getting her set up, that might look like he didn’t have enough faith in her, so he hung back and let her do it all herself.
Have a little faith. Trust, Matt, trust.
Yeah. Still working on it.
Trust issues and him went way back, so it was no wonder that even with good friends he still occasionally wound up verifying. It had cost him a relationship or two in his past, but after Joanne his trust when it came to women had been compromised almost permanently.
A half an hour later, he still hadn’t heard the sounds of nail gunning in the living room so maybe Sarah was still lining up the boards. Or possibly trying to figure out a way out of this while saving face. He tacked in the last wood floor slat and determined he’d go in and pretend he only wanted to check out her great progress, then underhandedly find a way to assist her before she impaled herself.
He heard a strange whirring sound, immediately followed by the sounds of a nail gun...being operated at the rapid-fire rate of a machine gun.
Shit. Not good.
He dropped everything and ran to the living room, where he found Sarah on the ground, wearing her safety glasses, legs spread out, holding the nail gun away from herself as it shot nails out like it was possessed by the demonic soul of an assault rifle.
Fuck. Heart pounding in his ears, he yanked the electrical plug from its socket then dropped down next to her, worried because she looked shell-shocked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m s-sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Explain what the hell happened.” He took the nail gun from her.
“I don’t really know. Maybe it jammed? Everything was going well, and then...and then...” Her safety glasses slightly askew, she pushed them up with her finger.
Thank God for the safety glasses. “Doesn’t matter. Just please tell me you’re okay.”
“Fine, but a little humiliated. This looked so easy. I read all the instructions. Well. Most of them.”
He let out an uneven breath, and took a good long look at the wall. The wall Stone had painted not long ago with a shade of brown had nails all over it in interesting random patterns.
“You killed the wall.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, crap.”
Yeah. It was okay, he told himself over and over again. She wasn’t hurt, and that was the main thing. Instinctively and possibly without much thought, he pulled Sarah’s back to his chest. They both sat on the ground of the living room floor staring at the massacred wall for several silent minutes. Finally, she leaned her head back and told him she was sorry another dozen times.
“Maybe you should stay away from power tools for now.”
She nodded slowly.
This would be an interesting couple of months, if they each lived to tell about it.
* * *
“HONESTLY, MATT, YOU look exhausted. Let me help,” Sarah said. “Please.”
“I’m good,” he said from the top of the ladder where he was fiddling with the wiring coming out of her bedroom ceiling.
Good. He was always good.
The man had run himself ragged all week long, working at the airport most of the daylight hours, helping his son paint a fence—she didn’t ask because Matt didn’t look happy about it—and working on her numerous home improvement projects. Being forever banned from using power tools meant that she couldn’t help him much anymore. But no sooner would he finish one house project than another issue would present itself. Either it was a wiring problem or a plumbing problem. Rather than the list getting shorter, it got longer. Just like the summer days.
And Matt got sexier every day. Each time he recited the complex reasoning behind why the house’s electrical wiring had “issues” she’d stare at him, appreciating that he understood her to be intelligent enough to follow was the single most attractive quality about him.
Of course, his most attractive quality changed from moment to moment and depending on what the man was doing. Sometimes his forearms were the single most attractive quality about him. Sometimes his eyes, beautifully dark and edgy. She had to face it—she had a large menu to choose from.
And now tonight he’d finally put in her ceiling fan, and those tentacles falling out of her ceiling would be covered up and stop giving her spider nightmares. She’d run the fan tonight and cool down from the suddenly hot summer nights. They were having a small heat wave.
Unless that was all Matt.
She was still feeling her way around this whole friends-and-roommates thing, thinking up ways to get Matt’s attention other than leaving all her underwear out, flashing him or scaring him with her appalling lack of carpentry skills. So far she’d accomplished all of those without even breaking a sweat.
He stood now on the ladder just under the wires, balancing his weight on the second highest rung. Her only job was to keep Shackles away from him, since her dog now had a serious case of hero worship for Matt and followed him around the sometimes-dangerous house. The evening sky had begun to darken and little slits of light were all that was left of the daylight coming through the bedroom window blinds he’d replaced for her. She walked to the window, still holding on to Shackles’s collar, to open them further and give Matt more light while he worked.
An enormous spark popped out of the ceiling, and Matt cursed as he fell from the ladder. Letting go of the dog, she lunged for the ladder to steady him, but he grabbed it and took it with him, presumably to keep from falling on them. Shackles yelped and ran out of the bedroom. Somehow Matt managed to topple onto her bed, at the last minute throwing the ladder away from them both. It landed with a crash against the far wall.
Matt lay on his back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Recovering from her small heart attack, Sarah rushed to him. “Matt! Oh my God, Matt, are you okay?”
“I’m good,” he said, wincing.
She climbed on the bed with him. “If you say you’re good one more time I’m seriously going to have to kill you.”
He groaned his response.
“What can I do? Do you need me to call 911? Should I get you a cold wet rag? How about a warm one? Talk to me!”
It took her a minute to realize that in her panic she’d crossed a dangerous line. She was pretty much straddling his hips. Not exactly how she’d pictured winding up in this position, with all her clothes still on, but damned if she would move now. She had a perfectly good excuse to be hovering over him, in care and concern over whether he’d managed to electrocute himself trying to fix her money pit of a house.
“I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
“It’s worse than I thought.” He looked at the wiring above them, then at her. “I’m not sure I can move my legs.”
Sarah
