Page 52 of Hold

“This is ridiculous.”

“Oh shit, you’re like, twenty-five, aren’t you? That’s why you won’t—”

“I’m thirty, T. Okay? The math doesn’t even work out that I could be twenty-five.”

“Oh. Thirty.” She lay back, and he watched her take it in, her eyes on the ceiling. “I couldn’t figure it out. When I first met you, you seemed young, and the way you dress and your beard—”

“A beard makes me twenty-five?”

“I’ve been out of the loop for a long time.” She sighed, her breasts rising and falling in a most distracting way.

She thought about it some more while Liam went through a hundred scenarios where she put the brakes on this whole thing and he was left out in the blue monster baby, flayed to the bone.

“Okay,” she said, and flipped on top of him and began kissing him again. “You gonna get those pants all the way off or what?”

♦

Since the idea of being apart was laughable, Liam brought a change of clothes to her house and left for work from there in the morning. In the evening, he came home before her, showered off his work from the day, and made her dinner.

When she got home on Tuesday evening, Liam was screwing nails or nailing screws or whatever it was, into her deck, and he was cranky.

“You don’t have to do that.” She remembered his comment to his father.

“You need new boards,” he said in the grumpy way he had when he talked about her house. “Here and here. And the rot’s creeping up this pillar. And that one—”

“Okay!” She covered her ears. “There’s no point in telling me about it when there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“It’s only a couple of feet of wood and some screws.”

“And a saw and a miter box and a bunch of screws and any possible clue of what the hell I’m doing.”

He turned away and drove another screw into the floor. With his back to her, he said, “I have a saw. It wouldn’t take long. I’ll show you how to do it, and you can do the rest of them. Borrow the saw.”

Thea paused. “That’s very nice of you,” she hedged. “But—” She didn’t want him to work on her house anymore. It smacked of some kind of exchange she didn’t want to look too hard into. Of payment for services rendered or something.

He shrugged. “Don’t want Benji falling through a rotten board.”

Ooh, the guilt-trip-inducing sonofa—plumber. There was nothing she could say against that. Thea leaned on one of the pillars. Which moved a tiny bit. She jumped away and nearly tripped over his toolbox. Liam turned around, giving that white slash of a smile again, and she found herself melting.

“Fine,” she said, trying to regain some dignity, though her feet were splayed on either side of the toolbox and she had grasped the doorframe so her top half was leaning toward it at a bizarre angle.

Liam laughed out loud. Thea had to grin back at him. He put down the hammer and went to her, his strong arm around her waist easily straightening her as he held her to him. “Hi,” he said right next to her lips. “Did you have a good day at work?”

“Are you still talking? Or are you going to kiss me?”

Liam obeyed, and Thea let him take most of her weight, the thrill of being encircled, protected in his arms still new and enough to turn her legs to mush.

“Babe,” he murmured, running a path of kisses from the corner of her mouth to her ear, “I’m starving.”

She thought back on their nights—and afternoons—together, on the well of need she had for him that wasn’t nearly tapped. “Me too,” she breathed.

“No, I mean, I’m really starving.” He backed up and gave her that white slash of a smile. “I worked through lunch today.”

“Oh.” She got her feet under her properly. “Okay.”

He turned back to his hammering, and she went inside to change, make a pitcher of iced tea, and assemble a towering plate of sandwiches. If Jake could eat his way through two or three rounds, she figured Liam would need twice as much.

They sat together on the porch floor, Liam with his back against the house, chewing methodically through everything she handed him.

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