“Have fun, buddy?” I asked him, smiling as he seemed to nod and agree. “Not gonna like what comes next.” No way could I let sandy wolf-dog into Trent’s condo like this. I almost felt bad as I led Sampson around the side of the house and turned the hose on him. He yelped at the cold, but then changed his attitude and decided to try to swallow every drop instead, coming at me with his mouth wide open.
“Cut it out,” I laughed, spraying the sand from his coat. I grabbed a towel from the rack beside the door inside and came back out, drying him as best I could. As we went up the stairs, I took another towel to put on the floor for Sampson to lie down on. He made himself comfortable against the living room wall of windows and I finally put on a pot of coffee.
Trent appeared as soon as it was ready. He had coffee radar.
“You good?” he asked, eyeing me. There had been plenty of mornings in the last year when I was not good.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He shuffled to the kitchen and we moved around each other in silence, pouring coffee and cereal, Trent frying bacon. We’d known each other since high school, and at this point, silence was a pretty comfortable state for us. But once he was fully awake, Trent sat down at the long bar separating the kitchen from the living room and fixed me with a look that said he wanted something.
“Tell me about the girl.”
“Dani.”
“And her sister. What do you know?”
I grinned. I thought I’d caught Trent talking to the girl with Dani at the club. I was right. It was her sister, though they looked nothing alike. “Not much,” I confessed. “Dani’s opening that shop. Wine and books. On Newport.”
“Right.” I’d told him that much yesterday, but Trent knew I was getting warmed up.
“She’s…” I paused, not sure how to capture Dani in words. There was something so compelling about her, unusual—a brightness, a light. I didn’t buy in to auras and new-age crap like that, but I knew I felt something around her that was solid and good. “I think she’s a good person.” It was about as descriptive as I could get.
“She’s hot,” Trent observed, focusing on his bacon. “Curvy. Cute.” He glanced up at me to see if I was going to argue.
Unbelievably, my cock was stirring to life just from that description. It made me think of the way her body had looked when I’d walked up to her on the sidewalk the day before. I nodded my agreement.
“Her sister’s hot, too.” Trent raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t know her,” I told him.
Trent returned to his bacon and asked in a casual tone, “You gonna see her again?”
I nodded. Trent was used to waiting for me to form actual words, but sometimes it was still easier not to bother.
“And?”
He wanted words. “Today. Going by the shop.”
A smile spread across his face. “That’s good, man.” For some reason, the news appeared to make him happier than seemed reasonable.
I raised an eyebrow at him, but his attention was back on his food.
“I’m at the station for the next two nights,” he said. “So I’ll see you when I get back. Club’s booked, too. Until Sunday.”
I nodded. Hoped I wouldn’t need to play, but if worse came to worst I could just play here at home. Sometimes that helped, too, but it was better with background noise and people.
Once I’d showered and we’d both eaten, Sampson and I headed out to Newport Avenue. If I let myself think about it, I would be nervous. Instead, I just pointed myself in the right direction and walked, feeling the muscles in my body move in concert, focusing on how lucky I was just to be upright, walking, talking—kind of.
It’s all relative, right? Things could be a lot worse. Things had been worse. I’d come a long way. And somehow, going to see this girl felt like a step forward.
The tile saw was set up on the sidewalk in front of the shop, but Dani wasn’t with it. She must be in the back, but I wasn’t sure I should just let myself in. I settled Sampson next to the door and turned for a second, looking down the street toward the pier. When I turned back, she was there. I saw her through the glass of the door, and she was just standing there, looking at me.
A wide smile pulled the corners of her mouth up and wrinkled her nose a bit. Her hair was piled on top of her head in some kind of messy bun, with pieces falling from it around her face. It might have been the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. All of it together. The ripped jeans, the tank top, the smile, and the hair.
Dani.
Yeah, there was something about this girl.
“Hey, you,” she said, pushing the door open toward me. “I’m glad you made it.” The smile didn’t falter.
I tried to remember the last time anyone had looked so happy to see me. Came up blank.
“Hi,” I answered, stepping over the threshold. “How’s it going?”
She looked around and I followed the sweep of her eyes. She thought I meant the tile, which was fine. I was curious about that, too.
Her head dipped and she looked sheepish. “I was just on my seven-hundredth YouTube video about mixing and applying grout.”
“That bad?” I couldn’t help but smile. She looked so dejected about her grouting delay. “Want help?”
Her eyes lit up and my heart nearly exploded. “Really?”
A laugh escaped my lips. It sounded like rocks against steel, and I hated it. The sound of my own voice had been an issue for me since the accident. I hoped it didn’t sound as grating and violent outside my own head. “Yeah.”
She waved me toward a big bag of grout and I looked around, finding a couple of buckets next to the other tools we’d need. I looked up to make sure she was okay with me taking over, and couldn’t help smiling again when my gaze found her bouncing on her toes and smiling. She looked so genuinely happy.
I mixed the grout and then set the bucket down.
“What now?” she asked, her voice high and eager.
“Needs to slake.”
Her face scrunched and she tilted her head. “Right.”
“Set up. About ten minutes.”
She nodded, understanding, and went to the door to check on Sampson. “He’ll be okay out there?”
“He likes to watch people.”
She pulled a bowl from the back, filled it with water, and set it outside next to Sampson’s snout.
Soon we were working on our hands and knees, pulling grout diagonally across the tiled floor. I showed her the basic technique, grouting a section, and then using the squeegee to pull it as clean as possible, waiting a few minutes and then cleaning up the excess with a sponge. She started in the bathroom and I worked backward from the kitchen. After about a half hour of steady, quiet work, we backed right into each other in the doorway to the main shop.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she cried, jumping away. Because we were both working backward on our knees, we’d literally bumped butts. It was the most action I’d had in over a year, and given the level of arousal I’d been fighting since Dani had appeared in my life, it didn’t do much but increase my desire to give in to the caveman instincts.
“It’s fine,” I said, laughing to cover the fact that my constant erection was becoming seriously painful.
She backed out, and I finished the section in the doorway and then sat back on my heels to look at what we’d done so far, adjusting myself before she glanced up.
“You’re really good at this stuff, Rob. Thank you so much for the help.” Dani was sitting with her back against the wall behind me as I finished up the back section.
“Glad to help.” I set down my tools and wiped my hands on my pants. “Don’t have much else to do right now.” My words were trickling out like thick molasses, but Dani didn’t seem to mind the wait. She hadn’t asked about my speech at all, but it felt like an elephant in the room. I couldn’t explain why, but suddenly I wanted to tell her. Wanted her to understand me.
Her eyes lit up a bit. “You’ve got your days free since you play at night?”
I wished it were that simple. “Yeah. But…also because I’m not working anymore.” I took a deep breath. Here went nothing. “I had an accident.”
I hated everything about the words I had just spoken. I hated the way they came out, one at a time, no cadence or flow.
I hated the truth behind them and also the fallacy within them. “Accident” sounded like something benign, something that could be fixed. And it had been more than a misstep, more than something glue and plaster could correct. And, in my mind at least, accidents were preventable. What had happened to me? Maybe if I’d turned in the other direction… But I hadn’t, and so nothing about what had happened felt preventable. It wasn’t an accident. It was something else.
Dani looked worried. “But you’re okay.” She looked me up and down, acknowledging my physical presence. And she was right, I was okay.
I nodded, shifting my weight. I hadn’t talked to anyone about this. My mom had learned about my accident from the doctors at the hospital, from the other firefighters who’d been with me that day. Trent and the guys had seen everything themselves. All the therapists I’d dealt with got the pass-down from a doctor or another therapist. I smiled a humorless smile, realizing I’d never actually told anyone what had happened. Never had to.
Dani waited patiently, her worried expression making her blue eyes shimmer.
“I was a firefighter,” I started, closing my eyes hard against the wistful desire that one single statement brought up. I pushed down the pain that came with knowing it was completely past tense. I’d never be that again. “With Trent, and those guys at the club.”
Dani nodded as if she’d already figured that out. She probably had.
“We got a call. Old warehouse by the airport. Was blazing when we got there, but we had to go in. Lot of homeless crash out in those buildings.” I’d been standing in the center of the room, but I felt heavy and tired. I walked to the wall where Dani sat and slid down to sit beside her. It might be easier to talk if I wasn’t watching her face while I did it. Already, I felt like I was going back into that fire. Dread bubbled inside me.
“Trent was behind me. A couple of guys on the other side. I heard something in the back. A voice. Told Trent I was going back farther. Someone needed help. But something cracked over us. A beam came down, knocked through an interior wall, and I got caught under both.”
Dani sucked in a breath, and I could feel her eyes on my face.
“Saw it coming, but I couldn’t move. Got pushed forward, caught on the back of the head by a steel beam and knocked out. Trent said I was buried under the burning wall.” I squeezed my eyes shut again, trying to stop the images flying through my mind. Flames, the wall coming in. “He pulled me out.”
“Oh God.” Dani’s voice was a whisper.
“The way I talk?” I turned to face her, wanting to see her acknowledge that she knew I was screwed up, that she’d already known.
She nodded.
“I have a traumatic brain injury. Damaged enough that they said I might not speak again, might not walk. I was in a coma for two days. And then in the rehab hospital forever.”
A little smile crossed her face. “Not forever.”
“Two months,” I said.
“You recovered,” she said, her hand landing on my arm as she turned to face me. “You did walk again. And clearly, you speak.”
“I don’t speak clearly.” I tried a joke.
She smiled, just a tiny smile, and shook her head. “I understand,” she said. Her voice was soft, and that hand remained on my arm, radiating warmth through every nerve in my body. Her touch echoed the words she spoke, and I felt like maybe Dani did understand, more than anyone had before. Understood me. As I was now. Not me trying to be who I was before. Because she hadn’t known me before.
I tore my eyes from hers and pulled my arm out of her grasp. Childish. But the contact, all the contact—her hand, her eyes, her understanding, and whatever was floating in the air between us—it was so much more than I could handle. So much more than anything I’d felt since the accident.
Dani sat still beside me for a moment, and I couldn’t look at her. I stared at a spot on the tile between my feet, resting my arms on my knees, my head almost bowed.
“Hey,” she said, and I raised my head to meet her eyes. Her head was tilted to one side, a look I couldn’t read on her face. “Would you be willing to help get this place all set up? Take on a few other jobs—some construction and stuff?” She let the question hang, but then quickly added, “A real job, I mean. I’ll pay you. Fifteen an hour?”
I forced a smile. It wasn’t what I made at the fire station, though I didn’t really care about that. Could I work with Dani every day? She already knew the truth, and it didn’t seem to have fazed her. Maybe this was what I needed right now. Maybe this could be a beginning for me—a purpose, even if it wasn’t a real path or future. It was good for now. I’d just have to control the intense attraction I felt for my employer. I nodded. “That’d be great.”
She beamed, and silence settled between us again as the dusty air in the shop carried in the sound of crashing waves from outside, the scent of warm pavement and briny water. “This tile isn’t gonna grout itself,” she announced, pushing herself up from the wall.
It was sudden, but I was happy for the non-sequitur. I needed to focus on something else, even though the sudden absence of Dani by my side felt surprisingly like a wound.
Everything was out there. She knew. And now we’d see how long she’d want me around, or find out if my injury became a wedge between us. Because maybe my inconsistency and inabilities—things that didn’t seem big to her now—would turn into an irritation that became too much fucking trouble when piled up.
Chapter Eight
Dani
I forced myself up from the wall, forced myself to move away from the man sitting next to me with pain shifting through his green eyes. If I didn’t, one of two things would surely happen. I would launch myself at him in some misguided attempt to comfort him, to take his pain or distract him if I could. Or I would shoot a bunch of words at him, to cover how deeply his story pulled at me. Part of me felt a tenuous connection to his hurt. Did pain connect to pain? Find comfort in parallel misery? I guessed that was where the phrase “misery loves company” came from, that desire to share your own hurt with someone you know might understand because they’ve had something just as bad. Or far worse.
My body wanted to take the first option, to find out what it would be like to press myself against all that hard muscle, to maybe feel those strong arms around me, see that inked arm intertwined with mine, his dark skin against my own pale skin.
My mouth used any uncomfortable situation as an excuse to take off, to try to form a meaningful web of words that might help us understand that life was sometimes cruel and difficult. Make sense of senseless things.
I didn’t give in to either my body or my mouth. For once, I listened to my brain telling me I had reasons for keeping a distance from men, I had things that needed focus in my own life. I fought instinct, changed the subject and got up, moving away from Rob, even though everything inside me wanted to reach out to him instead. I had reached out in a way. Offering him a job. And I couldn’t deny I was probably too happy he’d accepted. The idea of seeing him every day brought a strange rhythm to my heart, an excited rush of blood through my veins.
I didn’t know Rob well, though I understood more about this stony, stoic handsome man after his story. I knew enough to be sure that I didn’t want to overwhelm him or push him. I knew words were difficult for him, and he’d just given me a lot of them. So I forced myself to honor that by creating some space.
But as I pushed grout into the corners of the main area of the shop, moving out in a widening arc, my mind turned around everything he’d said. And the more I considered what he’d been through, the more I hoped Rob would find what he was looking for. He was strong and intelligent, and he was seeking something I doubted was going to
magically appear in the confines of my small bottle and book shop. All I could offer was some grunt work, some most likely irritating conversation, and my relentless attraction to him—which I would never act on. I could offer him friendship, too, and that’s what I settled on. If he wanted to be here, I would welcome him.
As soon as I’d established that in my mind, Rob spoke again.
“Your turn.” The deep gravel of his voice was coming to be one of my favorite sounds.
I turned and looked at him over my shoulder, surprised he wanted to keep talking. Or more accurately, surprised he wanted me to talk. Amy was constantly telling me to turn off the motor mouth. Sometimes I think I tried to understand the world by verbally describing it to myself, by constantly trying to force things into patterns that could be named. Amy said I used to make incessant noise as a baby, rolling around in my crib and babbling. She would know, she had been my protector pretty much since I was born, even though she was only twenty months older than me.
“Ah.” I laughed. “My story’s pretty run-of-the-mill. Maybe a couple of interesting points. Neglected kids, landed in the foster system, rescued by a sympathetic relative.”
“Gonna have to do better than that.” Rob’s voice sounded different and I risked a glance at him again. He was leaning back on his heels, watching me pull grout, his green eyes dark and heavy-lidded. I wondered how long he’d been watching me.
“Okay,” I said, turning back around after a quick mental assessment. What jeans was I wearing? If he was going to be staring at my ass, I was glad I hadn’t chosen the baggy carpenter jeans Nan had left at the house. Those were comfortable, but not even close to flattering. Not that it mattered. I sighed.
Focus, Dani.
“Amy and I were born to people that shouldn’t have had kids. But I’m glad they at least gave us each other.” I started the story, pulling out the only memory I had of my first home. “My mom met my dad when she was young. Seventeen.” I talked and worked, trying to make the story sound like it was just words and not the fibers of everything I’d believed about myself spread out before us. “Mom was pretty much an idiot, I guess. My dad picked her up during the year she took off between high school and college because she’d left home, quit speaking to her mother. She got pregnant with Amy and she must have gotten a little desperate. She let him talk her into working for him to save money to support the baby, so she started delivering drugs to his dealers for him.”
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