew and I will move your boxes and such to the steps. You girls can take it to higher ground.”
“C’mon, Fiona. Why don’t you show us where we can start stacking things to dry out?” Lisa said.
The garage offered the most floor space, so I moved my car out to the driveway—which also involved Alison backing up her car. We both ended up pretty wet. Lisa gave the garage floor a quick sweep, and then we began carrying out the boxes the guys had set on the stairs.
“Shouldn’t we open them, let things air out?” Alison asked.
I thought about it, but then shook my head. “Maybe we should get everything we can out of the basement first and then worry about that.”
In a little less than an hour, most of the smaller items from the basement had either been moved upstairs or put up on tables or chairs. Mike and Drew came up, taking off their wet shoes and socks. I passed out towels and beers.
While the others took a short break, I cautiously climbed down the basement stairs. I wanted to take stock, to see what was left down there and what needed to be moved next. I’d had some boxes of stuff stored there, too, like books, old papers, and other stuff I probably should have gotten rid of long before. I hated to think what kind of shape all of that was in now.
I eased down the stairs past the remaining items Mike and Drew had set there. With the power cut, the basement looked even darker than usual. I fought back the wetness behind my eyes. I’d had so much trouble with this house. It was the first house I’d ever bought. There’d been good things about it, most of which involved Jake, but a lot of bad things as well.
After pausing at the bottom, I took a tentative step into the water. It came up to my ankle. I moved slowly through the water, looking around. There was an old dining room set in the corner. On top of it was a wooden desk of Jake’s. The guys must’ve put it up there to get it out of the water. Those should go up. The things on the shelving units along the back wall looked okay except for the items on the bottom shelf.
To my dismay, I spotted an old wooden bookcase that I’d always loved, its base covered in water. In college, I’d painted it with swirls of bright blue and green. I went over and moved all the books to the table. The ones on the bottom shelf were ruined, of course.
I hated seeing the bookcase standing in the water like that. If I could get it up on something, maybe it would dry out without too much damage. I stubbed my toe and looked down. Some bricks from a long-abandoned attempt to create a garden patch in the back yard were covered by water. I pushed the bricks over to the bookcase with my foot. Maybe I could lift it onto them.
I raised one end of the bookcase but couldn’t get the bricks under it. I bent down, repositioned the bricks, and lifted again. To my surprise, the whole bookcase rose into the air a few inches. Confused, I looked up. Jake was holding the other end.
His usually expressive face was a mask to me. His eyes were serious, his mouth was a straight line across his face. I couldn’t read any emotions in his expression, but I knew he wasn’t happy. That much was very clear.
I managed to get my side propped up on a stack of bricks. Then I moved over and did the same thing on his side.
“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Mike called me,” he said, his voice flat and expressionless. “Thanks for letting me know that my belongings were under water.”
“I—I was going to call you, but things happened so fast.”
“Yet you had time to call the others.”
“I … ” Yeah. There wasn’t much I could say about that. “We got most of your stuff up. It’s in the garage.” I made myself look at him. Now his eyes were cold, something I didn’t think I’d ever seen before. It made me nervous, made me start to babble. “As soon as we get everything out of the basement, we’re going to open up the boxes, start drying things out. Alison thinks that we can—”
“Why bother?” he asked. “You kicked me to the curb, why not just do the same to my stuff?”
“Jake—” I began. But he turned away, sloshing through the water. He grabbed two chairs and took them upstairs.
I stayed there, stunned. I leaned against the wall, though what I really wanted to do was to curl up in a ball and cry. Could this day get any worse? A few minutes later, Mike and Drew came down, ready to move things again. Jake wasn’t with them.
They took up the rest of the table set, the desk, and the bookcase. Mike explained that anything that remained behind would get moldy. He said the basement would be damp for weeks even after we got the water out. He knew where to borrow a pump, and he thought that by tomorrow the water level in the surrounding ground would be low enough for us to start.
I didn’t take in very much of what he said. I just kept thinking of that look in Jake’s eyes.
The two couples left a few hours later. I thanked them profusely, and they promised to come back tomorrow to help some more. Jake’s pickup was still parked on the road out front, so I figured he was in the garage, sorting through what was left of his things.
I took a slightly warm soda out of the fridge, opened it, and drank about half of it. I was exhausted. And I was also afraid of going out in the garage. But I knew I had to.
I grabbed a beer for Jake and opened the door to the garage.
He had half a dozen boxes open and had spread the contents out to dry. Clothes, papers, tools, books were laid out on every available surface. The garage door was open. It was still raining lightly, but it wasn’t coming in.
Jake didn’t look at me when I came out, so I set the beer on the workbench near him. “I’m sorry about your stuff.”
He bent down and picked up a soggy pile of paper out of a box. He carried the dripping mass over to the trash can. “Is that all you’re sorry about?”
“I should’ve called you,” I said.
“Yeah, you sure as hell should have.�
�� He came over, took a swig of the beer. Finally, his eyes found mine, and I flinched at the anger in them. “Did you really think I’d fucking hold you to it?”
“What?” I said, tearing my gaze away from those blue eyes that usually looked so warm. So welcoming. I thought I’d seen him angry before. All those times we fought, all those times we’d both raised our voices. This was nothing like that. I was starting to see that when Jake got truly angry, he got quiet. He got cold. It was heart-breaking to see him look at me like that. And I still didn’t understand why. It couldn’t just be about his stuff getting ruined.
“Did you seriously think I’d make you fuck me for helping you with the basement?”
“What? No, I didn’t—”
“How could you even begin to think that, Fiona? It was a just a game. You could’ve said no at any time. Do you think I’m some kind of monster?”
“Jake, I—” But he didn’t let me speak.
“If you think I could do something like that, then you don’t know the first goddamn thing about me. If you think you can’t count on me in an emergency, then maybe we never knew each other at all. Maybe it was just about getting laid. That’s what you always thought, right? That all I was ever after was a good time? Drinking beer, having sex, playing video games, hanging with the guys. That’s all there is to me, right?”
He slammed the beer down on the workbench, causing liquid to slosh out all over the place. “Screw you, if that’s what you think.”
“But I don’t—”
But he’d left.
Chapter Seven
THAT EVENING WAS one of the worst nights of my life. I was exhausted, I had a basement full of water, I had wet furniture and cardboard boxes everywhere. Everything was dirty, including me. But all of that paled in comparison to Jake’s anger, and the genuine hurt I’d sensed behind it.
I still couldn’t believe that he’d thought I hadn’t called him because I was afraid he’d demand sex. That hadn’t entered my mind at all. I wish he would’ve let me explain. If there was one thing I did know, it was that I could count on him in an emergency. I knew that with all my heart.
So why, then, had I been so reluctant to trust him in non-emergencies? His other point had hit home. Maybe I had thought that he was only out for a good time. What did they say about living together? Something like, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Jake really liked milk, and I liked giving it to him.
I’d always known he was a good man. But yeah, maybe I hadn’t thought he’d taken us living together all that seriously. He’d always seemed so reluctant to talk about our relationship. Our future. So maybe I’d assumed he didn’t think we had much of one besides good times and good sex.
Around nine, I warmed up a small dinner in the microwave. Mike had deemed it safe to turn the electricity back on, but not the gas since the water heater was in the basement. The water heater Jake had fixed. I wondered, if I’d never called him over for things like that, if I’d never made that bargain with him, what would have happened.
I tried to convince myself that I wished we’d never started playing again once we broke up. But it wasn’t true. What I actually wished was that we hadn’t broken up in the first place. But then I supposed we’d still have the same problems we did before. Why did it have to be so complicated?
I ended up throwing the food out. I couldn’t eat. I was too upset.
On Sunday, the gang came back, minus Jake, and the guys got a pump set up. Slowly, almost too slowly to see, the water drained out of my basement. Lisa and Alison helped me sort through the mess upstairs. They made superficial small talk. I’m sure they could see my red eyes and nose, but they understood when I said I didn’t want to talk about it.
A little over twenty-four hours later, the basement still had a few puddles, but was much better overall. Mike turned the gas back on. He dismantled the pump and gave me instructions for the next steps, cleaning and sanitizing anything the floodwater had touched, and eventually making plans to seal the cracks in the floor. “You’ll be fine, kiddo. Turn on lots of fans, and keep all your stuff upstairs until it’s completely dry. You don’t want your things to get all moldy. And let us know when you’re ready to move furniture back down there. Unless Jake—”
“Thanks, Mike,” I interrupted. “For everything.”
He nodded and left.
Rather than work on mopping up the remaining puddles in the basement, I went to the garage to see how the stuff out there had fared. I opened the garage door, relieved to see that the sky was relatively clear.
Jake had pulled a lot of his things out and spread them around, but there were still a dozen unopened boxes. I cut open a few that were near me. They were mostly full of clothes, and the garments weren’t in very good shape. Though the cardboard had dried, the clothes inside hadn’t.
I sorted his jeans, vests, flannels, and sweatshirts into piles and started a load of wash. At the bottom of one box, I found a little stuffed dog. It was tan with over-sized, sad puppy-dog eyes. We’d gotten it at a local carnival. In a playful mood, I’d led him over to one of the games booths and asked him to win me something. It was a shooting game, and I’d figured that with his years of video-game training, he’d be able to get a prize no problem. But he’d said no, he wanted me to win him a prize. He’d coached me, showing me how to hold the gun and helping me aim, purchasing more tickets so that I could play until I’d won. We’d named him the little guy Spike.
Now, Spike was dark and dirty. I could see a line where the water had been. I looked at his sad eyes, hugged him to my chest, and started crying.
* * *
Thursday night, I texted Jake. I kept it very simple. I said that all of his things were dry. Could he come tomorrow night to pick them up? Or, if he wanted, he could store them in the basement again.
After a couple of hours, he texted back: Be there after work.
That was all. But it was enough. He was coming over, so I had a shot. I was determined to make the most of it.
On Friday evening, I was a nervous wreck. I’d taken off work a few hours early to get ready, but I felt like I needed about five more days to get mentally prepared. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say to him, but hopefully the right words would come when I needed them to. I’d certainly practiced enough.
I paced the living room for about a half hour until he arrived. When I saw his truck pull into the driveway behind my car, and I hurried to the garage and opened it.
He walked up the drive looking so damn handsome. He’d come straight from work, so he had faded blue jeans on and a long-sleeve cotton tee that showed all his muscles.
“Evening, Fiona,” he said when he spotted me in the garage. His eyes rested briefly on the forest green dress I was wearing. It was new, and it made me feel very feminine. The neckline fell in loose folds just above my breasts, but it was tight over my waist and hips. It ended mid-thigh.
“Going out later?” he said, one eyebrow raised.
“No,” I said without elaborating.
He stared at me for a second longer but didn’t say anything else. Instead, he looked around the garage. All of his clothes were clean and folded into neat stacks on top of a sheet on the workbench. The little stuffed dog from the carnival was clean and perched on top of a sweatshirt. The rest of his belongings had been dried out to the best of my ability and stacked in plastic crates.
“Thanks for doing all this,” he said. “I expected those clothes to be ruined.” He walked over and ran his hand over a neatly folded sweater. “Guess I’ll start loading up my truck.”
“Could you come inside first? There’s one more thing in there.”
He squinted at me. “That old desk, you mean? You can keep it if you’d like. If there’s not too much water damage. If there is, just toss it out.”
“Please come inside for a minute, Jake.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then shrugged. We went inside.
Once inside the doorway, h
e paused, noticing the smell immediately. Not the damp smell of wet wood and cardboard that I’d spent the week getting rid of, but the far more welcoming smell of his favorite mac ’n’ cheese with crumbled bacon and toasted bread crumbs. He walked into the kitchen and stared at the table set for dinner. I’d gone all out with the good dishes, a crimson table cloth, and even two low candles—candles he’d last seen in my bedroom.
“What’s all this?”
“I’d like to talk to you. And I thought you might be more willing to listen if I made your favorite meal.”
He looked at me, his head tilted to one side. “Another round of bartering, then? Trading food for listening? Seems like our last trade-off didn’t end so well.”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. Will you please have dinner with me?”
After another long moment, he nodded and went over to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. He dried them on his shirt. Same old Jake.
“I got your favorite kind of wine,” I said, going to the fridge and pulling out a long-neck bottle of a beer he liked. That got a half-smile out of him. I opened it and poured a soda for me. I needed my wits about me tonight.
I sat down across from him and watched while he took a huge serving of macaroni. He put a large scoop on my plate, too. I ignored it, instead picking at my salad.
I watched as he took a big bite, and his eyes closed, a look of bliss on his face. I’d seen that expression many times, mostly in the bedroom. After a few more bites, he looked up at me.
I took a deep breath. “There are two things I want to say to you.”
I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances Page 96