Ten Thousand Hours

by Ren Benton

  Von opened the door. His gaze zoomed to the cheesecake as if the woman holding it didn’t exist. “My wife doesn’t have to know.”

  “Your wife said the same thing about her husband when I told her what I was bringing.” She accepted the invitation to enter and shifted the pan from one hand to the other while he relieved her of her bag and jacket. “I’m going to throw this on the floor and watch you two fight over it.”

  He hung her bag and jacket from sturdy wooden pegs. “I’m game, but just so you know, food fights around here turn sexual.”

  She headed back to the kitchen. “The way Cam tells it, around here, sneezes turn sexual.”

  Von followed close behind to guard the cheesecake. “She’s so indiscreet.”

  Camille didn’t look up from the potatoes submitting to her knife on the cutting board. “I read straight from the script you give me, hot stuff.”

  “I’m taking this hot stuff out to fire up the grill.” Von trailed his hand over his wife’s butt in passing, and she wiggled into it in lieu of reciprocating with her starchy hands.

  Ivy looked away on the pretense of putting the cheesecake in the fridge. Her friends were openly, effusively, unabashedly affectionate. If they were within a hundred feet of each other, they invented excuses to collide, if only to bounce off one another before drifting to opposite corners until their attraction pulled them together once more. They were beautiful to watch — and a painful reminder that she had never been loved that way, had never inspired that kind of passion. The closest she had ever come was with a man who thought she was someone else.

  Speaking of which. “Guess who turned up at my parents’ house Sunday.”

  Camille’s focus on potato slicing intensified to brain-surgery levels. “Taylor Swift?”

  Ivy’s lips thinned. “Oh, I’d completely forgotten that. If you hadn’t brought it up, the memory would have stayed suppressed and our friendship intact.”

  “I said it as a joke, and the fool took notes. He should have taken some damn notes while he had you.” Camille drove the knife through a tuber with more force than necessary. “Prepping like he was going on a blind date instead of proposing to a woman he’s known for years without bothering to learn anything about her didn’t put me in a helpful mood.”

  She was being too hard on Jared. Ivy couldn’t say she knew his music preferences, either, if he even had any. She knew he liked quiet, so she turned off the radio when he was in her car and wore headphones when his presence coincided with a desire to blast one of her playlists, so how could he know what she liked? Music wasn’t something they had shared.

  What had they shared? They talked about work. The news. Budgeting. Responsibilities. Things that really mattered.

  Boring things.

  But Jared was beside the point. “Since he was the least of my unpleasant surprises that day, I’m letting you off easy.”

  “Worse than plain oatmeal and Swifty?” Camille put down the knife so a bombshell of that magnitude didn’t cause an accident. “You have my attention.”

  Ivy made her wait while she dropped ice cubes into a glass one by one. Camille was bouncing on her heels by the time she topped it off with water. “The serenade interrupted a reunion with the enchilada.”

  Camille’s brows rose high on her forehead. “No.”

  “He’s apparently known my father for years.” She took a leisurely sip. “They’ve gone fishing together.”

  “I refuse.” Camille’s chest shook with suppressed laughter. “Only you could let your hair down two thousand miles away and have the split ends follow you home.”

  Ivy claimed one of the baby carrots awaiting its turn under the knife en route to the mandatory side salad. “It’s punishment for my bad behavior.”

  “The hell it is. When the Lord provides an all-you-can-eat enchilada, you open wide and stuff yourself. That’s a gift.”

  Ivy studied the carrot — nutritious, no cholesterol, hardly any calories. Much healthier than an enchilada. “That buffet is closed.”

  “Why?”

  “You saw him.”

  Camille’s brows flattened. “And you fucked him, if I’m not mistaken. More to your point, he fucked you, so he obviously doesn’t think he’s too good for you.”

  “People do things on vacation they would never do in real life.” Her own actions were a shining example. One could safely assume Griff availed himself of a warm body he wouldn’t ordinarily be seen in public with. “He hasn’t been bragging about his conquest, so it’s obviously not something he’s proud of.”

  Camille flung up her hands. “Or maybe he’s not a pig! If we’re at the point where we determine how much men like us on a scale of telling their friends to posting our sex tapes on the internet, society needs to end.”

  Ivy tapped the carrot on the counter. “It is funny how fast my fear of sullying my reputation turned to outrage that he wasn’t even going to try. Mom never tried to set me up with him.”

  Her mother tried to pair her with every man she met under the age of sixty — and one over — but it never crossed her mind Ivy might get along with a handsome cabinetmaker.

  “Maybe she knows he’s a meth addict with a prison record for beating up senior citizens and he’s not good enough for you.”

  Ivy had some experience with addicts and violence, thanks to Holly and her acquaintances. If Griff fell into that category, he hid the signs well. “After he left, she said he’d be perfect for Holly.”

  “Why, is he a psychiatrist?” Camille resumed cutting fries. “If your mom tries to set them up, it’s proof she doesn’t like him. Holly isn’t good for anyone.”

  At least no one had ever accused Holly of being boring.

  Ivy stopped playing with the carrot and nibbled. At the time her mother expressed these romantic aspirations, her throat had been too hollow and raw to respond, her protest scooped out and discarded like the trash it was. Griff didn’t belong to her, and what — or whom — he did was none of her business.

  “What did Byron say when he found out his little girl’s halo got used as a cock ring?”

  A wad of masticated carrot snuck down Ivy’s windpipe. After her coughing subsided, she rasped, “Christ, Cam. Oddly enough, the subject didn’t come up with Dad.”

  “Oh? I’d have thought it would if you were being punished.” Camille scooped the fries-to-be into a bowl of ice water. “So what did the enchilada say, in the absence of oinking?”

  Nothing I could say about you would be cause for embarrassment. “He said my hair looked nice.”

  Camille’s nose wrinkled. “What an oatmeal thing to say. The enchilada let me down.”

  Von returned from the patio, bringing the smell of smoke with him. “What’s this about enchiladas? I thought I was grilling steaks.”

  “You are, hon.” His wife bumped him with her hip, the requisite collision after a brief separation. “Take your meat out and play with it.”

  “I’m just saying if the plan has changed, I could get down with a couple of enchiladas.”

  Ivy covered her face with both hands to blot out his enthusiastic and clueless foray into homoeroticism.

  Camille handed him the plate of steaks. “Sorry, babe, but there was only one enchilada, and Ivy will never tell me how she ate it until you go away, so shoo.”

  He returned to the patio with a push, muttering, “What’s to tell? You put it in your mouth and swallow.”

  Ivy’s hands muffled her words. “That concludes this episode of When Metaphors Attack.”

  “You’re forgetting the after-credits bonus footage when I ask if you did, in fact, swallow.”

  “Alas, my response is truncated by a preview of the network’s newest show, America’s Next Exploited Human Commodity.”

  “Interesting.” Camille spread the potatoes on a towel to dry. “Are you keeping your mouth shut because you’re embarrassed to tell your friend you laid with that man or because you’re not a pig?”

  Nothing she could say
about Griff would be cause for embarrassment. “I am not a pig. I am a sensible, responsible, inoffensive lady.”

  “If you were a pig, on a scale of telling your friends to posting your sex tape on the internet, how would you rate him?”

  “You would be the very first person to get the link.”

  A low hum came from Camille’s throat as she bundled the dried potatoes in the towel and transferred them to the pot of oil bubbling on the stove. “You need to get that man’s number and offer to help him with the shortage of scratches on his back.”

  “I’m not going to fight the thousands of other women volunteering similar assistance.” On a small island, she’d witnessed an attraction rate averaging one woman per hour. In a city with a population over half a million, women would be on him like mosquitoes in spring. She would never force her way through the swarm to get another bite.

  “Men like savagery. Prove you want it. Put on a bikini, oil up, snatch some weave.” Camille cast a glance over her shoulder. “No? You are no fun, Ivy Miller.”

  Being true didn’t ease the sting. “That’s the consensus.”

  She would have to be a completely different woman to be more than a one-time convenience to a man like Griffin Dunleavy.

  After escaping the office, Griff unwound with a trip to the lumberyard. While he debated which design to use for Violet’s curio cabinets, he could at least decide which materials to use. Tall or short didn’t matter if he couldn’t match the finish of the piece currently in her dining room.

  The grain of the available oak looked too rustic for his purposes. Maple, the other budget-friendly option, tended not to accept stain uniformly, particularly disastrous with the dark color he needed to achieve.

  He lingered a while over the cherry stock, which had a nice blend of heartwood and sapwood. It would darken with age, adding character but limiting the lifespan on color matching the factory-finished piece.

  He persuaded a guy with plans to build a table for his entryway to give some of the cherry a good home.

  Walnut would be too pricey to build a solid-walled chest, but most of the surfaces of this project were glass and mirror. If he went over budget on fifteen or twenty board feet of good wood, he’d absorb the overage. He’d burned money on less-worthy causes.

  He walked out of the store with a two-foot length of walnut and a sackful of samples of fillers, stains, and polyurethane to test on it.

  He pulled his car into the garage, removed his loot from the trunk, and threw the cover over the hood in anticipation of an evening of sanding and staining. He flipped on the light above the workbench so he could see his phone and opened the photo gallery to refresh his memories of Violet’s cabinet.

  The first image captured the tape measure stretched across the top edge but mainly refreshed his memories of Ivy’s hands. Soft skin. A bold touch. Bare nails just long enough to leave a lasting impression on a man’s body.

  He scrolled past that one before he developed further similarity to the driftwood rod she’d been stroking when those hands first caught his eye.

  The next image caught the upper curve of her ear, the pretty pink shell into which he’d issued self-preserving commands she had gleefully mutinied against with that breathy, wicked laugh of hers.

  Moving on.

  In profile, her cheek was rosy, flustered by the threat of anyone but him learning she’d been less than angelic for one hour of her life.

  Followed by big brown eyes looking over her shoulder, which reminded him of the way her eyes had gone wide and bruised when Byron mentioned his scars. Half of him had wanted to convert her compassion to kissing every hurt he’d ever suffered to make it better. The other half — the better half — had wanted to banish that traumatized look from her eyes.

  For once in his life, his goodness prevailed.

  If anyone deserved her sympathy, it was his parents for the exorbitant insurance premiums that roomed with his clumsiness in the absence of a healthy sense of mortality.

  How many damn pictures had he taken?

  In the long view of the floor-to-top measurement, the stretch of her arms overhead lifted her T-shirt above the waistband of her jeans. His fingers curled against the urge to smooth his palm over the strip of exposed skin. And around to her front. And up. Or down. If she had ideas about hand placement, he’d be happy to collaborate.

  He placed the phone, screen down, on the bench and rubbed the top of his head. This was stupid. He had a job to do, and there was no point getting distracted by the Duchess. Even if she had been less horrified at the sight of him, the rule for involvement with a friend’s daughter had to be the same as for a friend’s sister: don’t do it unless the friendship is an acceptable casualty.

  He liked Byron. He liked having a mechanic he could trust not to rip him off. He valued that relationship.

  There were plenty of women he could fuck without jeopardizing it.

  He would transfer the measurements — of the cabinet — to a diagram, find a good color sample and crop Ivy’s body parts out of it, delete the rest of the pictures, and join her in pretending that morning on the island never happened.

  But before he looked at any part of her again, he needed a minute to clear his head.

  He went through the connecting door into the house, stripping off his jacket and tie on the way to the bedroom. He traded his buttoned-down shirt for a tee soft with age. When his trousers went in the hamper to make way for sweatpants that were positively geriatric, he caught sight of the marks on his thigh that remained from Ivy’s nails.

  He assured his interested dick there were other women — even other women who were sexy, funny, clever, and not fixated on tying him down, unless it was in the light bondage sense.

  But why look for them when we already know where to find one we like? his dick reasoned.

  Friendship. Not getting gouged on auto repair. Her lack of happiness to see him. He’d already covered the reasons to look elsewhere, but they weren’t holding up against a few chaste pictures of isolated body parts.

  In his dick’s defense, they were very pretty body parts. None of them were especially striking on their own, but the fully assembled woman broadcast a soft, warm, inviting signal that appealed to more than his eyes. He’d received fully nude texts that hadn’t provoked as visceral a reaction as that narrow slice of Ivy’s lower back.

  High-mindedness was getting its ass kicked in this fight. He needed an external obstacle.

  He wouldn’t ask her parents for her number. If he couldn’t find it the old-fashioned way, he’d take it as a sign.

  An internet search would make it too easy, which would defeat his purpose, so he dug through the junk drawer in the kitchen and unearthed the phone book that had migrated to the bottom with disuse. Lots of single women had unlisted numbers for security reasons. Hell, lots of people didn’t have land lines at all anymore. She might not even have the same name as her stepfather. There was virtually no chance she’d be in the book.

  One look, old school, and that would be the end of this obsession.

  Miller, Ivy. Right at the top of the page.

  Rejection was another valid form of obstacle. She hadn’t been happy to see him, and she certainly wasn’t timid about busting the balls of unwanted men. She could shut this down where his better judgment had failed.

  He punched her number into the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. The voice on her outgoing message dispelled the notion it was a different Ivy Miller. “Hi. It’s Griff. I’d like to buy you another lunch.”

  He omitted the lengthy list of other acts he’d like to do with her, left his mobile number, and ended the call.

  He dropped the phone back in its dock and wondered if any man had ever looked forward to rejection with such fervent hope.

  The certainty of being shot down freed his mind of intrusive thoughts. He transferred the measurements from the photos to a diagram without lingering on the woman holding the tape measure. He didn’t hit the delete icon in case
he had to double check the figures — of the cabinet.

  An hour later, the walnut had smoothed under the stroke of increasingly fine grades of sandpaper. He had worked up to 300-grit when his phone buzzed on the workbench beside him. He grinned behind the respirator keeping the dust out of his lungs. He wouldn’t make it awkward for her by forcing her to decline his invitation live. She could shatter his voicemail’s heart while he concentrated on the job at hand.

  He had nothing finer than 360-grit, so he stopped there for the night. He blew the dust off the wood with a shot from the air compressor and ran his fingers over the satin surface. It would do for a stain test, but he’d massage the grain a little more when he finished the cabinet to mimic the glassy commercial smoothness of the original.

  He pulled the mask down to rest on his chest and pushed his goggles to the top of his head. He gave his dusty phone a blast of air before checking his messages. Several had accumulated since he left the office.

  A former client inviting him to play golf. A woman whose name he didn’t recognize inviting him to play something substantially more lewd. A current client complaining about the elder Dunleavy brother’s interpersonal skills. His sister-in-law expressing her displeasure at his continued failure to come by and coo over her glorious offspring.

  Ivy.

  Telling him where to meet her for lunch tomorrow.

  3

  Ivy had seventy-four minutes to clip her bride into the dress of her dreams and get across the park to meet Griff for lunch.

  Seventy-four minutes to wonder why he wanted to meet her.

  Her bride was hellbent on distracting her from the preoccupation that had gripped her since she returned home from dinner with Camille and Von to find Griff’s message on her answering machine. Martina Emmanuel had a lot of ideas about her bridal presentation that would require all of Ivy’s concentration to capture in one dress.

  Fortunately, Martina was the good-natured variety of particular. She cast a critical eye over her reflection while Ivy clipped the excess fabric at the back of the third dress she’d tried on. “This is a gorgeous dress, but I think it would take over the wedding.”