Down Shift

by K. Bromberg

  And yet today, another text. Another reminder of the family I don’t deserve. And of the weight I carry until I can make this right again.

  I look back down to the message on my phone, my thumb hovering over the keyboard. Fuck. What do you write when you don’t know the right words to say what you need to say? I set my cell down. Pick it back up. Exhale a breath. Shake my head. Type Thanks. Delete it because it’s lame, and yet while I don’t know what to say, I still need to say something. Anything. To let him know I’m trying to sort myself out. And not ignoring him. To thank him for sticking with me when I don’t deserve it.

  Thanks for giving me time.

  Chapter 11

  GETTY

  With my hands covered in streaks of pinks and peaches and oranges that match the sky at sunset on the canvas, I’m shocked at the time when I glance over at the clock. But my art always allows me to get lost in it, so I shouldn’t be surprised that four hours have passed when it felt like only forty minutes.

  A Sunday off from work and away from the bar meant the urge to paint has been overwhelming. But I’m not sure if it was the creative outlet or my desire to avoid Zander that really fueled my need to be locked away in my room.

  Because I am avoiding Zander—and his matches and fire and swoony words and defined chest and bashful kindness. In fact I have been for the past week; the few extra shifts at the bar I picked up have made it that much easier for me to do so.

  I’m not used to this kind of thing. What am I supposed to say to him? Ethan courted me with bouquets of roses, dates for dinner or the movies, pecks on the lips I mistakenly thought were romantic at the time, and abstinence before marriage.

  Proper at all times. Every date was a well-synchronized dance to win over my affection, make me believe I was desirable, so that he and my father could secretly join family empires. And then after marriage . . . the real Ethan showed his true colors. Hurt me enough until I ran away.

  So this—Zander—I don’t know how to handle his close proximity. His bruising kisses and intense eyes and unexpected admissions and kind heart beneath his brash exterior. The cocky smile and strong hands and brutal honesty. How do I deal with all these weird tingly sensations he keeps making me feel? I just don’t know. So I’ve been avoiding him. Sneaking down the hallway after he goes for his run in the morning or heading straight for my room when I get off work. No time to chat or make an idiot out of myself when I’m not face-to-face with him.

  But now that I realize how long I’ve been sitting here lost in my painting, I suddenly feel the ache of my back and the strain on my eyes from the constant concentration. And recognize that I’m starving. When I enter the kitchen, the television is on low, and Zander’s on the couch with his back to me, feet up on the table. He doesn’t turn or acknowledge me, although I’m pretty sure he heard the creak of the wood floor as I walked in. I’m okay with that, since at least I have a few more minutes to prepare myself to face him.

  But as I walk into the family room with a bowl of cereal in hand, I realize there is no amount of preparation that could stifle the way he makes me feel: lust and irritation and want and frustration all rolled into one. So I do the only thing I can and sit on the opposite end of the couch from him and settle in to eat my cereal, hating that I feel awkward in my own home.

  “Hey,” I finally say softly, not wanting to interrupt but letting manners get the best of me.

  “Hey.” That’s it. No glance my way.

  Determined not to let him have the run of our house while I slink away in avoidance, I settle into my seat and turn my focus from him to the television.

  He’s watching a race. The drone of the cars going around and around the track is constant, while the screen switches between the lead car and then the action farther back on the track where cars pass one another and change positions. I’ve never really watched a race before—too lowbrow for Ethan to care for—but there is a definite draw to it, something thrilling, that I think I can understand.

  In my peripheral vision, though, Zander is much more interesting to observe. His body language seems tense, hands fisted as if he’s behind the wheel. He grimaces every few seconds like there’s been a mistake made that I’m sure the layman fan would never notice.

  But he doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, just scrutinizes the racing world he’s been removed from. And that in itself has to make it brutal to watch.

  So we sit on the same couch, both viewing the race but for different reasons. The only sounds come from the clink of the spoon against the glass bowl. Or a mutter under his breath. The announcers droning on. The creak of the couch as I shift positions.

  “Let’s see if Colton Donavan can clinch this, Al, or if the absence of his teammate affects his ability to help block Grayson Dane from slingshotting past him on the final turn. He’s been running smooth and fast all day. Both have new tires and are good on fuel. But Dane has two more teammates on the track. Let’s see how much help they’ll be able to give him.”

  The race unfolds lap by lap, turn by turn, pass by pass, and as each second ticks by, Zander leans forward farther and farther: elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, and his features etched in intense concentration. The events on-screen own his attention so much that I don’t even think he remembers I’m there sitting beside him.

  “Goddammit!” he swears angrily as he shoves up off the couch and watches a blue car pass a red one. The announcers are going wild, but I’m too busy watching the emotion play over Zander’s face to hear what they are saying.

  When I can tear my eyes off him, the camera is following the winning car on its victory lap before panning back to the second-place car turning into the pits. Zander squints his eyes as if he’s waiting to catch a glimpse of something. The shot moves back to the victor before he sees it, because he angrily mutters something under his breath before throwing the remote down.

  The back door slams. The pounding of a hammer starts. And I’m left looking at a closed door with my empty cereal bowl in my hands and a lot of unanswered questions.

  That is, until the field reporter begins to interview the second-place racer. His name is splashed along the bottom of the screen in big, bold letters—COLTON DONAVAN—and seeing it in print causes puzzle pieces to fall into place.

  The matching last name. The missing racer from the team. The lack of help on the track.

  All of it.

  Even though I’ve never followed racing, Colton Donavan is definitely a name I’ve heard before—synonymous with his prolific successes and his renowned family—and obviously somehow related to Zander.

  Of course—how could I have been so stupid to not make the connection? That was Zander’s team, his ride, and the reason he now hates Sundays. It’s everything he left behind.

  Did his team lose today because he wasn’t on the track? Now the grumbling and the storming out make sense to me. When the hammer pounds harder and harder outside, it’s a clear indication that my assumption is correct.

  I try to ignore him, busy myself with picking up the house, cleaning the kitchen, folding the towels in the dryer, but the continued sound of the hammer keeps dragging my thoughts back to Zander. Curiosity nags at me. What did he do? How bad was it?

  Bored and yet too preoccupied to go back to painting, I stand in the kitchen and fight my own bad idea. Wanting to go sit in the sun for a bit before the incoming storm moves in. Close my eyes and soak up the rays while I relax.

  Except whom am I fooling? I’m not going out to sit in the sun so much as I’m going outside to sit with Zander—the man I’ve been avoiding.

  So I grab a bag of chips and head out in the direction of the incessant pounding noise and the occasional muttered curse word. When I step into the frame of the open sliding glass doors that lead to the deck, I’m surprised to see that Zander has ripped almost the entire thing down in the past few days—he’s starting to reinforce
the remaining pieces.

  He’s in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, hammer in hand, bent over in concentration with a level and a box of nails at his side while he lines up the next piece of wood. And I hate that I catch myself admiring his body. Taking note of the patch between his shoulder blades where a trail of sweat has darkened the cotton fabric of his shirt. The flex of his biceps as he works. The light flecks of sawdust in his dark hair. The small trace of blood on his forearm where he must have scratched it on something.

  “It’s therapeutic. Grab a hammer if you want to give it a try.”

  His voice jars me from what I thought was my private admiration of him. Heat fills my cheeks at the realization he knew I was there staring.

  “I—I don’t know how to . . . ,” I respond, suddenly flustered under the scrutiny of his stare behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses.

  “There’s no skill needed, Socks.” He bends over the toolbox and, after grabbing a hammer, holds it out handle first. “It’s not flowery or girly, but it does the job. Just don’t hit your thumb.”

  My eyes flicker from the tool to his face before I cross the few feet between us and take it from him. And now that I have it, I have absolutely no clue what to do. Luckily he senses I need direction, because he summons me over to where he was working.

  Taking the pencil from behind his ear, he proceeds to measure and mark small circles in the middle of the two-by-four he lined up on a section of handrail, while I stand there feeling stupid with the unfamiliar weight of the hammer in my hand. Plus now that we’re so close, my instinct to avoid him has returned with a vengeance.

  “I want you to hammer nails into each of those marks, okay?”

  While a big part of me is surprised and even excited to do something constructive with my hands, I’m also afraid I’ll make a mistake and mess something up. I must look like a deer in the headlights, because he belts out a laugh before taking a step closer to me.

  “C’mere. I promise it’s as easy as it looks. You take this nail here and then you tap the top of it until it bites into the wood.” He steps behind me, body ghosting mine, before taking hold of my hands and directing them into proper positioning. And hell if he didn’t just make hammering a simple nail on its head a lot more complicated.

  Because I’m sure I could have figured it out—it’s not rocket science after all—and yet once our bodies are touching, the scent of his cologne in my nose, the feel of his warm breath hitting the side of my face as he leans his head forward to demonstrate with our paired hands, the attraction hijacks my concentration. His comments from the other night return to front and center in my mind, when they weren’t buried very far to begin with.

  He holds my hand over the handle, and his fingers help me grip the nail as we tap the head of it into the first marked location on the wood. “See? Simple.”

  No, complicated is more like it.

  But I bite my tongue, nod, and concentrate through the distraction of his presence when I take control of the hammer and tap the nail in farther. He steps back after a few more taps and I feel like I can finally breathe again, think again without him clouding my thoughts.

  The work is slow going. For every one nail I tap in, I swear he taps in four or five, but there is some truth to his comment about it being therapeutic. There’s a sense of stress release in the repeated activity of pounding the hell out of a little metal nail: the clink of the hammer, how it starts to disappear into the wood, then one final hard hit to make sure it’s completely seated.

  “Eight brothers, huh?” I ask, trying to stick to a safe topic.

  “Yep.” The thump of his hammer interrupts his sentence. “Before I was adopted, I lived in a boys’ home called the House. There were eight of us over the time I was there. We all kind of grew up together. Consider each other as brothers.” Thump. Thump. Thump. “I was adopted eventually. The lady who ran the House, she and her husband ended up adopting me after a bunch of shit happened that’s complicated. But it didn’t matter to us. I mean, yeah, we don’t have the same last names and it’s not official by any law, but that doesn’t matter to us. We’re brothers.”

  “That’s seven, right?”

  “Yeah. My adoptive parents had a son. So eight.” He shrugs and, without warning, turns on the table saw and effectively ends the conversation.

  We work in silence after that. The ferry’s horn sounds out occasionally. Zander mutters a harsh swear every once in a while, but other than that, it’s just the steady (him) and unsteady (me) thump of hammers. When I run out of spots on my marked board, he sets up the next board for me with minimal words exchanged.

  “Maybe someday, you’ll trust me enough to talk about it.” His quiet comment spoken over his shoulder as if he’s talking about the weather throws me momentarily. Causes that little flicker of panic to come to life.

  “How do you know this is going to hold up? The deck?”

  Smooth, Getty. That redirection was really subtle. I mentally put the heel of my hand to my forehead as he belts out a long laugh that tells me it sounded as ridiculous to him as it did to me.

  “Very casual,” he says with a nod. “But I appreciate the attempt.”

  The smile is slow but on my lips nonetheless, and I love that he can do that to me—make me laugh at my idiosyncrasies. It’s not something I’m used to by a long stretch.

  “Okay.” I work my tongue in my cheek as I try to figure out how to answer him. “How about I’ll talk to you as soon as you talk to me?”

  His snort comes loud and clear. “The difference, though, is you can look me up. Know who I am. Where I came from. I’m not hiding any of the truths, just trying to figure out how much I want to listen to them.” He hits the nail with enough force that the sound echoes off the clapboard of the house before he looks over to me and lifts his sunglasses up so I can see the blue of his eyes.

  I avert my gaze instantly, afraid he’ll be able to tell from the flush on my cheeks that I did give in to temptation. Ventured to the library yesterday to use the Internet to see whom I’m living with. And of course, after taking all the time to build up the courage to go in there and overcoming the worry that he’d somehow find out—small town and all that—the damn computer was broken. Shipped out to the mainland for repairs.

  “You, on the other hand,” he continues, pulling me from my thoughts, “are a goddamn mystery in all aspects, so your offer isn’t exactly fair.”

  Our eyes hold each other in the waning sunlight; the challenge to give him a better answer is communicated without words.

  “Let’s just say I have Daddy issues. Is that a good enough answer?”

  His sharp, self-deprecating laugh is the last thing I expect. “You and me both, Socks. So no good. That cancels each other out. Next confession . . .”

  I direct daggers his way. My emotions are warring over what to tell him, even though I know I can’t just yet. There’s too much at risk for me—emotional and otherwise. “I don’t really want to like you, but you make it damn hard not to. There. That’s a confession.”

  That’s all I’m giving him with his quick grin and baby blues and coaxing questions.

  “It’s a start. I’ll take it.”

  Chapter 12

  GETTY

  “Ican’t believe I let you talk me into this,” I groan, but inwardly I revel in it. The red and white checkered tablecloth, the half-eaten pizza sitting on a metal stand, and what he called the wimpy starter wine shared in glasses between us. How after we came in from working on the deck, he told me to get dressed because he was taking me to dinner to thank me for helping.

  Of course I refused.

  But I’m so glad he persisted, because getting out, seeing the town through his eyes, showed me that I needed to have a little fun. Everyone he greets knows who he is because of his job, and really being a local instead of fading into the background has been liberating.
In fact I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed myself like this.

  “We forgot to make a toast,” he says as he lifts his glass up. I roll my eyes but can’t help smiling.

  “To friends,” I offer up, unsure what we should be toasting, but I figure this is as good an option as any given our situation.

  “No. Not to friends.” My eyes flash to Zander’s at the sound of his forceful reply; I’m a little surprised and a lot curious. “Because friends between the opposite sexes leads to friends with benefits and that always ends in disaster. And you know what, Getty? I don’t want that with you . . . so let’s just say ‘to us’”—he pauses, tapping his glass to mine—“whatever us may be.”

  “To us,” I murmur as his eyes search mine. All the while I’m trying to figure out what part he doesn’t want with me: the friends with benefits or the ending in disaster.

  The rest of the meal passes how the whole evening has, with us fabricating sordid backstories about the people sitting across the restaurant from us: townspeople we don’t know but will remember from here on out from our silly game. How the quiet mom with three rowdy boys in the corner really is a dominatrix for hire at night, or the gregarious busboy hoards Barbra Streisand memorabilia in his basement.

  The speculation and laughs are endless, but they don’t stop Zander’s toast from repeating in my mind as we walk back home to the cottage together.

  “Your toast? I don’t want that with you either.” Maybe it’s the few glasses of Moscato that have gone to my head or just that I’ve thought about his comment enough, but there’s no denying the tinge of hurt to my tone.

  Maybe he didn’t hear the hurt part.

  But I have to give it to Zander—while he falters midstride, he doesn’t ask what I mean. Rather he nods his head and keeps walking the rest of the way home without saying much more. He opens the door, turns on the light, and heads into the kitchen to put the leftover pizza in the refrigerator all without a word as I stare at his silhouette and wonder what he’s thinking. What I did to piss him off other than agree with him.