Page 31 of Between the Shady Groves
He blinked. And then nodded. And then, she knew he was thinking about what she’d said, because he said, “Is it cheating if I ask someone for help?”
She wanted to cry. And then she remembered sitting on the porch with Skyler, who’d helped her open her eyes.
“Kind of. After all, if you were figuring out a problem at work, you’d spend a little bit of time on it, but you might call someone and say, ‘hey, have you ever run into this before,’ and they’d give you a hand. So… I guess that’s still putting some effort into it. Okay. So asking for help is a little bit cheating, but okay.” She huffed out a laugh despite herself and then shook her head. “This is not funny.”
“You’re the one that’s laughing,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and putting his hands up like he was innocent.
“You’re the one that made a joke.”
“You’re the one who said you couldn’t decide whether you preferred intelligence or a sense of humor, and you were glad I came with both.”
“That was then. Not in the middle of a serious discussion. I want your intelligence, and your sense of humor can come… Actually, you’re right. A sense of humor and intelligence are equally important, and when you have intelligence along with a sense of humor, sometimes it makes a sense of humor even better.” She really did like his sense of humor. She kind of forgot about it. She hadn’t been on the receiving end of it for quite a while.
“I was afraid to make jokes after your mother died. I…saw you crying and thought you wouldn’t appreciate my jokes.”
“I think I needed your jokes more than ever then. And when have I ever gotten seriously mad at you for making me laugh? Even if it was a bad time?”
“True.”
“I’m sad about the miscarriages too.” She said it, then looked at him.
He looked down. “I feel really helpless about that. Ican’t fix that. Just like I couldn’t fix your mother dying. I want to fix things. I don’t want to sit around and think about them. And… I understand that you want me to sit and hold you, but do you understand that the same way that me not holding you makes you sad, me having to sit and do nothing is hard for me? Right?”
“Sometimes I do hard things for you. Don’t you remember that time you had me dangling off the top of the ladder, right beside those live electrical wires, when you were trying to get that first big security system in, before you had any kind of decent help or any knowledge about little tricks you can do to avoid that stuff?”
“I do remember that. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, because I can see you falling backward into those wires, and I think, ‘what in the world was I thinking?’”
“That’s funny. I’ve never lost any sleep over it at all, but you know, there were a few things I did that I didn’t enjoy.” That would be at the top of the list.
“All right. I suppose if you can climb to the top of ladders near live electrical wires, I can sit with you for a while.”
“Gee. Thanks. I really feel like you love me now.” She didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
But he laughed. He had liked her sense of humor once upon a time too. She wondered if she had completely lost it. Sometimes it felt like it was buried so deep she’d never get to it again.
They stood looking at each other for a bit, and then she looked down at his plate which had been empty for a while.
“If you come by in the morning, I’ll be making sticky buns. But there’s no dessert tonight.”
“I was thinking I probably should start giving up dessert. I thought I might ask Matteo for some advice on getting back in shape.”
“What?” she asked, pausing as she reached out for his plate.
“He asked me for some advice on his business venture, and I told him some hard things. He…seemed appreciative.”
“Hard things? You were nice to him, right? Please tell me that you were nice to him? Because he is my neighbor.”
“Yeah. I just told him straight up my best business advice, and he really seemed to love it, even though it wasn’t easy advice.”
“You’re scaring me, Cannon.”
“And I’m wondering why you’re so defensive about this dude. He looked to me like he’s more than capable of taking care of himself.”
“I just want you to be nice to him. There wasn’t anything going on between us, and you were already really rude. I just didn’t want you to be rude again.”
Was he jealous? Was that why he was so rude? Or was he just upset that he thought that she was cheating on him?
That was probably it more than anything else.
