Page 20 of After the Rain

ELEVEN

PRESSURE POINTS

WADE

I stood in front of the Victorian house on Old Johnson Street, keys heavy in my hand, still amazed at how much had changed in the three years since I'd bought this place.

But it was still a work in progress. My work in progress. My sanctuary.

Three years of weekends had taught me that restoration was as much about patience as it was about skill.

You couldn't rush the process of bringing something back to life.

You had to strip away the damage layer by layer, assess what could be saved and what needed to be rebuilt from scratch, trust that the foundation was strong enough to support the weight of transformation.

Some days the metaphors were so obvious they made my chest ache.

I unlocked the front door and stepped into the main hallway, breathing in the scent of fresh wood stain.

The original hardwood floors gleamed under the morning light streaming through the restored stained glass windows I'd salvaged from an architectural firm in Portland.

The cramped galley kitchen had been opened up into a spacious room with custom cabinets I'd built myself, and the tiny, dark bedrooms upstairs had been reconfigured into fewer but larger spaces that actually felt livable.

But as I walked through the rooms, I realized my mental plans kept including details that didn't make sense for a divorced man living alone. A kitchen island designed for multiple cooks. A reading nook with two chairs by the bay window. Storage solutions for more belongings than I currently owned.

My phone buzzed with texts from Kane and Jazz, my Saturday renovation crew for the past two years.

Kane

Coffee's getting cold. Where are you?

Jazz

If you're not here in ten minutes, I'm starting without you. And I'm using your good beer as payment.

I grinned and headed back outside. My truck was loaded with supplies for today's project—installing the custom built-ins for the master bedroom and finally tackling the bathroom renovation we'd been planning for months.

Kane and Jazz were waiting on the front porch, coffee cups in hand and a cooler full of beer at their feet.

The sight of them together still made me smile—Kane in his perfectly pressed weekend clothes looking like he'd stepped out of a magazine catalog, and Jazz in paint-splattered work clothes with her hair pulled back in a bandana, looking ready to demolish something.

"About time," Jazz said, raising her coffee cup in greeting. "I was about to start without you, and you know how that ends."

"With perfectly executed work done twice as fast as planned," Kane said dryly. "The horror."

Jazz Thompson had been helping with my renovation projects for the past couple of years.

She ran her own contracting business and could outwork most men half her age, but she also had a gift for seeing the emotional blueprint of a space.

She understood that houses held memory and intention in their bones, that every renovation choice was really a choice about how you wanted to live.

We'd met when Kane recommended her for electrical work on a commercial project, but she'd stuck around because she said watching me renovate this place was like watching someone learn a foreign language—slow at first, then suddenly fluent in ways that surprised everyone, including myself.

Kane Woodward and I went further back—best friends since college, though on paper we didn’t make sense.

He was sharp suits and spreadsheets, a luxury real estate guy with a taste for single malt scotch and brutal honesty.

He’s also openly bisexual, autistic, and unapologetically himself in every room he walks into.

That combination made some clients nervous and a few contractors dismissive.

I hired him anyway. Not in spite of who he was—but because I knew the kind of mind he had. Focused. Meticulous. Loyal to the bone.

He didn’t do small talk unless it mattered. But when it did—when it meant something—he listened in a way that made people feel seen. I trusted him with every major decision on this house, and most of the ones in my life. Still do.

"She speaks renovation," Jazz had told Kane after our first weekend working together. "But she's still learning to speak herself."

"Where are we starting today?" Kane asked, surveying the front of the house with the critical eye of someone who'd helped plan every detail of its restoration.

"Master bedroom built-ins first," I said. "Then if we have time, we can start demo on the bathroom."

"Finally," Jazz said with satisfaction. "I've been waiting three years to tear into that bathroom. Whoever installed that pink tile deserves to be haunted by the ghosts of good design."

"You say that about every room we renovate," Kane pointed out.

"Because every room in this house was a crime scene of bad decisions," Jazz shot back. "Remember the kitchen?"

"The kitchen wasn't that bad," I protested weakly.

"Wade," Kane said with the patience of someone explaining basic math to a child, "you had avocado green appliances from 1975 and contact paper that was supposed to look like wood grain."

"Contact paper that was peeling off in strips," Jazz added. "Like the house was molting."

"It had character," I said.

"It had problems," Jazz corrected. "Character is exposed brick and original hardwood. Problems are when your refrigerator matches your bathroom fixtures."

Kane laughed. "Remember when we tried to remove that contact paper and it took three hours to get two square feet off?"

"And we discovered that underneath the fake wood grain was actually real wood," Jazz said, shaking her head. "Someone covered up beautiful oak cabinets with sticky-back plastic. It was like finding out someone had painted over a Monet."

"That's when I knew this house and I were meant for each other," I said, loading lumber onto my shoulder. "Both of us had good bones hidden under bad decisions."

We spent the first hour unloading supplies and reviewing the plans I'd drawn up for the bedroom built-ins.

The master bedroom was the largest room in the house, with soaring ceilings and original crown molding that I'd spent months carefully restoring.

Each piece of trim had been removed, stripped of decades of paint, and painstakingly reinstalled to match the Victorian era's attention to detail.

The built-ins would provide storage and display space while maintaining the room's character, but they were also an exercise in hope.

Custom shelving suggested books worth collecting, display areas implied objects worth treasuring, and the reading nook with its carefully positioned lighting suggested quiet evenings shared with someone who mattered.

"You know," Kane said as we measured and marked the wall, "for a guy who supposedly bought this place as an investment property, you sure put a lot of thought into the bedroom design."

"It's about resale value," I said automatically, the same excuse I'd been using for three years.

Jazz snorted. "Resale value, my ass. You designed this room like someone's going to be living in it. Actually living, not just existing."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Look at this place, Wade." Jazz gestured around the room with her tape measure.

"Double closets—and not just any closets, custom ones with different hanging heights and built-in shoe storage.

Reading area with two chairs positioned so people can sit together but also have their own space.

Enough room for a king-size bed plus space to walk around both sides without doing that sideways shuffle thing. "

Kane paused in his measuring to give me a look. "She's not wrong. Most single guys would put in a murphy bed and call it good. You've designed a retreat."

"A romantic retreat," Jazz added with a grin. "All that's missing is a fireplace, and knowing you, you've probably considered adding one."

Heat crept up my neck because she was right—I had considered the fireplace. "Maybe I just like having options."

"Options for what?" Jazz pressed, clearly enjoying my discomfort. "Or should I ask, options for who?"

The question hung in the air as we worked, all three of us carefully not addressing the elephant in the room.

But as I marked measurements for the built-ins, I found myself thinking about the choices I'd made throughout this restoration.

Every decision had been made with an imaginary partner in mind—someone who would appreciate the morning light through the east-facing windows, who would use the window seat for reading, who would fill the closet space I'd so carefully designed.

I'd been building a space for love before I'd even understood what kind of love I was hoping for.

For the past year, Kane and Jazz had been gently probing about my personal life, clearly sensing that something had shifted but not sure what.

We worked in comfortable rhythm, installing the framework for the built-ins and discussing finish details.

The repetitive nature of construction work had always been meditative for me—measuring, cutting, fitting pieces together until they formed something larger than their individual parts.

Today, though, I found myself thinking about other things that needed careful fitting together, relationships that required the same attention to detail and patience as any renovation project.

Around noon, Kane cracked open the first beer and settled onto the sawhorses we'd set up as a makeshift table.

"Okay," he said, taking a long pull from his bottle. "I've been patient, but I have to ask. What's really going on with you lately?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've been different these past few weeks," Kane continued. "Distracted. Like you're working through something big. And you keep staring at your phone like you're expecting a call you're not sure you want to receive."