Page 30 of In Love with Lewis Prescott
“Thanks.”
“How about we get back to the flooring for a bit? Maybe that’ll help clear your mind and you can come back and look at the colors from a fresher perspective.”
“That’s a great idea.”
For the next hour, we’re back on the floor. I wring out my achy hands before gripping my pry bar once more. Just like every other day I’ve worked on this, I recall Lewis’s instructions on how to remove floorboards so that they stay intact. I slide the pry bar between the hardwood plank and the floor and gently wiggle until I feel the plank come loose. Then I grab the recip saw, reposition myself so I’m kneeling on the bare flooring, fire up the saw, and carefully glide the blade under each staple that pins the deep walnut–finished hardwood plank to the floor. In seconds, the floorboard is loose, and I carefully place it on top of the massive pile of wooden planks against the wall.
When I stand up and stretch, everything from my knees to my core to my arms to my wrists throbs. I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand and guzzle water from my bottle while glancing at Lewis as he works. Brow furrowed, he purses his lips in concentration as he loosens floorboard after floorboard at a dizzying pace.
He groans. “I’m getting too old for this.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re thirty-two—one whole year younger than me. You can shut up about how old you feel.”
He laughs before doing a slow scan of the space, his gaze landing on the last remaining stretch of hardwood floorboards near the fireplace that still needs to be removed.
“We’ve got the floorboards along the edge of the living room left to pull up,” he says. “Then we’re done.”
I mock groan. “Done with this part. We still have to relay the wood onto the flooring, remember?”
He holds his palms up at me. “Ha. Okay, okay. We’re almost done with this part. That’s cause for celebration.”
I head over to the fireplace and get to work on removing the floorboards with my pry bar and recip saw.
“You sounded like my grandpa there for a sec,” Lewis says as he sets up beside me. “He didn’t like it when I glossed over the details while working either.”
“I’m a detail fiend. I had to be for my old job.”
“What was that like? Working as an architect?”
“Stressful. Long hours. Frustrating at times, depending on the personalities of the people on my team.”
“How so?”
I grunt as I tug loose a particularly stubborn hardwood plank. “All too often, I’d have an older guy working for me who assumed that because I was young and female, I didn’t know what I was doing. They’d second-guess me or talk down to me. It was par for the course.”
“Shit, really?”
I nod.
“I’m sorry.” From the corner of my eye I catch Lewis staring at me.
“You don’t need to be sorry. There’s nothing in the world I love more than being underestimated and then nailing the underestimater’s ass to the wall.”
When Lewis doesn’t respond right away, I glance over at him.
“That’s hard-core. I dig it.”
I chuckle.
“So how did you go about nailing asses to the wall?” he asks.
“I just confronted them head-on, usually in front of the rest of the staff. I remember this one time a few years ago when I was heading an expansion on a museum near the Civic Center in San Francisco. I was holding a meeting right before the project kicked off to explain the construction of the entryway that I had planned, and one of the other architects interrupted me and said, ‘Are you sure that’s the best way to go about it?’”
Lewis winces.
“That’s the exact reaction my team had.”
“What’d you do?”
