by Holley Trent
She glanced at the big growling beast and saw Tim lean forward. He waved her over.
She pretended she didn’t see it and walked into the office to join Carine.
Not today, Tim.
She didn’t want to talk about why she was still there and why she hadn’t taken his calls.
Being in limbo, she didn’t know what to do with him. She was entertaining other opportunities, so chances were good that she was still leaving. It made more sense for her to tread carefully and not get attached. Not so much anymore for the sake of her job—because fuck that—but because now she was running out of reasons to not have a go at something meaningful, at least for a while.
She didn’t know how to do meaningful.
She savored the feel of air conditioning on her sweaty skin for a few seconds and then clasped her hand over Carine’s mouth before she could run it.
“Don’t tell me anything,” Valerie said. “Whatever Leah said, I don’t want to know.”
Carine huffed and pried Valerie’s hand away. “Fine. I won’t tell you what she said, but I’ll tell you what she’s doing. She’s on the way here, and certainly not because she wants to buy a piece of this marshy paradise. Where are you going to run to this time?”
“That little brat.” Valerie plopped into her desk chair and woke up her computer. “I can’t run any-damn-where this time. I’ve got too much work to do.”
“I thought you were quitting at the first opportunity.”
“I am. I’m not putting up with this anymore, but I still need to apply myself at least minimally.”
And if she were working, she wouldn’t feel so compelled to run to Tim for rescue.
She hoped so, anyway.
Carine gave her the long blink treatment. “All right, then. I’ll take Leah to Clay’s and will try to be a good example for her in your absence, but remember…” She pressed her palms to the desk and leaned in to meet Valerie at eye level. “The last time I escorted her, she caught a Dowd’s attention. I know how you feel about those Dowds.”
“I hate you.”
“That’s fine.” Carine signed and twirled a lock of her hair around her index finger. “I hate me, too, lately.”
___
The boys on the porch at Clay’s house obviously knew to withhold their commentary as Valerie walked past them with Leah and Carine. She hadn’t wanted to go but didn’t see where she had a choice. Someone needed to be the responsible one.
As soon as the ladies stepped into the cool air of the old farmhouse, Valerie had to force herself to take a deep breath. She felt like a crowd enveloped them, but her eyes told her otherwise. It really wasn’t that many people. She’d just felt intruded upon all week—constantly bothered with some little thing or another—and the loud, thumping music and the touchy-feely-grabbiness of the lowdown dirty folks in attendance made her a bit claustrophobic.
Clay squeezed his way through the clump and pulled her free of it. “You look like you need a drink, honey.”
She let out a ragged laugh and dragged her hand down her face. “No, but thanks. I’m the designated driver tonight.”
“Well, you want some tea? A sandwich? A steak or something?”
“A steak, Clay?”
“Hmm?” Scanning over her at the crowd, he seemed completely distracted, but Valerie could guess precisely who he was looking for. At the moment, that someone was rooting through the galvanized aluminum ice bucket in search of a beer.
Valerie squinted at him. “Clay,” she warned.
“What?”
“Eyes to yourself.”
“Hey, it’s my house.”
“And that’s my sister.”
She’d tried to talk Leah out of wearing that ridiculous leather getup and the four-inch spiked heels, but Leah had said she’d wanted to look the part. Valerie wasn’t quite sure what the “part” was because she couldn’t query the woman without sounding too intelligent on the subject.
“Yep. You know what? Y’all got some damn good genes in your family tree. Tell your grandma I said so.”
“Clay,” she warned again.
He seemed unmoved. He was still staring in the general direction of Leah.
Maybe try a different tactic.
Valerie folded her arms over her chest and canted her head. “I thought you liked men.”
“So?”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but Leah doesn’t qualify.”
“So?”
“Equal opportunity player?”
He grunted. “I wouldn’t say equal.” He finally pulled his gaze away from Leah. You want some tea? Made it myself. I’ve got the air conditioner on full blast, but the longer you stand here, the more you’re gonna sweat. Too many damn bodies in here…” His pale gaze tracked toward Leah yet again. “Writhin’.”
Valerie growled. “Yes. Thanks. Tea would be wonderful.”
“No problem. I take care of my guests.”
“Some more than others, I’m sure.”
“I’m being very, very good, Valerie. Trust me.”
“Trusting Dowds seems to be a questionable venture in my experience.”
“Why, because you don’t like the way it feels when you do?”
She didn’t dignify the question with a response.
“Mm-hmm.” Clay slung an arm around her shoulders and guided her through the open pocket door at the back of the room. He led her down a little hall, past the bathroom, and into a bright, roomy kitchen.
“Wow.” Her gaze hungrily devoured the refinished floors, the beautiful wainscoting, and the period window trims as he yanked opened the stainless steel-toned fridge.
“Yep. My pride and joy. This is the only room in that house that’s truly done, which makes sense, I guess. I spend almost all my time here, and when I’m not here, I’m on my porch, pondering my lot in life.”
“I’d love to see the rest of it. Architectural curiosity, of course.”
“Oh, for you, I’d throw open every door so you can ogle my deepest, darkest…” Letting the thought dangle, he snorted. “Deepest, darkest closets, of course. House is a fuckin’ mess. I don’t like folks seeing the worst parts of it, but I guess you’d understand. Feel free to poke around, but don’t tell anyone I told you that you could. They’ll think you’re getting special treatment or something.” He poured her some tea, handed her the glass, and winked. “Take your time. I’ll catch up to you in a bit. I need to greet my guests and reintroduce my hands to your little sister’s ass.”
“Clay!” Valerie gaped.
“What?” His expression was neutral as a sphinx. “I’m just gonna touch it. She doesn’t mind.”
“I know she doesn’t. That’s the problem.”
“Oh, honey, I’m the least of her problems.” He wriggled his eyebrows as he backed to the door. “And besides, as long as I’m groping her, no one else is.”
“I’m not sure why you think that idea would bring me comfort.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it shouldn’t.”
Valerie sighed, took a long sip of the cold, mellow tea, and arced around to the opposite side of the room. She peered out the back door at what must have been the fields in the distance, and then looked down at the porch in front of her. It was an impressive wraparound, even to her standards, though she imagined many Southerners in the last century used their porches in the way some modern folks used their living rooms. Prior to the advent of air conditioning, home occupants often chose to sit outside in the shade and try to catch a breeze rather than penning themselves up in stuffy, uncirculated air inside the home.
“Hmm.” She narrowed her eyes and pondered why so few of the home models at Shora had more than a few square yards of porch. “Don’t even wonder,” she told herself, rolling her eyes. “You already know the answer to that.”
The guy who’d made the plans had basically lifted them wholesale from previous projects. The houses were more or less out of the firm’s Generic Tract House file drawer. Valerie had never und
erstood why they didn’t at least make a few unique styles available for each new community. They wouldn’t be taxing the contractors any more than they already were because they knew they were going to be building five or six different floor plans, anyway.
“But, whatever. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”
She was going to do the bare minimum to get by, just like everyone else in the company, until she could find something better.
She was done. Lipton could go fuck their collective selves.
Valerie started up the rear staircase that was accessible from the hallway just off the kitchen and studied the fixtures and renovation work as she went. Her guess was that Clay had only recently repaired the ceiling as well as some stair treads. Probably the braces beneath it, too. Once people started tinkering with structural components like stairs, studs, and supports, they tended to proactively fix the items immediately around them, too, just to feel confident about the durability of the work.
Peeking only into the rooms that had lights on, Valerie alternately grunted with appreciation and shuddered in revulsion at what she saw. There had to be an eighth-inch of peeling wallpaper in one room. There was a hole in the floor in another. The afterthought of a bathroom slapped onto the end of the hall sometime in the last-half century, probably, made Valerie’s eye twitch.
Clay’s bedroom, added on at about the same time, was large and dark and spacious. The bathroom was a mess, but the bedroom would be worth the rest of the frustration by the time everything was done.
She lifted the end of the bondage cuffs he’d left dangling from a bedpost and chuckled. “I hope he cleans up before inviting his mother over.”
She made her way back downstairs and into the kitchen.
Clay had returned. He wriggled his eyebrows at her and leaned into the fridge. “Did you give yourself the grand tour?”
She chuckled. “I wouldn’t say grand tour. More like the abbreviated discount tour.”
“So…” He backed away from the fridge, expression surprisingly bashful for a man who was outgoing by profession. “What’d you think of the bathroom?”
“It’s a terror, but you know that. Looks like you don’t use it.”
“Nope. Tim and I didn’t even use it when we were kids. We always used the one down here. We didn’t have to worry about falling through the floor that way.”
“I’d get rid of that upstairs bathroom, not that you asked for my opinion.”
He put up his hands. “No, no. Go ahead. I’m curious to hear what you think.”
“I mean, I suspect it was put there because the existing plumbing was easily accessible from that location, but the plumbing got updated later anyway, right?”
“It did, and I’m updating it again. I’m getting rid of that tiny room off to the side of the master and using it for a bathroom and the closet I don’t currently have. Or at least, that’s my plan. I haven’t talked to the architect yet.”
“I hope you and Tim don’t share an architect.”
“We do. Why?”
Valerie forced a breath through her clenched teeth and shook her head. “My grandmother always says, ‘God don’t like ugly,’ so I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
“God also doesn’t like botched reno jobs, so you run that mouth all you want, honey. If the architect’s a hack, tell me now.”
Valerie took another sip of tea and stared at Clay over the rim of the glass.
“Fine. You didn’t say it, so I’m gonna assume it. He’s a hack.” Clay threw up his hands. “Great. Super. I already gave him the down payment for the next thing.”
“Get it back. I wouldn’t trust him to design so much as a gazebo.”
He swiped a fist through the air, and growled out, “Fuck. And now I want a gazebo. I don’t like you, lady. You make me want stuff and stuff costs money.”
“Like my sister? She costs lots of money.” Shaking her head, she laughed. “Don’t worry about the house, Clay, I think you’ll figure it out.”
“Yep. He’s good at thinking outside of the box. Always has been,” came the voice of a newcomer to the room.
No…
Valerie stared straight ahead, unseeing, and sipped the dregs of her tea. She wasn’t going to look toward the door.
That voice, that had sounded so much like Tim’s, was surely just a phantom in her mind. Perhaps the sound was only a bit of delirium on her part due to the stressful past couple of weeks. Tim wasn’t actually there.
She wasn’t going to have to deal with him tonight.
Not at all.
“You got here fast, Timmy,” Clay said.
Valerie sighed. She couldn’t very well pretend Tim wasn’t there if Clay could see and hear him, too.
“There was no one on the roads,” Tim said. “I might have pushed the speed limit a little.”
Valerie scoffed. Un-fucking-real. She locked a glare on Clay, who now leaned on the kitchen island staring brazenly at her and not the bottle of wine he’d apparently meant to fetch.
“You called him, didn’t you?” she accused. “As soon as I got here.”
“Yep.”
“So much for privacy, huh?”
He shrugged. “You know, what happens here generally stays here. I don’t call folks and let them know if any particular person shows up. I always tell them to find out by seeing with their own eyes. But this was a special case.”
“That’s called tattling, Clay.”
“Yep, but I wasn’t tattling as host of this function. I was acting in my capacity as the brother of this guy.” He grabbed the bottle and shuffled toward the door. “Staying a while, Timmy?”
“I don’t see where I have a choice. A couple of those harpies out there have harangued me into doing a demonstration.”
“With who?”
Tim shrugged. “I’ll pick a volunteer.”
“Hot damn.” Clay practically skipped with glee. “I’ll go clear the stage.”
Valerie rolled her eyes as Tim sidled up to the island.
Saying nothing, he leaned his forearms onto the counter and locked that takes-no-shit glare on her.
“Don’t do this to me, Tim.”
“Don’t do what? Be pissed that you obviously don’t feel anything for me because if you did, you’d tell me things?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It makes me feel like I’m in the wrong and need to be punished, and I don’t. I do what I need to do to solidify my career, and I told you upfront that nothing was going to come of our time together. I was very clear about that.”
“Mm-hmm. I’ll admit that you were, but I think you’re being unreasonable.”
“Why, because you can’t have your way? No wonder Kevin has such privileged thinking.”
At that stinging retort, Tim’s nostrils flared, and brow furrowed.
She sipped the last of her tea and set the class on the countertop. “Don’t tell me I’m being unreasonable, and I won’t tell you about…parenting, I guess you’d call it.”
Screw this.
She hitched her purse up to her shoulder and walked into the living room, scanning for Carine and Leah. She figured she’d return for them later when they were ready to go, or Valerie could wait in the car and ponder all the things that had gone wrong in her life up to that date.
It was bound to be a long list.
“You ready, Tim?” Clay called out from the little stage set up in front of the fireplace.
Tim slid around Valerie, staring down at her as he passed, and made his way through the crowd.
What’s he doing?
She hated that she was curious, but how could she not be.
Up on the stage, Tim rolled up his sleeves.
Someone up front in the crowd wolf-whistled. Another shouted, “Get your hands dirty, Timmy!”
Dirty how?
Valerie eased a bit closer to the crowd and exploited openings throughout to position herself nearer the main event, whatever it was.
At the tap to her shoulder, she tur
ned and found Leah behind her, lipstick smeared, ponytail crooked, and the top of her leather catsuit unfastened.
“What the hell have you been doing?” Valerie snapped, and then made the universal sign for You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.
Leah rubbed her finger over her incisors. “Nothing you need to know about, prude.”
Valerie cut her gaze leftward toward the stage and caught Tim leaning down for a lady in the front to whisper something to him.
“Don’t worry. She just ran into an enthusiastic groper,” Carine said with a titter.
“Who? Clay?”
Leah batted her eyelashes. “He might have been a part of it.”
“What do you mean, a part of it? Who else was a part of it besides you?”
“You can’t ask that.”
“I sure as shit can.”
“Why, because you don’t think that at almost-thirty that I can occasionally make a good decision?” Leah asked.
“This whole place is a bad decision.”
“Just have fun. God. Nobody’s asking you to be a saint.”
“You keep assuming that I am one!” Valerie spat.
If Leah had a response at all to that blurting, she didn’t have time to expel it because the older woman in leather pants and a harness right in front of them turned around shushed them.
“Bite me, Stella,” Carine said. “Nothing’s happening up there yet and, besides, you know…freedom of speech?”
Stella huffed but turned.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Leah asked Valerie. “What you just said?”
Valerie sighed. Apparently, Stella’s interruption hadn’t been distracting enough. “None of your business. Just know that when I offer you guidance, that perhaps it’s because I know a little something about what I’m talking about.”
“You can’t make decisions for me,” Leah said. “In fact, I think you should let someone make some for you for a change. The first one would be to bend you over and pull that stick out of your ass.”
Valerie ground her teeth and faced forward. She didn’t have a problem with letting someone else make decisions on occasion. But the problem she was running into was when that person’s decisions impacted her for more than just short-term. That was the unacceptable risk of playing with them.
