Page 8 of Outside the Lines
Simon’s warm hand on my back nearly made me jump out of my skin. “What are you looking for?”
“Paint.” It came out higher than it should have. “I, uh, used this particular sepia brown under everything, and I could have sworn . . .”
His fingers drifted down my back and fell away. “You wouldn’t happen to remember the name?”
No. But I had lists for that. A few flips of the pages in my notebook, and I’d found it. “Here.”
He took in more than the paint color above the tip of my finger. “This is high-end stuff.”
“Dude. This isWolf’s Landing.”
A little red in his cheeks. “Right. Hollywood. Sometimes I forget.”
“Is that good or bad?”
He peered back at me, eyes the same shade as a morning sky. “Both, I think. It’s weird. A lot of you guys have become local-ish. Settled in. That’s good.”
“And the bad?”
“I don’t carry this brand of paint.”
Yeah, that could be a problem. “We’ll make do.”
He stepped up to the model and peered closer. “I bet I can match the color.”
Wouldn’t you know, he did. Nearly perfectly. There was a touch of red in the brand he carried, but in some ways, that was better. We rebuilt the upright columns that acted as tree trunks and fixed up the altar base until it was as good as new, then started painting the whole contraption. Simon’s color contrasted better when I added gray on top. While I touched up the paint, I set Simon to piecing together the shattered remains of the trunk texture. I’d spent so damn long to get those trees to appear real, especially in the flickering light that should play off them . . . right before the whole set blew up. I wasn’t going to waste that work.
He hummed to himself. Nothing I recognized—might not have been anything but random notes—but it was pleasant and sweet, and I wondered if he puttered around his house like that, making up little tunes under his breath.
That led to visions of Simon, bare-chested, wearing nothing but a low-slung pair of gray sweatpants in his kitchen. Man, did I want to seethat. There was nothing like slim hips in sweats that begged to be slipped off.
Oh yeah. I had it bad.
“I do love puzzles,” Simon murmured, as he poked at pieces of tree bits on the table. He straightened and stretched his back. “I think I’m done.”
“Nearly there, myself.” I put a few final touches on the base, then stepped away. It looked decent too. Still a lot to accomplish, but my stomach told me we were close to dinnertime, and my watch confirmed. Nearly five thirty.
Not bad for a half-day’s work.
On the other table, Simon had arranged the bits and pieces of cracked tree trunk material, and it did kind of seem like a pieced-together puzzle, had the maker been a sadistic bastard. Which I guess I was, since I’d asked him to figure out how they all went back together.
“There’s parts missing.” He pointed out some spots where there were noticeable gaps.
I chewed on the inside of my mouth, arms tingling, and nodded. “There’s going to be, anyway.” I waved at the model. “The bases for those trees aren’t exactly the same as they were.”
“I’m surprised you don’t use real bark.”
He wasn’t the first to suggest it. “It looks wrong. Ridges are too big, since it’s actual tree-sized and not miniature.”
Simon snickered.
“What?”
“You drive a Mini.”
I stared at him.
“A miniature guy . . . who drives a Mini.”
