Page 11 of Kiss Me Now
“I think so. I have to turn it over to switch it out. I was kind of hoping you would do the turning over part.” It was a heavy machine. It had taken both Grace and I to get it into the house this morning.
“I got this.” He gave me a cheeky bicep flex. “They don’t call me Muscles for nothing.”
I didn’t smile, instead letting my gaze slip away and mumbling something about getting the new sheet. His arms were annoyingly impressive.
I fetched the sandpaper from the foyer where I’d left the box sitting beside the front dining room entrance.Libraryentrance. I was allowed to call it by its new name.
I dawdled while pulling out the new sheet. Ian had been poking fun at himself with the flexing, and I’d always gone for brain over brawn, but something about the way the cotton of his worn blue T-shirt had pulled over his arms had made my cheeks warm. I needed a second to collect myself. I’d been man-deprived for a long time, but I wasn’t fixing the problem with Ian.
When I walked back into the library, he had the sander flipped over on the floor.
I crouched beside him. “I think we loosen that circular nut from the plate, pull off the old sheet, and put the new sheet on.”
“Let’s do it.”
I took a stab at it, but it wouldn’t budge. I frowned and tried again. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, right?” I asked.
“Yeah. Want me to try?”
“No, I got it.” But after a few more attempts and a very sore thumb and index finger, I conceded that I did not, in fact, “have it.” “All right, I need to go find my wrench.” I wasn’t sure which tool I would need for the job, but so far, plunking down my toolbox by everything I’d had to fix then pulling each tool out one by one and holding it up to the problem had helped me repair a lot of things in the house.
I climbed to my feet and headed for the laundry room where I kept the toolbox on the washing machine. It was as good a place as any to keep it since the washer didn’t work. I’d been using it to store cans of sample paint and washing my clothes at Miss Lily’s house.
I stared at the tools for a while, picking them up and considering each before I settled on the three I thought would most likely suit the job, but when I returned to the dining—library, Ian was sitting beside the sander with the used sandpaper in his lap.
“You got it,” I said, annoyed with myself for being relieved that I wouldn’t have to figure it out after all.
“I did.” But he looked sheepish. His bangs were almost long enough to fall into his eyes, like he was overdue for a haircut, and he brushed them out of the way. “There may have been a complication.”
“What kind of complication?”
“When I pulled out the screw, it slipped and rolled away. I was about to look for it.”
I scanned the floor. “Which way did it roll?” A silver screw wouldn’t be too hard to spot, unless...
Ian pointed to the thick sawdust coating the sanded area. “That way.”
“Of course it did,” I muttered. Rule one of home improvement was that nothing ever went right, and rule two was that it always went wrong in the least convenient way possible.
“Sorry about that. Don’t worry, I’ll find it.”
I glanced down at my watch. “It’s lunchtime. You’re off the hook. You can report to Miss Lily that you’ve done the time. I’ll sweep up the dust and find the screw.”
“No, really I—”
“You’ve done enough,” I said, keeping my voice even. It was no surprise to discover I’d have been better off switching it out by myself the hard way. Story of my life.
“I’ll find it.” He tugged off his sneakers.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to shuffle through it barefoot. That’s how I’ll find it.”
A smile tugged at my lips in spite of myself. I had to give him points for trying. “All right. You start at that end doing it your way,” I pointed to the far corner, “and I’ll start at this end doing it mine.”
“What’s your way?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I fetched the shop broom from the laundry room and smirked when his eyebrows rose and looked from the short-handled broom I’d given him to the full-sized broom I now carried. But neither of us said anything as we set to work, him carefully stepping barefoot across the sawdust, me sweeping it up in short, brisk strokes as I watched for the screw.
