by Sarah Title
Not that they had a relationship.
A girl could dream.
And this girl maybe did dream. About an angry man in boxers.
Oh, Lord, those boxers.
She shook her head. No. No no no no no. She was on a Fresh Path to Independence, not a Do-Dumb-Stuff-with-Your-Landlord-Even-If-It-Looks-Super-Fun Path. And taming that angry bear who lived next door would definitely be trouble. She didn’t want trouble. She didn’t want to reform a bad boy. That stuff was not for her. If the bad boy wanted to change, he’d change. A person can only be who he is. That’s how she’d ended up getting anxiety hives when her last boyfriend talked about marriage. She was not a homebody. She was not a stay-local kind of gal, and she’d been living her whole life as if she were.
She had enough trouble trying to figure her own stuff out; she didn’t need to try to figure out someone else’s.
No matter how tempting it was.
No amount of head-shaking could convince her that she did not want to see what those flexing muscles looked like up close. Fortunately, he was clearly a jerk.
But what a hot jerk.
A hot jerk with a secret.
Not only was he a jerk, but he was clearly disgusted by her. Which was not really fair. He hadn’t exactly seen her at her best. She looked down at her worn cotton shorts. Definitely not her best. And the last time he saw her, she was wearing different old shorts and being bested by blue velvet. But that shouldn’t matter. Dad always told her not to judge a book by its cover. “Wait until someone gives you a reason to dislike ’em,” he always said.
All she had to do was pay her rent and stay out of his way. What was she trying to do, sleep with him?
That had her pausing over a squash blossom.
No, of course not. That would be a terrible idea. He was her landlord. That was like sleeping with your boss, she told herself. Bad bad bad idea.
But he wasn’t really her boss. What was the worst that could happen? He could evict her if it didn’t work out. That would suck.
But that back. Those hands.
There were other apartments in the world.
No, no. No sleeping with Grumpy Walker. She was here to be independent, to work hard, and to make her own mistakes without a parental safety net. She had a big, demanding job that would take up all of her energy. She would be way too tired for ill-advised sex.
She also had a mess of a garden.
Lindsey bent over the plot and pulled out a weed. There were a lot of weeds. That was okay. She wasn’t afraid of a few weeds. Or a few thousand weeds. She kneeled down at the edge of the plot and started pulling.
What was she doing out there? From his hiding spot under the porch, he could hear her making noises. It sounded like she was playing in his jungle. He started to wag his tail. He wanted to play with her! He started to wiggle his way under the boards, and the cold dirt floor felt so good on his belly he almost gave up his mission and sat there wiggling. But then he got a good look at what she was doing. She was pulling his jungle apart! She was tossing big green pieces over her shoulder into a pile!
Actually, that pile looked like it would be fun. He’d just wait down here until she was gone, then he’d have the pile all to himself. In the meantime, this dirt wasn’t going to roll in itself...
Chapter 6
Lindsey woke up restless. She was a morning person, and she was used to being at her most productive when she got out of bed. But she wasn’t used to feeling like this. Antsy, her old boss would have called it. She lay there, admiring the clean paint job on the ceiling, making a mental list of things to be anxious about.
Job: so far, so good. Still a lot to learn, but she was okay with that. Friends: could use some work. Mary Beth had invited her to join her book club, and this month’s selection sat on her nightstand. It wasn’t exactly the raucous honky-tonkin’ she secretly hoped for when she moved to Kentucky, but she was willing to give that some time. Family: all in Arizona, all healthy, all starting to worry about her a little less, which was progress. Home: . . .
Maybe that was it. Despite her efforts over the past few weeks, Walker still remained a grumpy mystery. And the mystery was beginning to get really deep under her skin. She wanted to know what his deal was, and not just because she wanted to know what his deal was.
Why was he so quiet? What was his art like? Did he think she wouldn’t be able to just Google him to find out? Because she had, and it was cool. Very masculine, but somehow delicate and beautiful at the same time. They were landscapes, of a sort, metal that seemed to be flat or stamped with images, but when the photographer zoomed in, it was actually shaped and . . . carved, maybe?
Of course, there was practically no information included, except that it was steel and copper, and there were six of them hanging in a gallery in New York City.
Seeing images of his work made her even more curious about him. What kind of guy has the patience and vision to create what he created?
And why did he apparently hate her?
Maybe she’d been coming on too strong. Maybe what she thought of as a normal, neighborly level of friendliness was a creepy, stalker-level invasion of privacy to him. Maybe he was sensitive. He was an artist, after all.
Right. Okay. Things looked a little brighter if she thought of her neighbor as sensitive and shy rather than a grumpy hatemonger. She could live with sensitive and shy. She would just tread a little more lightly. She’d avoid any unnecessary contact. She would let him come to her, if he wanted to. And if he didn’t want to, well, that would be okay too. They would just be two strangers who inhabited the same general space but had no kind of relationship whatsoever.
She could live with that.
Ceiling and life fully examined, Lindsey hopped out of bed. She had some time before work—she could weed in the garden a little. Looking out the window, she changed her mind. She was beginning to love her garden, but not enough to work on it in a steady downpour. She was also starting to miss the desert.
She drew the curtain closed before she could notice if the light in the garage was still on, which meant that Walker either got up earlier than she did—unnatural!—or spent all night in there working, which she shouldn’t notice because she was trying to keep a healthy distance from her sensitive and shy neighbor.
Who was she kidding? She had noticed. And in the time it took her to close the curtain, she considered, then rejected, bringing him a mug of coffee for energy and maybe also to enable her to sneak a peek at his work. And his shoulders. No, mostly his work.
But, no. Healthy distance. Sensitive and shy. Let him make the first platonic move, if there was a move to be made.
But since he was in the garage, that meant he wasn’t in his house, which meant she wouldn’t wake him up like she had all those weeks ago with The Great Couch Disaster. And as much as she would like to see him all steamy and mad in his boxers, that was not in her Healthy Distance Plan, so she banished the image (mostly) from her mind.
Exercise. She needed exercise to burn off some of this excess mental energy. Rain meant this would not be the morning she took up running—hooray. But she was well equipped to deal with unpleasant weather interrupting her exercise plans. She threw on a sports bra and a pair of shorts and padded down to the living room. This morning felt like a Bollywood Blast morning. And if Walker was in the garage, she could crank it up and sing along, which was her preferred method of Bollywood Blasting. The extra diaphragm work was good for her abs. And she was a dork who couldn’t help but sing along, even though she didn’t know the words, or even the language.
Whatever. Who was going to see her? She popped in the DVD and started Blast-ing.
Walker was climbing through a window and his head kept hitting wind chimes. He hated wind chimes. Only jerks put up decorations that would jangle and crash in a place where they were the only ones who could not hear it, while they sat in comfortable silence behind a door. Why were there wind chimes in his window? But then he went inside, and there were m
ore wind chimes. And some of them had a serious bass line. He reached up, determined to rip one of those jangling death monsters out of the ceiling, when—
Walker sat up like a bolt. After a second of adjusting to reality, he rubbed his hands over his face. He had to stop falling asleep on the couch. He barely remembered stumbling through the back door, although he did recall looking in despair at the insurmountable flight of stairs leading to his bedroom.
He was acting more tortured than artist, and he was starting to piss himself off.
But the jangly bass wind chimes were not a dream, after all. They were coming through the wall. And they sounded like music. And—was that singing?
Or was someone murdering a turkey?
He weighed his options. He could ignore what he guessed was Lindsey singing and stick a pillow over his head and continue to emit only grumbles in her presence. Or he could go over and confront her, ask her nicely to turn down the music, and start to develop a civil relationship.
He looked at his pillow.
Then he heard Myron’s voice in his head, telling him to “Man up. Are you afraid of one little woman?”
He wasn’t afraid. Walker was not afraid of Lindsey! And she wasn’t that little. She was short, but she wasn’t little. She was curvy, a perfect handful . . .
Either way, he was not afraid of her.
He would go over and confront her.
Nicely.
The start of a beautiful friendship.
Lindsey was totally lost in the music, which was why she loved the Bollywood Blast routine. She could get her dance on and get her workout on at the same time. All in the privacy of her own little living room. It was very efficient.
She was feeling the bass, flicking her hips on the downbeat. First right, then turn, then left.
On the second turn-then-left, she saw a shadowy figure standing in her doorway.
She screamed.
She was so startled out of her Bollywood Blast reverie that it took her a long, screaming second to realize that the shadowy figure was Walker. And that he looked pissed.
Surprise.
“What are you—” she started as she threw the front door open. Then she watched his eyes blaze an angry trail down her body. She quickly covered up her sports bra with her hands. Then she uncovered it and put her hands on her hips. It was her apartment. She could walk around in a bra if she wanted to. Hell, she could walk around without a bra.
He shook his head, focused back on her eyes. “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“What am I—? This is my apartment! What are you doing in here?”
“Well, I was trying to sleep in my apartment, but then it sounded like someone was murdering a turkey over here, so I came over to investigate.”
“No one’s murdering—” Then she got it. He’d heard her singing. Ha ha ha. She was a terrible singer. She took a deep breath. He was just mad because she’d woken him up. And because he was a jerk. But in this case, his jerkitude was possibly justified. “I thought you were in the garage.”
“Why would you think that? It’s barely six in the morning.”
“Because the light was on in there!”
She saw him pause, saw the corner of his mouth try to hitch up into a smile. “You were watching me in the garage? Are you spying on me?”
“Says the man standing in my living room. Uninvited.”
She thought she saw him blush, then drop his eyes. Well, whatever. It was just a sports bra.
Oh my god, she thought. Walker is embarrassed. He was embarrassed by her sports bra! Her glee at that idea totally erased any residual embarrassment she felt at being caught singing loudly and badly in an unfamiliar foreign language.
“Can you just . . . keep it down?” he spat. “Please?”
She cocked her hip and smiled. “Since you said please.” Then she turned toward the kitchen. She was done with her workout. She needed a glass of water.
“Show yourself out?” she threw over her shoulder, and stuck her head in the fridge.
Boom. She heard the front door close, and smiled.
This was getting ridiculous. She wasn’t that hot. She was . . . it probably didn’t matter what she looked like. Whenever Walker saw Lindsey, he wanted to touch her. Just to see if her skin was as soft as it looked.
And . . . he was officially a creep.
It wasn’t his fault that he kept running into her while she was wearing short shorts and sports bras and other things that showed off a lot of probably soft skin. Just because he always saw her in the yard or, you know, inside her own apartment. Just because this was the twenty-first century and, fine, she could wear whatever she wanted. He didn’t have to like it. He didn’t have to like that he liked it.
But seriously, would it kill her to put on pants?
By the time he reached the garage door, though, Walker was all out of steam. He was just going to have to accept that he was renting to a very annoying woman to whom he was unfortunately attracted. He would have to get Mary Beth to help him re-word the lease next time. No hot people. Only quiet people who wore lots of clothes. Maybe an Amish person. That would save on the electric bill, too.
Yes, of course. The only answer to his problem was kicking Lindsey out and getting an Amish neighbor. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier?
Oh, because it’s a dumb idea, his inner Myron told him.
Shaking his head, he unlocked the garage, eager to get to work. Or, more likely, eager to stare blankly at a pile of scrap metal and hope inspiration struck.
Looking at the stuff he’d salvaged from the junkyard, he waited. And waited.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t see what was intrinsically interesting about the shapes and lines of an old muffler, a set of lead pipes, a spider’s web of different colored wires. He knew that once he polished up the fender and the hubcaps, they’d look cool. But he wasn’t seeing . . . anything beyond the pile of potentially shiny crap in the middle of the garage.
And that’s what scared him. Because his gift had always been seeing a pile of crap like a puzzle. And not just like a set of pieces to put together; he could look at the puzzle and see what it would look like finished. It was easy.
Not that welding and smashing and shaping things into the finished product wasn’t hard work, but the vision always came easily.
It was all Lindsey’s fault.
Ever since she moved in, he had no interest in hard lines and sharp surfaces.
Ever since she moved in, he was obsessed with softness and light.
Dammit. He didn’t do softness and light.
He didn’t like compromising. He knew it made him sound like a pretentious jerk, but he didn’t want anything clouding his vision. He had to see something clearly to be inspired. He could see the tree, see how it had managed to defy nature and grow out of that isolated rock, see the tenacity in that little seed to cling to whatever it could to reach for the sun.
And now the tree was dead. It had reached the sun, and then it had died.
Even though that idea made him want to put on a black turtleneck and smoke French Gauloises cigarettes, that was what he had seen as he stood on the top of the hill. That was what had drawn him to that one tree—the beauty in the tragedy, the embodiment of the truth that everything comes to an end. It had moved him.
But as he stood back and looked at the bones of the stretching branches, he wasn’t feeling the same power. It was just . . . a tree. Or, it wasn’t a tree. It was a set of welded-together metal rods that vaguely formed the shape of a tree.
He closed his eyes, turned away from the sculpture. He had to shake this off. Everyone had their moments of doubt. He’d had them before: the fear that he would never be able to capture what he saw in the metal.
Was this just the usual self-doubt and anxiety? Could he shake it off? He’d never felt quite so . . . disheartened before.
It was the pressure. There were three artists in this show, as opposed to a dozen. The next step was a solo show,
then a show in London, then art fairs. This was big. This was what he wanted, to make his living creating. When he’d finally had enough to buy a house, the duplex had seemed like a great idea—the rental income would get him through lean times.
These were definitely going to be lean times if he didn’t get his head out of his butt. Staring at the walls of his studio was not going to help matters. He needed to get his mind off things, come back with a fresh perspective.
He thought of Lindsey, soft and light and wearing shorts and a stethoscope.
No. Bad. He needed the kind of distraction that did not involve creeping on his tenant. He needed the opposite kind of distraction.
He’d visit Myron. An old man in a nursing home who would tell him the exact, specific kind of idiot he was being. The best medicine for what ailed him.
Chapter 7
Lindsey was half-looking over Hope’s notes from the night before, but she kept being distracted by the photos on the desk the three nurses shared. Hope had twins, a boy and a girl, who were just starting high school this year, and last year’s school pictures stared back at Lindsey.
Before coming to this job, Lindsey had been concerned that her age would be a problem for Hope and Evan. She was younger than both of them, and even though she had valuable experience working in larger nursing homes, they still had more years on her. Plus, she had the cushy shift. Seven AM to three PM—as close to a normal workday as any nurse could ask for.
