Page 27 of This Might Hurt

“Fuck you,” he mumbles. After digging around for a minute, he comes over with the screwdriver dangling between two fingers like it’s a dead rat. He stands right next to me and watches as I crouch down to fight with the old, rusted screws holding the lid in place. “What is it?”

“Septic system access.”

His expensive sneakers, now more tan than black, crunch in the dirt as he shifts his weight. “Like the thing that holds peoples’ shit?”

“Uh-huh.” Flicking the last screw into the grass, I hook my fingers under the corner of the lid. “No one has shit here in a while, but I’d still hold your nose.”

He wraps his arms around himself protectively and backs up past the edge of the lawn, past the wheelbarrow, until we’d have to yell to hold a conversation. Ignoring my own suggestion, I wrench up the lid in a shower of dirt.

Turns out he had the right idea. I fall over backwards and dry heave twice, coughing up a mouthful of saliva.

“It smells like seventeen people died down here,” I holler, pinching my nose.

“Fuck me.” I scoot close enough to make sure I can see the white pipe Google said was an outlet baffle, then run away, gagging again.

When I peer at Andrew through teary eyes, it’s clear that he’s enjoying my suffering.

I empty the contents of the wheelbarrow into a chaotic pile on the ground, then put on the N95 mask I brought and use my multi-tool to cut open one of the bags of quick-set concrete.

“Can you read the instructions for how much water to use?”

He flips the second bag over gingerly with his toe, then crouches down to squint at the text on the back. “Two liters per fifty pounds.”

“Great,” I pant. Concrete dust puffs up in tiny gray clouds as I pour it into the wheelbarrow.

“Do that then.” I don’t even know how much a liter is, but he’s a smart man.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him roll each pastel sleeve painstakingly up above his elbows, then tap something into the calculator on his phone with a crease between his eyebrows.

Whenever I give him a job to do, it’s like something crumpled tight in his chest opens up a little more.

By the time I get the second bag emptied, my back is killing me and the heat is making my head spin.

I drag my filthy yellow tank top off over my head and pick up the shovel.

“Pour it in,” I mumble, leaning on the handle and scrubbing my forehead against my bicep.

I don’t even watch him, just close my eyes and listen to the trickling sound under the rasping of grasshoppers.

It’s proof I’m not losing my mind alone up here.

The awful scraping of rocky sludge against metal swallows up all the other noises as I gingerly stir our creation back and forth.

If there’s a right way to do this, I wouldn’t know.

Good enough is always good enough. But I can’t remember the last time my shoulders hurt this bad, and I’m probably halfway to heatstroke already.

I only make it about a minute before I have to yank down the mask, prop my head against the shovel, and gulp in frantic breaths, trying not to puke.

“Here.” His voice sounds surprisingly close. When I look up, he’s right in front of me with the plastic water bottle I packed. His face is slick with sweat too, but it looks a lot more aesthetic on him. “Come on.”

He’s the only thing that isn’t blurry, so I keep my eyes fixed on him as I open my mouth and tip my head back.

When he rests the bottle against my lips, lukewarm water slips down my throat and overflows to drip off my chin.

“Okay, I’m good,” I gurgle, pulling away as everything comes back into focus.

Instead of drinking the rest, he tugs off my ball cap with a frown of concentration and pours the last few gulps over my matted hair.

A tiny breeze stirs against my damp scalp, tricking my body into thinking it’s getting cooler.

I flash him a relieved grin through the water dripping onto my nose. “Thanks.”

When I start to turn away, he clears his throat.

“Jude.” I glance back at him, confused and unraveled by the sound of my name in his mouth.

He’s not smiling, but the skin around his eyes crinkles like he’s happy as he reaches over and smooths back my tangled hair—firmly, then again more slowly.

I lean my head into his palm and we just look at each other for a minute, his fingers playing with my wet strands dangling over my forehead.

Hey, I want to ask him. Have you ever felt anything like this?

I want to say, Being alive might hurt, but I’m glad you stayed.

I don’t say a word. Because if I give it a name, it can be taken away.

“It’s going to set if you don’t hurry up,” he says wryly, dropping his hand. “And you will have royally wasted our time.”

He adds a few more totally unnecessary cups of water as I mix, like a kid enjoying a science experiment. When I grab the handles of the wheelbarrow to push it across the lawn, the whole thing almost overbalances under a hundred and fifty pounds of wet concrete. I set it down quickly. “Shit.”

I’m surprised when Andrew grabs the front edge and braces himself. We can’t seem to coordinate our pushing and pulling, because I don’t think a single part of our brains works the same, but we make progress a few feet at a time.

“Why are we doing this?” Andrew pants miserably, squinting back at me with his nose scrunched like I’m torturing him for fun. He’s a couple of inches taller than me, and wider in the shoulders, but he’s not strong at all. It’s really sweet.

All I do is lie—to Lena, to Ramona, to that doctor guy who wanted to fix me—but never to him.

I don’t think I could if my life depended on it.

“My friend Ramona’s going to buy this land.

Like, it’s basically hers already. So I need the other guy to un-buy it.

You know? If we block the outlet on this septic tank, then when the inspector turns the water on—whoosh.

” I wave my arms expansively. I’m so fucking wired now, way too excited, but like Ramona he always seems to listen to what I’m saying instead of getting hung up on how I’m saying it.

“You know how much one of these systems costs to replace?”

“I don’t know how much anything costs.”

My breathless laugh sounds more like a wheeze. “Well, I called around to get quotes. Out here where there’s no proper access road, with the ground contaminated? At least twenty thousand.”

He raises his eyebrows. “And that’s a lot?”

My laugh softens into a smile. “Yeah, it is, you freak. Enough to kill a sales contract. But Ramona can use all this land for whatever she wants, and we’ll fix the septic later. Great, right?”

When I try to start pushing again, he doesn’t move. “She wants you to do this?”

Slowly, I let go of the handles and straighten up.

Something scared stirs deep inside my chest, and I realize how nauseous the smell from the tank is making me.

This can’t happen. If I slow down and think, even for a second, I can see how far I’ve gone.

I’m not stupid; I know nothing I do is good.

But I don’t seem to have the power to stop, even when I want to.

“Please don’t say that,” I murmur, rubbing my thumb hard along the blisters trying to rise on my palm.

After a long silence, he sighs and gives a sharp, impatient tug on the wheelbarrow. “Push. I refuse to have done all this shit for nothing.”

With a weak, snotty chuckle, I scrub my arm across my face and try to remember how it felt when I knew this was the best idea I ever had.

Ten feet from the hole, Andrew gags and presses his sleeve over his nose, but he doesn’t abandon me this time.

Between the two of us, a big rock, and a bunch of cursing we manage to get the wheelbarrow propped up so I can hold it while Andrew pokes at the concrete with the shovel, coaxing it into the pipe instead of down into the tank.

As soon as it's mostly empty, I throw the wheelbarrow aside and crouch next to the hole. I wave my phone flashlight one way, then the other, watching it reflect off the glistening gray mass filling the outlet baffle. “Shit, look at that. That’s a good job, dude.” Adrenaline takes over the shitty feeling as I grab his hand and pull him closer.

“I promised you’d like it.” Maybe he won’t.

No one has ever quite understood what I see when I look at the world, especially since my brain quit working.

He glances between the pipe and my face, then straightens up and shakes his head with a sigh. But he’s fucking smiling. Full and genuine. “You’re really something.”

I settle the plastic lid back into place, but I leave the screws out so the inspector doesn’t have to fiddle with them when he opens the thing up to show Edward Miller why he definitely shouldn’t buy this place after all.

All my energy comes back as I bound over to the cans of Coors I tossed in the shade.

The cardboard box falls apart when I try to pick it up, all wet from the condensation of the cold beer warming up.

“Want one?” I hold a can out to Andrew, but he pulls a face and crosses his arms to make sure I can’t force it into his hands. “You’re ungrateful, you know that?”

Between the jostling and the heat, foam spews all over my hand when I pop the tab, dripping into the dirt. I’ve been waiting too long for this, so I just grip the can in sticky fingers and gulp down a few blessed mouthfuls.

Andrew clears his throat. “I want you to marry me.”

I choke on the beer and start hacking so loudly a bird flutters out of the pines behind us.

“Tomorrow,” he adds in the same flat tone, like that clears everything up.

Sinuses burning, I wipe my nose and struggle to catch my breath. It’s very, very quiet for a long time. “What the fuck did you just say?”