Page 35 of Shattered Veil

“What?” Cassie asked.

I moved to slide the stud finder once more, confirming my internal thoughts, and then noted, “The joist isn’t straight.”

Her head tilted to the side. “What do you mean?”

I held up a hand, gesturing toward the house and then away. “The joists run this way, right? Should be straight…perpendicular to the wall. It’s not straight—look at the string.”

“Yeah…” she replied, tracing her eyes over the yarn, “I don’t want it hung like that. It’ll look weird.”

I glanced at it once more, and nodded vehemently. “This house is crooked as shit.”

“Hey,” she admonished me sharply, “don’t diss the house. I like this house. I bought this house.”

My head snapped to hers. “You own this place? How’d you afford that?”

“It’s a one bed, one and a half bath cabin in the middle of the woods—it wasn’t exactly prime real estate.” Cassie added, “And did you forget that I make good money doing what I do? You strip for a few years, you manage to save up for a decent down payment.”

“A few years?” I responded. “You’re twenty-two, how long have you been—”

“Since legal age, you can do the math,” she stated quickly. “Don’t diss my house.”

Surprise aside, I told her, “I’m not dissing your house. I’m stating a fact—it’s built crooked.” She narrowed her eyes at me, and I spoke a bit more gently, “In this exact spot, at the very least. You wanna say it adds to the charm of the place? Go ahead.” I pointed to the ceiling. “Doesn’t change the fact that this joist isn’t at a ninety-degree angle on the overhang. If you want the bench here, it’s gonna be angled like the yarn is.”

“So, crooked,” she deduced bluntly.

I smiled wide. “Just like the house.”

She pursed her lips together for a moment and then griped, “I don’t want it to look like that.”

“Eh, it’s not that crooked,” I reassured her and then joked lightly, “It’ll add to the feng shui of the place.”

Cassie chuckled, albeit a bit reluctantly. “Feng shui?”

“Oh yeah, I’m all about Chinese harmony. Balance. This feels right,” I sarcastically remarked.

She rolled her eyes, and her grin grew. “You’re so full of shit.”

“Yup.”

Her soft laughter made my smile stretch further, and she sighed. “Fine. If it’s gonna be crooked, can we just lean into it and have it be catacorner? Like…hang it from two different joists and have it be facing out,” Cassie held out her forearm at what depicted a forty-five-degree angle, “like this?”

I shrugged, pulled the thumb tack closest to the wall out of the ceiling, and threw it in my slacks’ pocket, allowing the string to hang free. I climbed my way back down, shimmied the ladder forward, and once I was back up, I quickly swiped the stud finder across the ceiling until the high-pitched beep occurred once more. I kept it held in place, reaching my other hand down and flicking my fingers toward me as I spoke to Cassie:

“Hand me the string again.”

She stepped forward quickly to assist me, reaching out to give me the makeshift measuring tape, and her fingers brushed mine as she placed it in my hand. While still focused on the space above, mentally examining the length between the other end of the yarn and where I held the stud finder, I reflexively grabbed her hand. Not the string—her hand. And that would have been fine if it didn’t linger there—if the sensation of it in mine didn’t make time slow to a crawl. I whipped my gaze to her, finding her dark eyes set on our touching fingers. They remained there for the briefest of moments, I squeezed them, and her hand fell away as she left the string in my grasp. We looked at each other, and for just a beat, we were stuck. Locked in place.

The rational part of my brain screamed at me, ‘Cut it out and hang the goddamn bench!’ and I inhaled sharply as I quickly brought my attention back to the stud finder. I moved it along with the string until it was pulled taut, and I saw Cassie take a few steps back in my peripheral vision.

I retrieved the thumb tack from my pocket, shoving it in the ceiling to hold the yarn, and she asked, “There?”

I looked to her again, swallowing to mentally push past our brief, tense moment, and nodded. “What do you think?”

She cocked her head, her eyes tracing the string along the ceiling and then out into the space before us. Cassie moved to stand below me, angling herself as if she were examining her potential view, and she glanced up at me, throwing me a beaming smile.

“Feng shui?”

I chuckled. “Feng shui as hell.”

---