Page 29 of Rules to Love By

Now this, he understood. “Only the wrong rules take away the fun. The right ones make everything better.”

“You say that like you know it for a fact.”

“I do.”

“And guys let you make the rules, do they?”

Eli straightened. “They do.”

For a moment, Marcus considered him. “Okay, then.” He held out the drill and motioned to the shelf. “Unscrew it.”

There was a catch. Eli knew there was. If he used the drill to try and unscrew the brackets, it wouldn’t work. But he didn’t know enough to know why it wouldn’t work. Not yet. “Show me,” he said at last.

The hesitation was slight, the lifting of his chin minimal. But it was there. “What if you do it wrong?” Marcus asked as he turned to the wall.

“Do what wrong?”

“Make the wrong rules? I mean, you don’t know everything, right?”

“I don’t.” He moved so he could see better what Marcus was doing. “But I try to pay enough attention to figure it out first. Not saying I don’t make mistakes. But everyone does, and I try to make sure we’re both going in knowing that.”

As he watched, Marcus flipped a switch on the drill.

“Reverse.” Marcus winked. “Obviously.”

“Obviously.” Although he hadn’t even known drills had a reverse.

“Normally you can just unscrew the screw, but if it’s not catching on anything”—he wiggled the shelf to demonstrate that the screw was loose—“it might not unscrew, just spin in place.”

“Huh.” Spin in place. Didn’t that hit a bit close to home?

“Like that,” Marcus said after applying the drill to the screw and hitting the trigger. The screw remained where it was. “Take this.” Marcus handed him a thin, curved length of metal. “This is a cat’s paw. Slide it behind the bracket and pull slightly. Since the screw’s threads aren’t offering any resistance, you’re going to do that.”

“That works?”

Marcus nodded. “We could probably just yank the thing off the wall. It’s barely holding on as it is. But this way, we don’t damage the plaster as much, and there’ll be less repair before we can paint.”

“I thought you said this wasn’t a two-person job,” Eli said as he repositioned the cat’s paw at the next bracket.

“Neither is jerking off, but it’s always fun to have company.”

The cat’s paw slipped out of his hand to clatter on the floor. Eli jumped back to avoid losing a toe to the heavy tool. “Seriously?”

Marcus snickered. “You flirted first.”

Though he was ninety percent sure that wasn’t true, Eli was one hundred percent positive he wasn’t passing up the opportunity. “And what about not kissing the guy you work for?”

Marcus lowered the drill. “I work for your father, according to you?”

“I did say something along those lines.”

Marcus wrapped fingers around the front of Eli’s shirt.

“I see how it is,” Eli murmured, words brushing against Marcus’s lips.

“How’s that?”

“You can kiss me, but I can’t kiss you?”

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