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“How much will it cost me to have those things fixed.I have money, but not a lot of disposable income right now.”Stack said that they could have it repaired in no time with no cost to her.“You can’t just fix it without some help from someone bigger, can you?I mean, I don’t know anything about furnaces, but I know it’s a big job.”
“We have magic.”That didn’t sound like a good reason for them to be fixing the furnace, but he didn’t comment when Danielle didn’t.“We can do anything that you need done to the house.Such as filling the rooms out that are now empty.We’ll just adjust things to suit you as you wish.”
“You mean you can put furniture in the rooms that are empty without me having to go to the store to buy them?I don’t know about that.Isn’t that going to put someone out of business?I’d hate to be a part of someone going out of business because I had some faeries that could magically make things for me.”He loved the way that she was thinking, but that had nothing to do with why there were so many of them here.“Look.You can fix up my house, but repairs that are going to be costly need to be cleared by me.You can fix the furnace and roof because I don’t even want to begin on trying to get those fixed right now, but the rest we’ll work out as we go.”He asked about the gardens.“Don’t let anyone notice you so that you don’t get into trouble with your boss or Sunny, but you can fix them up, too.I’d love to see what the gardens look like when they’re not a bunch of weeds taking up the entire back yard.”
After Honey and Stack went to the rest of the pip—he’d only just figured out that a pip was a bunch of faeries—he turned to look at Danielle.She looked no less stressed, but he could tell she was embarrassed, too.He asked her what was going on.
“Everything.Did you know what they wanted before they got here?”He told her that he’d not only that she was sounding stressed, and he wanted to help her out.“Thank you for that.Especially after I treated you like shit earlier.When I called Jameson, he told me to call you and gave me your number so that I could.I don’t remember why he thought it was a good idea to call you instead of him helping me, but he said you’d get to the bottom of it, and I guess you did.”
“Are you all right now?You still look like you’re stressed out.”She told him what her plan had been when they showed up.“You must be getting sick of sandwiches.I know that if I had to eat them all the time, I would be.”
“I don’t know how to cook.Not anything.I burnt a bag of popcorn last night and had to leave the windows open all night to get the smell out of the house.My new microwave is probably permanently going to smell like it for the rest of its life.”He told her that the faeries would probably take care of it for her.“Yeah, I guess they could.They’re already going to fix my furnace.I had no idea that those things were wrong with this house when I moved in.I wonder what else is wrong with it.I’m sure, as how tight my grandmother was with money and knowing that the furnace was broken long before they died, I can’t imagine that too many things got fixed when they were broken.”
“Doubtful.I knew your grandmother; she wasn’t anyone that I would have hung out with even on her best days.”She said that she could understand that.And she was related to her.“I’m profoundly sorry for that.And for the loss of your dad.He was a good man when he was out from under her control.Which wasn’t all that often.”
“I didn’t know him all that well.When it became unbearable for me to come here and visit him, Istopped coming.He didn’t put up a fuss about me not coming around.I always had the feeling that, for as much as she was mean to me, she was ten times worse to him when I left.But he saved everything that I sent him over the years for his birthday and Christmas.”
“That was good of him.”He looked around the room he was in and told her that he’d never been in the house before.“I mean, I knew who lived here, but I didn’t bother with coming around.She and my mother could have been cut from the same cloth; they were so mean to everyone else.I have a feeling that they would have been best friends.”
“I’ve heard about your mom and her dad.They were quite the pair, weren’t they?”He said that she had no idea.“I probably don’t want to know either.But if you need a reason to bitch about them, you can come over and we can talk about them.I’m sorry for the way that I treated you this morning.I wasn’t having a good day.”
“Understandable.”He asked if she was all right now.“I think you just needed them to listen to you, and it could have all been cleared up.Or you’re listening to them.I’m not sure what the breakdown was.”
“They made me nervous, there were so many of them.”He said that he’d gotten the same overwhelming feeling, too, when he’d come to the house.“So I was right in thinking that there were so many of them.How many do you have in your apartment?You do live in one, I was told, correct?”
“Yes, I have an apartment.I was going to build on the land that my father left me, but I’ve decided to put that off for now.”She asked him if it was because she had a house already.“Yes, that’s part of it.I don’t know that you’d want to live anywhere else but here.I’ll live where you are if we ever get to that point.”She changed the subject as soon as he finished talking.
“I’d invite you to dinner, but all I’m having is half of a sub.The rest will be my dinner tomorrow night after I have lunch with the women tomorrow.”He asked if she’d mind if he cooked for her.“That would be fantastic, but I don’t have anything to cook with.All the pots and pans that were here before I moved in have been thrown out.They were old and worn to nothing anyway.”
“Come to my place and I’ll feed you.I have everything I need to make some good tomato sauce and pasta.I was at the top of my class when it came to making noodles.I find that I love making them whenever I can.”She said that she didn’t know what homemade anything tasted like.“Of course you don’t.We’re just getting to know one another right now without the faeries being a distraction.”
“Thank you.”He was excited to have her come to his place.There was a great deal going on at her home at the present time, and he wanted to show her how he could cook.It was small in comparison to what she would bring to them as a couple, but cooking would relax him, and, in turn, hopefully relax her as well.It’s all he wanted right now was to make her feel better about life in general.
~*~
Danielle didn’t know what to expect, but the state of his home wasn’t it.There wasn’t much in the way of furniture and even less in things that reflected the man that she was slowly beginning to know.While not at all messy, it had nothing much more than the basic needs in the house that he lived in.
A couch that had seen better days, perhaps years ago.His kitchen had a card table in it with three mismatched chairs.In the dish drainer, there were five plates and some silverware that looked as mismatched as his chairs had.Upon arriving, he showed her where the bathroom was and told her that he’d only just had it cleaned, and the towels were also cleaned up.They didn’t match one another either, and she thought that was really sad.
To be as rich as she’d heard that he was and have nothing to show for it made her heart hurt for him.It all had to do with his mother; she just knew it.She must have been a cruel task maker, as she’d heard she’d been.Not allowing them any freedom when they had moved out of her home, where that should have been the end of it.
Watching him pull out what he called a pasta maker, she wanted to sit in the kitchen area and watch him make them.After putting a great deal of flour on the counter, he cracked some eggs in the center and began mixing the ingredients together.When the dough was made, he said it had to ‘rest’ while he had to make the sauce.
“In some parts of the states, they call the sauce gravy.Since I love gravy and mashed potatoes, I’ve never been keen on calling it that.”He chopped up some tomatoes with some of the green leafy plants he had on the counter and made the entire apartment smell amazing.Watching him cook made her jealous that she couldn’t get the same smells out of whatever she’d been cooking at home.“I have some loaves of bread, too, that I can make garlic toast.”
By the time he was cooking the pasta for the sauce, she was starving.The smells alone were enough to have her salivating, and she’d not eaten one bite of food yet.As soon as he was dishing up their dinner, she wanted to knock him away and eat the entire pot full of pasta and sauce all on her own.It was that great.
Sitting down to eat, she no longer noticed the mismatched chairs nor the chipped plates.Dinner and the person she was having it with made her realize that it mattered little when there was good food and good company.And he was too.After giving her a small glass of wine, all she wanted they ate dinner.Danielle’s first bite had her moaning at the flavors that seemed to explode in her mouth.
After they both had two helpings of the dinner, she was stuffed.The bread had been so delicious, too, that she had eaten far more than she should have.After their plates were shoved away, it was all she could do to stay awake; the carbs were hitting her hard after not getting her nap today.
“I’ve been really stressed out for the last couple of weeks.I thought that having my own place and money enough to afford not to work would be just what I needed to get on with my life.But I’m finding homeownership is a lot more stressful than I thought it would be.”He asked her if he could help her with the house.“I think that once I get used to the faeries being around, I won’t stress about the yard.I found several notices about the lawn needing to be taken care of in some of the paperwork that I found on a desk in my grandmother’s room.”
“I’d be more than happy to help you with anything you need.”She told him that right now, she just needed to rest and then get a job.“I have to find myself one too.I’ve been sort of lazy about working since I was going to college.Now that I’ve finished up, I need to get into gear and start earning a living.I can afford not to work, for now anyway—you understand that, but I need to have something to do or I’ll get myself into trouble.I have a feeling that you’re the same way.”
“Not so much trouble as I get bored.I was really busy when I first started on the house, tossing things out that were broken or old.Going through their things was heartbreaking, too.But since I didn’t know any of them all that well, it wasn’t so difficult to toss out their personal things.Except for my dad’s things.That was a bit harder to go through.”He asked if she was finished moving things out.“I am for the most part.The first time I went through the house, it was sort of a purge.The next time I’m going to go through the house, I’ll be more selective about what I toss out.Mostly, as I said, it was broken or old stuff that had long since outlived its usefulness.”
“And now you’ll have the gardens finished too.I can talk to my brother Weston about the notices if you wish.I doubt very much he’s gotten that far into his job to notice if yards are mowed or not.He’s doing a really great job if you were to ask me about it.”She said that he might be slightly one-sided in his opinion.“True.He is my big brother after all.”
