Page 6 of Hold

“Wrong night?” he asked in his cranky growl when she didn’t move.

“Oh, hey, Liam!” one of the twins said, hearing his voice. “You found us, then.” The twin stood to see Liam in the doorway. Since Thea was still blocking Liam’s way, the twin squinted at her through his blue frames and added, “He was invited, too, right?”

Liam was still looking at her. “No! I mean yes!” Thea said. “Of course. Come in!” Dammit, she sounded breathy. Out of control.Get it together.

The others welcomed him loudly. Thea went to get another chair from the kitchen table and waved him to the one remaining comfortable seat. But he took the hard chair from her, shaking his head, and before she could protest, he was seated by the kitchen entrance with his ankle over one knee, looking completely at home.

Since he hardly said a word at first, her stress level lowered and the group got going. They worked well together, with an easy camaraderie she had never had with her fellow undergraduates—perhaps because she’d been so much older than them. But she did wonder why Liam was here if he wasn’t going to say anything.

About half an hour into the session, though, he suddenly growled, “Dammit, I can’t stand it anymore,” stood up, and marched into the kitchen.

Everyone stared after him. He had been so still during the meeting unless they asked him a specific question that they’d forgotten he was there. And now he’d changed the dynamic of the room simply by rising with such speed and almost storming out.

Thea followed him. “What?”

“This damn faucet.” He was already on his knees in front of the sink, opening the cabinet and throwing things onto the floor. Old scrubbing sponges, a dishwashing brush coated with soap from a leaking detergent bottle, rubber gloves that had perished and lost a few fingers when he pulled them off the sticky cabinet floor: all appeared at Thea’s feet. She felt her cheeks flush. Was that how bad it had gotten under there?

“Hey!” she exclaimed, catching a can of Comet before it spilled. “Do you have to be so—”

He didn’t even seem to have heard her. “Doesn’t that drip bother you? Bothers the crap out of me, and I’ve only been here twenty minutes.”

She dropped to her knees herself, gathering up the items as if she could hide all of them from her guests. She looked behind her. Yep, they were all in the doorway, gazing at her and Liam as he got farther into the cabinet.

“Woah, Thea,” Chloe said. “You didn’t say you were going to put on a show. Nice butt, Liam.”

He didn’t answer. Thea hoped he at least had the grace to blush. An old drain plug, stuck inside a plastic tub that might once have held deodorizer, rolled out of his hands and came to rest at the feet of the crowd at the door.See,I did at least try and make it a little less stinky in there.

The inventory of Thea’s messy life finally stopped. Liam grunted with satisfaction and turned the tap to stop the water supply. The dripping, which had been magnified by the cookie tray she had thrown into the sink earlier, ceased. Liam got up, hit his head on the cabinet frame, cursed, and rubbed his head as he examined the faucet. His hand still on the back of his head, he turned to Thea.

“Got a wrench?” he growled.

“Yeah,” she snapped back. “You want me to finish what that cabinet started?”

His eyebrows lowered, eyes turning dark. “You want this fixed or not?”

She folded her arms in defense, but he had her and he knew it. She ignored their audience and stomped out of the back door.

Even though he hadn’t lived with them for two years, most of Gabriel’s things were still at her house. When he’d so unceremoniously left them, he’d left all his tools behind. They were in the basement, which was dank and smelly and leaked every time it rained. Thea had thrown all his crap on the floor one day and left them there. She still had to go down to use the laundry, but she went nowhere near the table Gabe had laughably called his workshop.

She threw open the double door entry from outside and steeled herself against the spiderwebs and cave crickets. It was dark in there, and the light from two bare bulbs slung from the ceiling was pitiful.

Sure enough, inside the ancient space, lined with nineteenth-century stone and badly clad pipes, a canvas bag of tools sat rotting in a puddle in the corner. “Ew,” she said, her voice deadened in the damp air.

“Thea?” Zahra’s voice came through the floorboards right above her.

“Yeah,” she called back, lifting her head—but still watching for spiderwebs. “Be right there.”

She approached the tool bag as if a snake were about to leap out of it, but it just sat there, dark and pathetic and ignored. She used the mere tips of her finger and thumb to open the flaps. They were slimy and moldy, and her fingers were instantly filthy. “Ew,” she said again.Oh, and for the eight hundred and ninety-sixth time, fuck Gabriel.

The tools might have been sodden, and some of the rubber coatings might have turned to powder in her revolted hands, but they were made of steel and there was still a faint sheen to them. Thea saw something with a wrench at one end and a round hole at the other sitting at the top of the pile. Gratefully, she pulled it out, again with finger and thumb, and hightailed it out of the basement.

With a certain pride, she held it out to Liam, who was now standing in front of the sink. His audience hadn’t moved.

His mouth was a thin line. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

She pulled back her hand. Now he was really starting to piss her off. “Uh, fix my faucet? Or I can think of another place you can put it.”

Suddenly, he was right in front of her, so close she had to look up to see his eyes and smell the mixture of whatever deodorant he used and the bleach he’d dislodged in the cabinet.Damn, those eyes.

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