Page 6 of The Torment of Two

Only one.

Two

Dax: Dude, stop ignoring me.

I groan and quickly read through the onslaught of messages my best friend sent over the past two hours. He knows if I don’t answer, I’m busy with a project. I swear I chose the most high-maintenance guy in the world to be friends with.

Me: I’m not ignoring you. Cedarwood Mansion has my immediate focus.

Dax: The real one or the replica?

Me: The replica IS real.

He sends me a fuckton of eye roll emojis. Sometimes I wonder how two completely different guys like me and Dax Summers could ever become and stay friends. We’re so different it’s almost hilarious. Dax drives a tricked-out matte-black Beamer, plays football for PMU, and has a jock style that makes every girl in the vicinity drool over him.

Meanwhile, I drive Pops’s old 1988 Land Rover Defender 90, which is the complete opposite of Dax’s chick magnet. I certainly don’t play sports like him. And my style? While I think it’s cool, Dax has told me numerous times that it’s not.

What’s not to love about an olive-colored M-65 field jacket from the Vietnam War? It’s vintage and was a badass find. No one, and I mean no one, is wearing this jacket.

Dax: Do you want help?

Me: No.

I tear open a brand-new bag of butterscotch hard candies. They’ve been my favorites for as long as I can remember. Once I’m armed with a candy on the inside of each cheek, I turn on the dust-covered Magnavox CD player boombox and toss in one of The Rolling Stones albums I own. Classic rock isn’t my favorite, but it’s Pops’s and he’s the one I inherited this thing from.

Dax: You need an intervention.

Me: I just need to finish this piece.

Dax: Dude, this is why you don’t have a girlfriend.

Now it’s my turn to blast him with middle finger emojis.

Me: Remind me again, what’s your girlfriend’s name?

I chuckle before tossing my phone back down on my shop table. Dax dates girls here and there, but he hasn’t ever kept one long enough to call her his girlfriend. And he wants to give me shit.

Pushing away all thoughts of Dax, I lose myself once more to the intricacies of my small-scale replica of Cedarwood Mansion. It’s created completely with salvaged materials from one of the historical sites Pops recently did a job at. The real Cedarwood Mansion sits on the outskirts of town, neglected and forgotten. Pops and Dad complain weekly about what a waste the historical site is. They’ve approached the owners many times about a restoration or even purchasing the property from them, but are always met with a simple, “no.”

At least my replica will look like the original. I spent months researching photos on the internet and in the Park Mountain Library to get a sense of what it should look like in its pristine condition. My replica is a twelve-by-twelve-inch version that opens the mansion up like a book so you can view all the intricacies of each room. I’m about seventy percent done, which means Dax will have to stop bugging me because I won’t stop when I’m this close to completion.

I quickly become engrossed in my project, ignoring time and all thoughts that don’t pertain to Cedarwood. My neck starts to ache and my stomach growls violently, but I’m not ready to quit for the evening.

“Two, kiddo, time to eat.”

Groaning, I sit up and blink several times to clear my daze. Swiveling around in my ancient, rusty barstool, I find Dad standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.

Great.

He’s giving me the “you’re in trouble, buddy,” look that I always hated as a kid. But, to my dads, despite being in my third year of college, I’m still that strange child they brought home with them one day and decided to let stay.

“What?”

He purses his lips and slowly walks into my workshop, gaze scanning the chaos that is my happy place. Once, a couple of years ago, he and Pops cleaned it out and organized it to surprise me. I freaked the fuck out because all the things that had a place were now gone and in some other place. It took forever to find everything again.

“You’re awfully hyper focused on this project lately,” Dad says, coming to stand near me. His neatly manicured eyebrows pinch together. “Everything okay with you?”

I cringe at the thought of him worrying about me. Last time he and Pops worried about me, I ended up with a prescription for Prozac and a higher dosage of anxiety meds.

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