Page 11 of Bed and Breakup (Dial Delights #15)

Molly

“No,” I tell Robin for what feels like the millionth time as I linger outside the door to the basement, a basket full of dirty laundry in my arms. Everywhere I’ve been this week—working on stained glass in the shed, repairing the supposedly burst pipe in the kitchen, searching high and low for a moment of peace—Robin keeps managing to corner me to try to convince me to accept Clint’s offer.

“But why?” Robin asks. “Aren’t all the gray walls and tacky light fixtures and canvas prints of beaches killing you?”

“Of course they are,” I say, readjusting the basket on my hip. “But I didn’t come here to renovate the inn again. I have work to do.”

Robin paces across the floor of the dining room, bumping into one of the cheap folding café tables. “Sure. But with the money we could make from selling the inn, you wouldn’t need to work for a while. When’s the last time you took a vacation?”

“I’m not the vacationing type.”

“Fine,” Robin says. “Then I’ll do it myself.”

I don’t intend for my laugh to sound harsh, but I’ve never heard such a harebrained idea. “You don’t even know how to use a power drill,” I say.

Robin looks offended. “Sure I do.”

I put down the laundry and produce the yellow-and-black bag from where I stored it under the check-in desk. “Okay, then,” I say, pushing the bag into Robin’s hands. “Show me.”

Robin straightens up and rolls her shoulders back in a move I can tell is meant to convince herself of her competence just as much as me.

She pulls out the drill, holds it with two arms fully extended like a sheriff in a Western, and presses the trigger.

It makes a whirring sound, and Robin smirks at me like she deserves a round of applause.

I cross my arms. “Won’t you need a bit?”

“Uh…” Robin turns the drill around and sees the blank space at the chuck. She digs in the bag to find a bit, inserts it, then pulls the trigger again. The bit, predictably, falls to the floor.

My point proved, I pick up my basket and walk downstairs to the basement.

“This conversation isn’t over!” I hear Robin’s voice echo behind me. “You’ll see reason at some point!”

We’ve been having this fight for almost a week, and I don’t intend to come around to Robin’s view.

The job of fixing up the inn sat largely on my shoulders last time, and I’m not falling into that trap again, especially if Robin intends to take half of the money in the end.

Sure, she helped with some painting and cleaning, but she spent most of her time selling Miss Addy’s antiques, getting all the business licenses squared away, building our website, and testing recipes for breakfast service.

None of which would be necessary this time around.

Besides, haven’t we been fighting enough without a massive, high-stress project on our hands?

My only path back to sanity is getting Robin out of here, not committing to several more months together.

Especially because this disagreement is reminding me of a different kind of tension we used to have. One that’s decidedly more…heated.

I try to shake the encounter from my head and focus on my dirty clothes.

I haven’t been down in the basement since I returned to the inn.

First, because it’s creepy. It’s dark and shadowy and smells like mildew and for some reason there’s a random horse saddle?

If anywhere in this house is haunted, it’s the basement.

Second, though, is because it’s where Robin and I used to sneak away to make out early on when the inn was full of guests.

We even had sex down here once. Okay, more than once.

And yes, the horse saddle was sometimes involved.

But we stopped when we realized it wasn’t worth getting cobwebs in our underpants.

I get a little flushed remembering all that sweat and heavy breathing and intensity.

But I shove a load of laundry into the machine and slam the door shut on those memories.

It’s been a long time since I got laid. It’s hard when you’re on the road, working on commissions, sore from welding and soldering.

Maybe some people manage to find hookups while traveling for work, but it’s not my style. I like to get to know someone first.

And unfortunately, I know Robin quite well.

I know exactly what happens when I kiss that spot where her neck meets her collarbone.

I know how her callused yet soft hands feel against my skin.

I know the precise gasp she makes when I use my tongue to drive her right to the edge, and how to keep her there until she’s ready to burst.

I wipe away a bead of sweat and fiddle with the buttons on the machine until I find the right setting.

As I press start, it occurs to me that maybe I don’t know Robin like that anymore.

We’ve now been apart slightly longer than we were together.

My body has changed since the last time we saw each other naked.

Hers probably has too. I wonder if that birthmark on her rib cage still looks like the Little Dipper.

If her breasts still fit perfectly in my palms like they were made to go together.

If she’d still make that irresistible low moan if I ran my fingernails up the inside of her thigh.

Whew, I think the AC is broken down here. I tie my hair into a messy knot on top of my head and fan the back of my neck with a file folder of old documents I grab from a nearby cabinet.

This level of horniness is not sustainable. I can’t think about Robin like this when she’s walking around right over my head, so close but untouchable. I’ve got to figure out a way to defuse this sexual tension, and fast.

At least I can distract myself for now with this mess in the basement.

I elbow through the piles of boxes and old furniture around the machines.

It looks like the management company didn’t get rid of everything, thankfully.

If I hadn’t been faced with the more pressing problem of cohabitating with my ex-wife, finding out what happened to all this stuff would have been my top priority.

Poking through the storage, it only takes a minute to find a box with all the old quilts that used to be on the guest beds, each one handmade by my gram.

I took my favorite one with me when I left, but losing the collection would have felt like losing her all over again.

For a moment, I get lost in running my fingers over her careful stitches, admiring her choices of colors and shapes to create sprawling floral patterns.

I peek into more boxes, sorting some of the contents and clearing more floor space in the basement.

It looks like most of the antique decorations are here, lamps and framed art and knick-knacks.

The dining room furniture is stacked under the stairs, along with some of the chairs and bedside tables from the guest rooms. I find a folder with a key to a nearby storage unit and a list of larger furniture supposedly held there.

As staunchly opposed as I am to restoring the inn with Robin, it’s hard to look at all this stuff and not feel nostalgic.

Even more unsettling are the boxes of our personal things that got left behind. The tacky bunny mug Robin gave me for our first Christmas. The two-seat kayak we bought once we hired enough staff to take days off to spend at the lake. The oversize guest book from our wedding.

Just when I’ve had enough of wandering down memory lane, the washing machine buzzes.

I switch my clothes over to dry and head back upstairs with plans to start cutting glass for the board-game store’s window.

But then I smell burning plastic coming from the kitchen.

I push my way through the drop cloths to find Robin at the same moment the smoke detector starts beeping.

“What the hell?” I pull down two pieces of plastic to reach the window above the sink and immediately push it open.

Then I work on untangling Robin from the staticky drop cloths to find the source of the burning smell.

She’d somehow managed to carve out a bubble in my construction zone around the stove. “Get out of there!” I demand.

Robin emerges from the gap in the plastic sheets, coughing and holding a smoking pan. “Whew. That did not go as expected,” she says lightly, as if she didn’t just nearly give me a heart attack.

I pull more of the sheets from around the hot stove to redirect another cloud of smoke. “Do you have any idea how fucking dangerous this is?” I shout over the alarm, fanning until it stops shrieking.

“I know, I know,” Robin says. “I could have messed up your drywall or whatever. But hey, I made grilled cheese! Want one?”

“You could have died, ” I say, shocked that she can be so cavalier while my adrenaline is pumping.

I may hate her, but I was fully prepared to drag her from the building and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“You turned on a gas stove with zero ventilation. You could have suffocated. You could have caught yourself on fire!”

Robin grimaces. “Well, that’s why I turned on the hood vent. But then it created a weird vacuum and the plastic got stuck on the burner and…” She trails off and starts waving away the smoke with a couple of oven mitts.

I massage my temples. “You don’t have the common sense God gave a goose.”

Dropping the mitts on the counter, Robin says, “I should probably be offended by that, but it’s the goofiest way of insulting someone I’ve ever heard.

” She steps closer to where I’m bundling up damaged plastic drop cloths, analyzing my expression.

“Were you worried about me? Is that it? Look at me. I’m fine.

So is the kitchen. I made a little mistake, but we’re good. ”

Instead of admitting that she’s right, I was scared she’d get hurt, I focus on the building. “You could have burned down the whole inn. Miss Addy is probably rolling over in her grave.”

Robin’s face goes pale. “Her…grave?”

“She passed in 2022,” I say, quieter when I see how devastated she is by this news. “Heart attack. I forwarded the obituary and funeral details to your assistant.”

“I never saw them,” Robin admits, voice hoarse.

As I watch her make the decision to put her feelings away and move on for now by busying herself with the pan on the stove, I remember how she’s never been good at sitting with grief.

When her favorite aunt died, she wouldn’t talk about it, just put on a smile and spent a week obsessively polishing the silverware.

Now she clears her throat and holds out the pan, where two only slightly overcooked grilled cheeses are still steaming. “Well, then, should we have lunch?”

I blink at her, knowing pain was behind the emotional U-turn I just witnessed but unable to fully make it with her. “The sandwiches you risked life and limb to make? I’ll pass.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Robin says, her falsely calm exterior finally slipping. “I have to eat, and you already closed up the drywall, but you just want me to starve to death waiting for you to say the kitchen’s finished?”

“The spackle is drying, and I still have to add another layer tomorrow, sand it, paint it, reattach the cabinets,” I say, counting off the tasks on my fingers. “Dust will go everywhere. It’s not something I can rush.”

“But,” Robin says, an obnoxiously hopeful look swinging back onto her face, “with all that, you’ll have basically renovated one room. We’ll just need to do eight more, and then we can sell the inn to Clint. Right?”

“Wrong!” I say, my temporary feelings of sympathy evaporating in favor of the old, familiar resentment.

“Eight guest rooms, eight guest bathrooms, the hallway and check-in area, the dining room, and the penthouse? That’s more like twenty rooms. And fixing the pipe in the kitchen has already put me behind on my glass projects.

Renovations take a ton of time. Time I don’t have, even if you’ve got all the time in the world to test recipes and make my life miserable. ”

Her lips are pressed together in two thin lines. “It never took you this long back in the day.”

“Are you kidding me?” I say with an unamused laugh. “It took months. ”

“But no hole in a wall took more than a couple days, three max!” Robin says, outright yelling at this point.

“If you know so much about leaky plumbing and drywall, fix it yourself!”

“Maybe I will!”

I don’t know when it happened, but suddenly we’re less than a foot apart, my face turned up toward Robin’s, her looking down her nose at me, engaged in the glaring match of the century.

Robin’s gaze is intense, her golden-brown eyes blazing like hot copper foil.

My rage is simmering dangerously close to the surface.

It may only be one small spat, but with this crackling energy between us, it feels like I’ve traveled through a time machine and been dumped out right in the middle of our fights back in 2018.

She’d try to convince me to move to Portland with her to open a restaurant and I’d try to convince her to stay here and appreciate what we’d already built.

Both of us so certain we knew what was best for each other, what could keep our love alive when we’d grown so far apart.

But it’s not 2018. Our marriage is already wrecked. I don’t have to stay here and keep reliving the year that proved I was doomed to spend my life alone. I break eye contact, turn on my heel, and stomp out of the kitchen.