Page 7

Spencer honestly didn’t love a demo day. He didn’t mind swinging a sledgehammer a few times if the situation called for it, but mostly it was dusty and loud and not a situation in which he was particularly useful. On top of all of that, he was still twitchy from the day before and not in much of a state to be helpful.

He arrived at the Brown Street house at eight, Americano in hand having visited Raj right before heading over, to find that the dumpster had already been delivered. So far, so good. Inside, Cat had gathered her crew in the dining room. He thought her skin might even be a little glowier from the spa.

“Okay, electrical’s off at the box, water’s off at the main.”

She looked up at Spencer as he joined the circle but kept talking. “Everything original stays. Any fixtures that are in good shape get donated. All the walls that need to be opened up for the electrician and plumber are marked with orange Xs.”

Everyone on the crew had been working for Cat for years. They knew the drill. “Above all, be safe,”

she said in Spanish. Not everyone on the crew spoke Spanish—Spencer didn’t—but they all knew what that meant. The number one rule on Cat’s jobs was no bleeding.

That was the indication for dismissal, so a few people headed upstairs, Spencer assumed to start demoing the bathroom, while a good number started dismantling the kitchen. Two were in the entryway starting to pull up the carpet.

Spencer took a long inhale. Okay, that carpet was really dusty. He was doing better than he had been the day before, probably because he at least had activities to do for the day, but there was something about being in this house that was putting him on edge. Maybe it really was haunted.

He flexed his hand at his side, thinking about Ian standing in this room like he really didn’t want to be there, Ian not telling anyone about the house, Ian’s relief at his offer to help clean out the basement. He knew he was still standing in the dining room, but his vision was unfocused, the sounds around him muted. He could remember viscerally how it had made him feel when Ian had stood close to him in the living room, when Ian had looked at him in the attic, when Ian had leaned over the roof of his car and said Spencer had breathed life back into this house. He flexed his hand again, tingles running through his palm to the tips of his fingers. The sound of a sledgehammer hitting drywall startled him out of his reverie and made him drop his coffee.

“The fuck?”

Cat stepped out of the way as though her work boots hadn’t seen worse.

“We need to protect the stained glass in the living room so it doesn’t accidentally get knocked around,”

Spencer said, leaning down to pick up the now-empty cup. At least all the carpet was coming up, anyway.

Cat looked up at him like he had three heads. “Did you come here to mansplain my job to me? Like this is my first restoration? After ghosting me all day yesterday with absolutely no explanation?”

Spencer ran a hand over his face. “Fuck, sorry, that was a dick thing to say.”

He hadn’t really meant to open his mouth at all. The room was starting to feel unbearably small, and he had the sudden urge to run out the front door.

“Yeah. Want to tell me why you said it?”

Cat was looking up at him like he’d grown antennae.

Spencer exhaled audibly. “I don’t know.”

Cat scrunched up her eyes like that would make it easier to see why Spencer was acting like this. “Is there something going on here that I don’t know about? Because the plans look pretty straightforward to me.”

He paused, doing mental gymnastics to see if he could get out of this conversation without looking like an idiot. “No. It’s not about the house. It’s . . . maybe about the client.”

Cat quirked an eyebrow at him and rested her forearm on her sledgehammer. “Is he hot?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

Spencer wanted to take a sip of his Americano for strength, but that ship had apparently sailed. When Cat started asking questions, it was impossible to hide from her. Not that he wanted to hide anything. Or he didn’t think he did. Raj may have been his oldest friend, but Cat was the one who knew everything. “He seems really emotional about this but also really aloof. He can swing from shy as fuck to confident and in control in half a second. And he dresses like if this state were a person, which is super weird, but also I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Cat blinked. “Well, that’s . . . unexpected.”

Around them, whole pieces of the house were coming down and being removed, luckily drowning out the sounds of this humiliating conversation.

“You know, it’s not horrible to feel things for people,” Cat said.

He looked down at her skeptically. “It’s horrible to feel things for men.”

Cat’s laughed echoed over the din. “I grant you, white men are not the first on my list of people to feel things for.”

“Plus, fucking a client and then needing to dance around him for a year would not be a good play.”

“That would not be smart, no. And I don’t know anything about this man. But have you considered maybe sleeping with someone and then, I don’t know, speaking to them again?”

He gave her what he hoped was a withering glare. Cat knew he didn’t like to consider that.

“Hey, I’m not the one coming in here telling people how to do jobs they’re fucking fantastic at because I’m all up in my feelings.”

“I offered to help him clean out the basement,”

he blurted, apropos of nothing.

“Oh god, Spence.”

She looked down at her watch. “Okay, I’m here for the next eight and a half hours. You obviously aren’t going to be of any help today. But your ass better be standing next to that dumpster at exactly five p.m. because we will be talking about this.”

Spencer nodded and took that as his opportunity to escape the house before he said anything else.

———

Spencer walked up to the dumpster at exactly five to see the house still standing, which was always a good sign. Cat came out the front door brushing drywall dust out of her dark, curly hair, messing up her ponytail. “Get in the truck.”

The cab of Cat’s truck smelled like stale coffee and her dog, Penny, but Spencer didn’t feel like it was the time to bring that up.

They drove the short distance to Cat’s house in silence. The house was a little three bed, one bath foursquare that she’d painstakingly renovated over the almost ten years she’d owned it. It would never be done because it was Cat, but it now looked basically like it had when it was built in 1930. Spencer loved this house. It felt like a warm hug, like he could see Cat’s fingerprints all over the place, and a few of his own in places where she’d let him help.

He sat down at the dining room table while Cat stuck her head in the fridge. The house technically had a formal dining room, but Cat used it more like an office. At one end of the table was her laptop, some mail, and various paperwork for the houses they were working on. The other end was clear for eating. This room had been repainted at least a dozen times, maybe six of them by him at this point. It was currently a pale sage green but give it a few months.

“Okay, I’ve got some pozole, some carne asada if you want tacos, obviously tamales . . .”

Cat’s parents cooked like they were feeding an army, and her mom brought leftovers to keep her fed over the course of the week. The tamales were extras from Christmas, Spencer knew, when her whole family made hundreds of them together and stored them in their freezers for the rest of the year.

“What is this?”

He heard her open a Tupperware. “Oh no, we shouldn’t eat that.”

She chucked it into the garbage can.

“Tamales,”

Spencer called through the doorway. He didn’t actually care, but he didn’t want her to list every edible thing in her kitchen.

He heard the microwave start, and Cat handed him a beer before sitting across from him at the table. Penny, a mutt with wiry brown-and-white fur who looked perpetually frazzled, followed her and put her head on Spencer’s thigh to be petted.

“Don’t tell Mami I’m not steaming them.”

Spencer mimed zipping and locking his lips.

Cat was still wearing her dusty overalls and tank top. Spencer knew she usually changed first thing when she got home to avoid spreading the mess everywhere.

“Do you need to shower?” he asked.

“No, but you need to tell me why you’re hiding from me and freaking out on jobsites.”

Fuck, he hated talking about this shit. With his therapist, with Cat, with anyone. “I may possibly have the teeniest tiniest crush on this client.”

“Ian something?”

Spencer nodded, almost imperceptibly. Then the microwave beeped, and Cat disappeared into the kitchen only to come back out with the steaming tamales divided onto two plates.

“So he’s preppy and quiet and has no opinions on how you should remodel his house, and that made you fall in love with him?”

She tried to shovel tamale into her mouth but clearly burned her tongue and spit it back out.

“No.”

Spencer slowly spun his beer bottle between his hands. The cold was grounding. “He seems shy and thinks there are ghosts in the basement, and he told me he liked my design, and I found that . . . charming.”

“There are ghosts in the basement?”

Cat leaned back in her chair as though trying to physically distance herself from the bad energy. “You know I don’t fuck with that, Spencer.”

Spencer did know that Cat would say she wasn’t superstitious, but she hated the idea of ghosts. He rolled his eyes at her. “Jesus Christ, there are no ghosts. I went down there.”

Cat pointed at him with her fork. “Or the ghost inhabited your body and caused you to fall in love with this man so you’ll marry him and move into the house and they can claim your soul for eternity.”

“Oh my god,”

Spencer groaned.

“Okay, okay, seriously.”

Cat’s smile sobered. “I know why you’re freaked out, but don’t you think it’s possible this isn’t a terrible thing?”

Cat did know why he was freaked out, mostly, why he’d had to leave New York and only ever did hookups with strangers. “I talk to my therapist about it basically all the time, okay?”

“And what does she say?”

Spencer knew Cat knew the answer. “That feelings like this aren’t as dangerous as I think they are.”

Cat’s face softened, and she reached across the table to take his hand. Hers was calloused and warm against his. “But you still think they are?”

“I guess I just don’t trust myself to know if it becomes a bad situation again, so it’s easier to not put myself in that position at all.”

He felt a hot pressure behind his eyes and clenched his fists. He didn’t really feel like crying all over Cat after the day he’d had previously.

“Spencer.”

She was getting that look she got when she was about to go into full-on best friend mode. “You know I don’t know what that’s like, so I can’t tell you you’ll for sure see all the red flags. But I do know you’re not twenty-two anymore, and you have a fuckton of people here who would never leave you alone in a bad situation.”

Spencer could feel a smile twitching at the edge of his lips. “I know,”

he said to the table.

“I would . . . I don’t know. Busting down your door probably wouldn’t help. But obviously whatever you needed that actually would help, up to and including busting down your door.”

Spencer huffed out a wet laugh. “You’re too small to bust down a door.”

The image of Cat’s five three frame trying was enough to lift his mood.

“Bitch, I can have any door off its hinges in ten seconds flat.”

She squeezed his hand. “You’re never going to be unsafe like that again, okay?”

He nodded. He knew his life was different now than it had been in New York. He and his therapist had been over it at least a hundred times, all the different anchors he had to a life he had chosen, a life he had built. That didn’t make it any less scary.

“Look, it doesn’t have to be this guy. I don’t know shit about him. But I know you, and I know you deserve to be happy. Whatever that means for you.”

Cat reached over with a tissue she’d pulled out of one of the pockets of her overalls.

“What the fuck?”

She looked down at the tissue in her hand, then back up at him before shrugging. “Drywall dust makes me sneeze.”

He took the tissue and blew his nose, then tried to dry off his face with minimal success. “I probably shouldn’t be perving on a client, anyway.”

Cat started back in on the tamales. “I wouldn’t recommend you perv on anyone. But I don’t think it would hurt to talk to him and see where things go. Knowing you, he’s probably already in love with you. Everyone is.”

“Not everyone is,”

Spencer mumbled, looking down at his plate.

“When are you helping him clean out the basement?”

“Thursday.”

Cat waved her fork as though she was counting days in her head. “Then just see how it goes. You don’t need to push it, but leave yourself open to possibility.”

Spencer nodded and chewed thoughtfully. That sounded like something he could potentially do. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”

“Oh, speaking of this guy, I’ve got something in my truck for you.”

“For me?”

Cat quickly ran out the side door and jogged back into the house holding what looked like a sheet of paper. “Well, for him, but I know you’re going to see him before I do. If I ever do.”

Cat preferred it when Spencer was the client-facing one. She handed the paper over. “We found this while we were demoing the downstairs bathroom.”

It was a black-and-white photograph of three people, two adults and a child, that looked professionally posed. On the back was written, Connor, Shannon, and Fiona O’Brien, 1960.

“Well, that explains the carpet, doesn’t it?”

Cat laughed, the warmth of the sound suffusing the room. “Nothing explains that carpet.”

Spencer put the photo over to the side far enough that it wasn’t going to accidentally get food on it. Then he caught Cat’s eye across the table. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she said.