Page 153 of Brazen Mistakes

He huffs out a breath. Only one turn later, we park in front of one of the houses I saw for sale on my run over Christmas. He clicks the car off, then rests one of his big hands on my knee. “Clara, I’ve already shared more with you than I’ve ever shared with anyone. Could we just not fight about this? It didn’t seem important, not with everything else you’ve got going on.”

The humility is as shocking as it is unexpected. I nod. “Yeah. I can do that.”

Acceptance gained, he’s out of the truck, carrying the toolbox and bucket up the front porch, unlocking it as I follow with my purse and coffee.

“Turn the temp up to seventy. The thermostat is through there.” He points, then goes back outside to finish unloading.

Once the temperature is dealt with, I do a lap of the main floor, then head up the stairs, skipping a riser that screams when I try to put weight on it.

Upstairs, I find the same disgusting, broken mess I found downstairs. And I don’t even want to investigate the basement.

Back downstairs, Trips is taking off his coat, despite the house still being only warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I want to stand on the stairs and watch him, like I’m a girl who has a right to him. Only, I’m not his girlfriend. And my presence hasn’t made things easier for him.

I’m still learning all the ways I’ve fucked up his plans.

Reminding myself that he told me I’m helping, that my being on the team is making them money even when I feel like everything I’m doing is costing them, I clear my throat, staying a few steps up, not ready to feel small in front of him. Not yet. Not today.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I joke, and he shakes his head.

“Even shitholes like this cost more than I’d like. I had to take a mortgage out on this one, because we didn’t have enough clean money for two outright buys within a month. So now I have to worry about interest and payments until I can get more cash cleaned through the other one.”

“What about our house?”

“I bought it outright with my trust fund. But I ‘collect rent’ from all the guys, and now you, so we can clear a few thousand every month without raising any brows. But that’s peanuts compared to what we’re bringing in.”

“Hence, scaling up?”

“Yup. For now, I can only hire workmen who’ll take payment in cash. Maybe someday I can get a construction company up and running, which would be a double benefit—workmen and laundering—but that’s the future. Luckily, I like doing some of this shit. It feels good to take a horror show and turn it into a home for somebody. We’ll start with cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms so I can get a plumber in here.” He carries the ladder to the back, and I follow, setting up in the dismal space.

I put on a dance-able playlist, still light after sending that email, and settle into turning the kitchen into something that isn’t a health hazard, working side by side with Trips.

Until today, I hadn’t realized how much I’d learned from my mom. I pull out some cleaners and not others for different stains, talking Trips out of using chemicals that’d ruin the original woodwork, barely visible under the grime.

Cleaning lady might not be a glamorous job, but there are practical applications. And apparently, I absorbed enough of them during her endless complaints and gripes about work.

Once the kitchen won’t require hazard pay from the plumber, we move to the downstairs bathroom. It’s a much smaller space, and being this close to Trips makes my skin tingle. “You don’t strike me as someone who had to clean his own room,” I say, not sure how else to fill the charged silence.

“I didn’t. But I figured out pretty quickly in rehab that I like a clean space, and as they’re all about personal responsibility and shit, I had to figure it out.”

Well, that didn’t fix the silence.

“My mom cleans houses,” I say, the only thing I can latch onto.

“Did you ever help her?”

“She brought me a lot when I was a kid over the summer, because we couldn’t afford the camps some of my friends went to. I made beds, swept, vacuumed. Nothing too hard, as I was like, seven. Once I got older, I only went along if she took on more clients than she should. But we usually ended up fighting, so it wasn’t efficient. When I started working over the summer as a babysitter and nanny at thirteen, I wasn’t available to her, so that was that.”

“Is that why you knew exactly where to find the paint at Walgreens?”

“Bored kids on a rainy day are one glitter bomb away from catastrophe.”

He snorts, then leans into the tub, his muscles bunching under his t-shirt as he scrubs decades of grime from the porcelain. And once again, the urge to stop what I’m doing and enjoy the view sparks. Instead, I focus on making the floors not brown and sticky. What the hell did people do in here?

When we move to the upstairs bathroom, it’s obvious it’s much worse than the kitchen and downstairs bathroom combined. “Do you think the floor will hold us both?” I ask.

“It’s going to be a complete teardown up here, but the plumber needs to cap and mark the pipes, so we don’t end up with water damage.”

“Is that mold?” I cover my nose, the pungent smell making my stomach roll.

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