Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn

here in my house, getting to see something so important to me. I want to even the scales.

      He laughs. “No. She’s my dad’s neighbor.” His brow furrows for a minute as he looks out the window. “Then again, I guess she has qualities of a stepmom. Or of a mom, really.”

      “Your mom is—?”

      He turns back to me, leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets. “She’s around, sort of. My parents got divorced when I was nine, and my dad and me, we’re a team, I guess. My mom’s not a bad person, but she wasn’t much up for being a mom. So I’ve pretty much always been with my dad, even before the divorce, I guess. Sometimes he messed up, and I definitely did, but we made it work.”

      “That sucks about your mom.” Before I can think better of it, I add, “My mom wasn’t around, either. She left when I was, I don’t know, three months old, I think? Maybe a bit before.” I keep my eyes down, scribble some nonsense in the margins of the notebook, look busy.

      “That’s young,” he says, and though he hasn’t moved, I feel somehow that his posture has changed, that it’s coiled a bit more tightly than it was before.

      “Yeah. My brother was around, though.” That sounds sad, sort of Oliver Twist sad, so I say, “I mean, you know. My dad too.” That’s a can of worms I can’t believe I’ve opened here. It’s bad enough I’ve mentioned my freaking absentee mother. I’ve always been the kind of person who talks, who opens up, who tries to connect with people, somehow. But bringing up my father? That’s pretty new, even for me. He’s such a source of terrible guilt and sadness that I hardly ever talk about him, not even to Zoe and Greer, who just think he’s kind of garden-variety distant, instead of so screwed up and damaging that I have to make actual, professionally coached efforts to control the way I interact with him. Thinking of it, it strikes me that I’d loved the salvage yard so much in part because I’d liked seeing Ben and his dad together. “I think we’ve got everything in here, right?”

      He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. He’s still looking at me, but I’m determined to let this pass. “Right,” he says, and brushes past me out the door, to the bathroom.

      I stand and follow, feeling awkward and inappropriate. It’s one thing for someone to be okay answering questions about themselves, but it’s another when you make them feel weird by laying out your own crappy baggage when they didn’t ask for it. But when I get into the bathroom, Ben’s already talking. “This toilet runs.”

      “Better go catch it,” I mumble, unable to stop myself.

      He’s smiling as he lets out a dramatic groan. “That is the worst, Kit. That’s a dad joke, right there.”

      “You know, what’s everyone got against ‘dad jokes’? I think they’re funny. A toilet running? That’s funny! Just picture it.”

      “What? You’re not supposed to picture it. It’s just a pun. What is wrong with you?” He’s laughing now, and it’s so infectious that I start laughing too. “I can’t believe a person as brilliant as you laughs at a toilet running joke.”

      He called me brilliant. I can feel the way my smile changes, from laughing pleasure to flattered surprise—and he’s watching it, watching that transformation. I’m standing so close to him in this small room that I can see an answering change in his eyes, and is it—is that something like hunger there, something new I haven’t seen in his expression before? He’s got one hip leaned against my sink, looking down at where I stand in the doorway, neither of us laughing now, and I think, oh, what if I pushed up onto my tiptoes here, what if I lean right into him, and then Ben straightens and says, “I’m going to fix your toilet.”

      And thank God for that, because I was maybe a hair-trigger away from making a fool of myself, stunned stupid by that dimple and those blue eyes. “Oh, no, that’s all right,” I say quickly. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch a YouTube video or something.”

      “It’ll take five minutes.” He’s already headed downstairs, probably trying to politely flee from the doe-eyes I just served up. He returns from his truck with a toolbox, and sure enough, he does fix it in five minutes, betraying no embarrassment about that—moment. Instead, he fixes the light switch in the guest room and also resecures the window air conditioner that I have in my bedroom, which he says is about to fling itself off the ledge.

      But when the afternoon grows late, he checks the time on his phone and says he really does have to be on his way. He’s picking up pizza for him and his dad and Sharon, and since he does the bedtime routine with his dad, he doesn’t want to push it too late. Weirdly, I feel a pang of loneliness when he describes these plans, which are probably pretty exhausting for Ben. But since I was planning on eating a Lean Cuisine and online shopping for bathmats, pizza with a convalescing salvage yard owner sounds pretty great.

      I thank him, maybe a little profusely, for his help. He waves me off, all handsome nonchalance, but—it was a really kind thing for someone to do, and even though over the last hour I’d decided that moment in the bathroom was only a blip, nothing to think twice about, now, out here saying goodbye on the porch, my thoughts go right back there. Here’s this nice guy, this hot as hell guy, who spent the afternoon with you.

      “You’re not going to get much time to miss me,” he says, his voice low and teasing. “Seven p.m., tomorrow. You, me, and that microscope you like so much.”

      Oh. I feel my face heat a little in embarrassment. Brilliant, he’d said, but of course he’d said that, this guy who’s recruiting me for a job I don’t want. I’d forgotten, a little. I’d forgotten the guy I met in the suit, the corporate guy with all that undeserved confidence, replaced him temporarily with the Ben who makes toilet repair look sexy. And it’s deflating to think I’ll have to deal with the other guy tomorrow.

      “Right,” I say, a little flat, and he seems to hear it, or maybe I just imagine that little shift he does with his shoulders.

      “Looking forward to it,” he says, heading down the steps. At the bottom, he pauses, looks back up at the house. “It really is a beautiful house, Ekaterina.”

      I’m too dumbfounded by the compliment, by the way he’s said my name, to respond. So I wave and duck back into the house, more than a little confused about the day.

      Chapter 6