She looked at herself in the mirror. She felt attractive and womanly for the first time in how long?
“What the heck are you doing?” she whispered.
Given the hunger David Blaze made her feel, and the happiness, what the heck was she doing?
It was obvious. She was playing with fire. And she was startled by how much she liked it, especially when she let him into her house a half hour later and saw the deep male appreciation darken the brown of his eyes to near black.
And then he turned his attention, swiftly, to her rickety chair, and to the heap of tools he had unearthed at his mother’s house and brought with him.
For a moment she felt an old wound resurfacing: his turning his attention so deliberately away from her made her feel the same way she had felt after he had kissed her all those years ago, and then turned away.
Suddenly, she wondered about that. Had he turned away then because he felt too little? Or because he had felt too much?
She reminded herself that she had invited him here for him, not for her.
And for now she was going to free herself from all that; she was just going to enjoy the moment. She would navigate the other stuff when it surfaced.
And hope that it didn’t blow everything around it to smithereens!
“There,” he said, a half hour later, righting the chair, resting his hand on the back of it and looking supremely satisfied with himself when it did not wobble. “Done.”
“That’s great, David. Hey, do you think you could mow my lawn? I’ve let it get too deep. I can’t even push the mower through it.”
He shot her a look like he was going to protest. She deliberately busied herself rescuing the remains of the Dandy Lion ice cream, then snuck a look at him.
As she suspected, David looked nothing but relieved that she had given him another excuse not to go home.
* * *
Two days later, on her back deck, Kayla snuck another look at the man in her yard. Terrible as it was to admit—like a weakness, really—it was nice to have a man around. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was a man like David.
They had fallen into a routine of sorts. He came over in the morning, and she made coffee and toast.
He sat out on her deck with his laptop and used her internet, and then, as if it were a fair trade, did some chores around the house. Her screen door didn’t squeak anymore—he’d replaced and reinforced the latch; the kitchen faucet didn’t drip.
Yesterday, when the hardware store had delivered planks to fix her back deck, she had protested.
“David, no. I feel as if I’m taking advantage of you and all your manly skills.”
He had lifted an eyebrow at her to let her know that he had manly skills she had not begun to test yet. The awareness between them was electric. But despite long, lingering gazes, and hands and shoulders and hips “accidentally” touching, they had not kissed again.
But then his gaze had slid to his own house.
She saw how her initial assessment of the situation had been bang on: he needed to be busy right now.
And his initial assessment of her situation had also been correct: her house was a project that was too big for her to undertake.
“I am so grateful for your help,” she admitted.
He smiled and Kayla appreciated the slow unfolding of the new relationship between them. Even if she would have given in to the temptation, Bastigal had an intuitive sense of when the hum of electricity was growing too intense between them, and would become quite aggressive toward David.
His message was clear: I am the man of this house. But in a way it was a blessing that he was chaperoning them.
She had made the mistake of intimacy too quickly once before and the results had been disastrous.
If there was something here to be explored, she wanted to do it slowly, an unfolding of herself and of him.
Now she watched him out on her lawn. David was doing her lawn in sections, mostly because her lawn mower—which he had dubbed HAL Two—had, like the name suggested, a mind of its own.
It would roar to life, work for five or ten minutes and then sputter to a halt. From the first day, she had liked watching David fiddle with her cranky lawn mower.
Every time it broke down he would do the manly things required with such ease: checking the oil, turning it over and cleaning out underneath it. As she looked on he would run his finger along the blade and frown, but then apparently decide it was okay and flip it back up again.
Moments later the air would be filled with the sound of the mower once more. She had always liked that sound and the smell of fresh-mown grass.
Kayla had told herself to keep busy. She could look up the manual for her batch freezer on the internet after all! But there was no reason she could not do that from her perch on the deck.
So she ended up, day after day, taking the computer out on the deck, liking the feeling of being close to him, of covertly watching him work.
Seeing David—willingly working, liking to help out—was such a poignant counterpoint to the life that she had had and the choices she had made.
After watching David struggle through her jungle of a lawn until he was wiping the sweat from his brow, Kayla took pity on him and went in and made lemonade. She had it done by the time the lawn mower shut off, and she called him up from the yard.
He eyed her offering with pretended suspicion.
“This looks suspiciously like pee, too. Is it the Dandelion ice cream reincarnated?”
“No, but what a great idea! Fresh squeezed lemonade at More-moo.”
“You need to let me do some homework before you go any further on the More-moo thing.”
She went still. Oh, it felt so good to have someone offering to do things for her! But it was a weakness to like it so much, a challenge to her vow to be totally independent.
“Duh-veed,” she said, her tone teasing, “I can do my own homework.”
He lifted an eyebrow and put down his lemonade in one manly gulp. He handed her the empty glass. “I have people who do nothing else all day long. You should let them have a look at it.”
To refuse would be churlish, pure stupid pride. “I’d have to pay,” she decided.
“At least that would be a better investment than the batch freezer.”
“The ice cream eruption was just a minor glitch,” she said. “I can fix it. I’ve been on the internet looking at that model. The snap-down lid is missing, that’s all.”
“It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, getting that contraption before you know about the ice cream parlor.”
“It was a good deal!”
He rolled his eyes but took the glass from her. He casually wiped the sweat off his brow. She refilled the glass and he took a long, appreciative swig.
There was something about the scene that was so domestic and so normal that she wanted to just stay here, in this sunny moment, forever.
His phone buzzed and he took it out of his pocket, frowned, read a message and put it back. “Could I tap into your internet for a few minutes? A video is coming through that I’d like to look at on my laptop instead of my phone.”
“Of course.”
He went and retrieved his laptop from where it was now stored on her kitchen counter. He sat outside on one of her deck chairs. He looked uncharacteristically lost.
Kayla