“Can you keep hanging on while I screw them in?” he said when he got to her.
“Sure,” she said a second time, at a loss for why so much about this man and even perfectly innocent things he said seemed suggestive to her.
Maybe it was hormones.
Or maybe she’d spent too much time teaching teenagers who could rarely think or talk about anything else.
One way or another, she really needed to curb it, she told herself.
There was silence for the first few minutes of their joint endeavor and during that time Issa couldn’t help looking at Hutch.
She was glad she hadn’t indulged her inclination to change clothes for tonight, that the only thing she’d done was brush her hair out and leave it down. She’d told herself that it would be too obvious if she put on a different outfit, that it would give away the fact that she’d been singularly—and strangely—focused on when she was going to get to be with him again. And now that she could see that he hadn’t been inclined to change his clothes for her, she thought it was a good thing she hadn’t changed hers for him.
Not that he didn’t look just as stare-worthy tonight as he had earlier, because he did. And she was never more aware of that fact than when he had leaned over to pick up those cookies.
But she’d lectured herself about not paying any attention to things like that and so she was trying not to.
Of course, it might help to do something besides ogling him while he worked close enough for her to catch the scent of a cologne that smelled like a cool, clear summer day at the beach. She just couldn’t think of anything to say to distract herself.
Then, as Hutch began to apply screwdriver to the second screw to fasten the inside and outside knobs together, he offered her that distraction by making conversation.
“Issa—that’s not an ordinary name,” he said then.
“It’s short for Isadora.”
“Still not ordinary. And there’s Dag, and some others I’ve heard…”
“There’s my sister Tessa—Tessa is short for Theodora. And my sister Zeli, but she’s just Zeli. Our mother thought our names sounded European and that anything European was sophisticated. And unfortunately she was all about putting on airs. But it isn’t as if Hutch is a common name. Or Ash, either,” Issa pointed out.
“Hutch is short for Hutchenson. It was on the birth certificate and because my birth parents weren’t around to explain it, I can’t tell you where it came from. I can tell you that Asher was a family name on Ash’s mom’s side—her grandfather.”
“I see,” Issa said, panicking slightly because he’d initiated this subject and she couldn’t think of what to come back with now that it seemed to be her turn.
But again Hutch Kincaid made it easy on her by not expecting her to take a turn. “So you’re a teacher, I think Dag said…”
“High school freshman chemistry. Or at least I was a teacher. In Seattle. But a little more than a year ago I sort of accidentally invented something and that allowed me to… Oh, it’s complicated,” she concluded when she was afraid she might bore him.
“What did you invent?” he asked, not letting her off the hook so easily.
“Well, in its toy version, it’s called Gob-o-Goo—”
“I’ve seen that at the toy store! It’s sort of like putty?”
“Right, except that it doesn’t ever dry out, it will hold whatever shape it’s put into, but then can be remolded whenever anyone wants to. Plus it’s not harmful if kids eat it—not that it’s food, but it just won’t hurt anything if kids put it in their mouth.”
“And you accidentally invented it?”
“It really was an accident. I was working at home on an experiment for the Reactions in the Kitchen lesson, trying to jazz it up a little to make it more exciting—it isn’t easy to keep ninth graders’ interest—” Because they were so often thinking about whoever was in front of them the way she was thinking about Hutch at that moment, about the way his hair curled just the slightest bit at his nape…
Issa again reined in her wandering thoughts to continue what she was saying.
“Anyway, I reached for something, knocked a whole box of baking soda into what I already had in the bowl—”
“And ta-da?”
“Pretty much. After the mixture went kind of crazy, it stabilized and then ta-da. It looked like a soft, shiny cloud and I just couldn’t seem to resist touching it to see how it felt.”
Much the way she wanted to touch his hair and see how it felt….
Luckily her hands were occupied with doorknobs.
“It felt as good as it looked and it was fun to mess with.” The way she couldn’t mess with her landlord, she warned herself. “Long story short, it took some tweaking from there, but I kept going back to it, fiddling with it, and Gob-o-Goo was born. A friend worked for a toy company and she helped me patent it and sell it to them.”
“That’s not a story you hear every day,” he said.
“It really was just a fluke, though. I almost feel weird taking credit for it.”
“And what did you mean when you said in its toy version?” Hutch asked then.
He really paid attention….
“That was kind of a fluke, too. One day I was messing around with it when the phone rang. I sort of unconsciously kept squeezing it and squishing it while I talked. Then I had the idea of turning it into something therapeutic. A distant, aging relative years ago broke her arm and I remembered her squeezing a ball as part of her physical therapy to increase the strength in that hand when she was recovering. At first she was too weak to do it and I started to think that my stuff had just enough resistance that it might work better than the ball in the first stages of rehab therapy.”
Okay, now she was thinking about squeezing the biceps her gaze had somehow attached itself to. What was wrong with her?
Averting her eyes, she said, “Anyway—again—” Because she knew she’d already said anyway once before. “I went back to the patent attorney, told him my idea and second ta-da. It’s being used as a filler substance to manufacture a new therapeutic tool.”
“That’s impressive,” Hutch said.
“Not really. Not when you know that it was honestly all unintentional. Accidental.”
“Still, those are more fortunate accidents than I’ve ever had.”
“They did allow me to quit working for the time being so I could move back to Northbridge. That was the biggest benefit because I was at loose ends in Seattle and staying there would have been… I just didn’t want to do it,” she finished, deciding belatedly that she didn’t want to get into the subject of the
