Page 86 of Hold Your Breath
“So, what are we doing?” she asked, her eyes darting to the kitchen sink so they wouldn’t land on his too-tempting mouth.
He opened the cabinet beneath the sink, turning onto his side and sliding his head under the trap. “Get under here,” he said when she hovered above him.
“Okay,” she said doubtfully, “although I don’t see how I can hand you tools in a bedazzled leotard in this position.” She scooted until she was on her side mirroring him, her head and shoulders inside the cabinet. “You have an unsettlingly clean under-sink cabinet. Don’t most people store, I don’t know, rat poison and bleach under here?”
“Grab the flashlight. Is that what you kept under your sink?”
Her stomach lurched at the past-tense reference to her cabin, and she used the excuse of getting the flashlight to hide her expression from him. She’d forget about the fire for a few minutes, and then something would remind her, forcing her to experience the horror with painful freshness each time. When she was with Cal, it was easy to pretend she was safe and not scared all the time, and that there wasn’t a psycho ex-boyfriend out there who wanted her dead. Although she knew it was a false bubble of security, she still wanted to dwell in it for a little longer.
“No.” She turned on the light and aimed it at the drain piping. “I didn’t really use bleach or rat poison. I had dish soap, a bag filled with plastic grocery bags, a stack of paper grocery bags, extra scrubbies, a bucket, extra hand soaps, and a few containers of Bar Keeper’s Friend. Oh, and a big bottle of white vinegar I used for cleaning.”
He’d been positioning the pipe wrench, but paused so he could stare at her. “How could you live like that?”
“It was organized. Well, sort of neatly kept. Maybe a little messy.” She watched as he loosened the pipe with the ease of much practice, wanting to turn the conversation away from memories of her cabin. She couldn’t think about her once-homey kitchen without picturing it engulfed in flames, and her nerves tightened. “So, how’d you learn all this stuff?”
“What’s that?” he asked, his focus still on his work.
“This.” She waved her hand at the interior of the cabinet. “Fixing things. You are intimidatingly capable.”
“Necessity,” he said shortly, unscrewing the nuts on the underside of the sink.
His curtness just made her more curious. “When you got this house, you mean?”
“No.” Although she waited for him to elaborate, he remained silent. To encourage him to talk, she made the flashlight jiggle around the cabinet in a truly irritating way, if she did say so herself. With an annoyed grunt, he reached out and clasped his hand over hers, steadying the beam. “Fine. Growing up, if I didn’t fix something, it stayed broken. Necessity.”
When he ducked out of the cabinet and stood, she wondered if she’d pissed him off with her pushing. She stood as well and saw that he was removing the strainer from the sink. Once he’d lifted the flange, he stripped off a circle of rubber attached to it and attacked it with a wire brush.
“Didn’t your mom fix stuff?” she asked, watching with interest as he scrubbed the sink where the flange had been with equal vigor.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Hand me the plumber’s putty. And because she wasn’t the type to learn to fix something. She was more the type to cry that it was broken and then bring home another loser who wouldn’t fix anything.”
“Here.” After handing him the putty, she watched him apply it with careful precision and considered his use of past tense. “She’s not around anymore?”
“No. Gasket, please.”
“Uh…” Lou looked between the neat arrangement of tools and Callum’s face. “What exactly does a gasket look like?”
He gestured with his chin at a packaged part sitting next to his toolbox.
“Ah.” She pulled open the packaging and handed him the gasket. “Why didn’t you just say the round rubber thingy?”
Although he attempted to give herthe look, he was obviously fighting a smile as he accepted the gasket.
“I don’t…umm.” Even though she was dying to know the answer, she was also dreading the possibility that he would say yes. “Never mind.”
“What?” Callum returned to his position under the sink.
Joining him, Lou resumed her flashlight-holding duties, watching as he began tightening the nuts he’d loosened earlier. “Do I remind you of her?” When he didn’t answer immediately, nerves made her babble. “Because of the whole princess-of-chaos thing. I mean, I remembered you mentioning your childhood was chaotic, and my life tends to be chaotic, especially these past few weeks since I kicked a dead guy—oh wait, I guess it was earlier than that, because Brent was already shoving pointy objects into my tires—”
“Lou.”
“Never mind. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Lou.”
