Page 74 of Not That Ridiculous

Why had this lovely, kind, intensely physical and formerly straight man set his sights on me?

He’d more than set his sights. He’d locked on and was coming at me full throttle. He wasn’t going to stop until he got his way, and I was giddy with excitement about it. I wasn’t even talking about the sex. I was excited at the mere idea of someone looking at me and thinking,I want to make that man happy.

Why me? Why now? What did it mean for the future? Was there even a future or was this a phase?

I had a lot on my mind.

With an impatient huff, I closed my laptop, took the noise-canceling headphones off, and went outside to see how they were doing.

And to see Kevin in his element.

They’d finished taking the old frame out and my little hall was flooded with morning sunshine. I winced at the generous scattering of masonry and general crap over the tarp that Kevin had put down to protect the parquet.

“Am I safe to come out?” I called.

Ali’s head popped into view. “Yep,” he called back. “Come on through. Don’t touch anything.”

Keeping my arms to my sides, I eased over the tarp and slid through the ragged doorway.

The old door and frame lay on the lawn to the left of the path; the new door, Kevin, and Phil were all huddled together on the right. Kevin was on his knees with a measuring tape and a pencil. Phil sat with his nose about an inch from Kevin’s and watched, enthralled, as Kevin made a mark at one end of the long side of the frame. He sat back on his heels, tucked the pencil behind his ear, and twisted at the waist to say something to Ali, who was brushing stone chips and debris from the doorway. When he caught sight of me, he smiled.

“Hi,” I said breathlessly.

“Hi.”

“Uh. How’s it going?”

“Good. Now we’ve got that old frame out, we’ll be cracking along.”

Behind me, Ali muttered in agreement and continued his brushing.

I wandered over to stand by the old door. “I can see why I had such a tough time getting it closed now. Looks like a banana.” It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was definitely warped. The middle lay flat to the grass. The top and bottom bowed up.

Kevin came to stand next to me. He tapped the splintered frame with the toe of his work boot. “Good job we got to it today,” he said. “Look how much it’s swelled. Another few months and bits of it would have started falling off. Rot’s got in.” He kicked gently at the rain bar along the bottom edge. The wood crumbled.

I felt oddly embarrassed about it, even though it had been in a similar state when I bought the house.

“If you want to help out,” Kevin said, “you can get the furniture off for me.” At my quizzical look, he said, “That’s the hardware. All the metal. The wood’s gone to shit but this’ll clean up nice, and it’s proper antique. I can put it on your new door for you, or you can sell it to a salvage yard.”

I blinked at the door. Sell it? “Is it worth anything?”

“Nah, not really. Not a lot. You’ve got a nice knocker and finger plate. Good solid knob.”

I side-eyed him, wondering if this was more of his hopeless dirty talk because it sounded like it, but no. He was taking this seriously.

“Hinges are a bit crap,” he continued, “but they’re antique too, and they should still be functional when you get the rust off. I really hate to see stuff like this get chucked, you know? It’s not too much of a bother to clean it up or, hell, don’t even clean it up, just take it to salvage rather than landfill or scrap metal.”

“That’s very environmentally conscious of you,” I said. “Sustainable.”

“Yeah. I’m kind of into that. You won’t believe the stuff that people have us haul away. Like, proper antiques and stuff. I mean, Craig never tells them if it’s worth anything, he just takes it off their hands then goes and sells it himself for the profit. Like he did with the ribcage shower.”

“The…what?”

“Ribcage shower. It was a style of Victorian shower.Somany cool pipes. They come off a central pipe and curl around in a semi-circle from about head to thigh, like a big open ribcage.” He sketched it out in the air between us. “I never even knew they had showers back then, but they did. Looked proper steampunk. Shame we had to take it out. I did say to Craig, why not see if the client would rather we fix it up and make it a feature but he said there was no point, they’d already bought the new suite for us to install. I suppose it makes sense. If you want a new bathroom, you probably want to level up and go for rainfall shower heads and…” he trailed off and his attention zeroed in on my face.

“I don’t need a new bathroom,” I said quickly.

“But—”

---