Page 115 of Mr. Fixer Upper
“Okay, so I’m not fired, and you two are together?” Felicia clarified.
“Yeah, that’s the gist.”
Felicia whooped and picked up the mic of the headset she was wearing around her neck. “Bust open the kitty boys. Gaige is in the building!”
There were corresponded whoops and cheers from all floors of the house.
“You had money on this?” Paige covered her face with her hands.
Felicia shot her an incredulous look. “No one was going to bet against Gannon,” Felicia said. “I mean, look at him. Who says no to that?”
Gannon preened like a peacock.
“So what’s the money from?”
“We each threw twenty bucks into the pot to go out and celebrate when y’all started bumping uglies. Got quite the stash just waiting on you two.”
Paige decided her hands were just fine where they were and kept them over her eyes.
“Just so you know, Felicia,” Gannon said, coming up behind Paige and sliding an arm around her shoulders. “We’re pretty serious.”
“Well, well.” Felicia’s eyebrows winged up her forehead. “Personally, I’d like to say about friggin’ time.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Gannon agreed.
“I’m gonna go spread the word. You two’ll come out with us tonight right? Celebrate?”
Gannon squeezed Paige’s shoulder. “Sure.” It came out as a croak, but hey, it was an affirmative. Felicia bee-bopped out of the room whistling “Happy Birthday.”
“See, princess? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
WINTER
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The house was taking shape, Gannon noted with pride as he nudged an open box of tile out of his way with the toe of his boot. It was slowly morphing from hellhole into blank canvas. Sunlight streamed through new replacement windows onto freshly sanded hardwood. The musty smell of stale air had been replaced with the fresh scents of sawdust and sweat. And progress was happening everywhere.
The framing on the upper floors for bedrooms, sitting rooms, and bathrooms was finished, and they would have Gannon’s office and small workshop on the lower level framed in by mid-morning. Then they’d let the drywallers loose on all four floors.
Drywall was always the turning point. They’d gutted the old plumbing, wiring, and HVAC, lugged out radiators, patched the floors that could be salvaged, and tamed the exterior. The roof was new. The landscaping was looking more like overgrown yard and less like an untouched jungle.
The irony was that between demo and drywall, very little of the renovation process was interesting to viewers.
Footage of his team running new electric or building HVAC ducts rarely ever made it to screen. Audiences loved demo day and seeing new walls go up to define reimagined spaces, but they had no interest in what lay within those walls. The innards, as he liked to think of them, were the meat of any project. It wouldn’t matter if you had shiny tile on your backsplash if your fifty-year-old plumbing was dumping water everywhere. But viewers generally didn’t hold his views.
He ran his hand over the new studs that framed out his master bedroom.
The shooting schedule that had remained fairly light was ramping up to the long days that came with the design process.
But it was symbolic of a vision becoming reality. This was the point in the process when his crew stopped thinking he was insane and started seeing the potential.
Potential and vision were two things he was rarely wrong on. And that’s what he saw in his relationship with Paige. He may have had to drag her into it kicking and screaming, but they worked better than either of them had anticipated. And he’d had rather high expectations there.
He’d gotten used to waking up to her, to finding her wrapped around him or vice versa. When they were awake and working, she kept him grounded, and he pushed her to stretch. She’d stretched into the role of director and surprised no one but herself when she rocked it. She’d worked behind the camera long enough that she was able to start crafting the stories in real-time, making it easier for the editors in post-production to flesh them out.
She’d impressed him with what she’d absorbed about the construction process and scheduled shoots with sensitivity to his crew that Gannon and the rest of his guys appreciated.
And on their off time, they’d built a tentative personal routine, too, something he took as part and parcel of being in a relationship. They spent the dark of the night tangled up with each other, playing as hard as they worked. On their occasional days off, they’d fix a lazy brunch at his place, experimenting with simple recipes that they could handle and spend the afternoons tag-teaming projects. When Becca was out of town, which was most of the time, Gannon lent Paige a hand with whatever tasks she trusted him with.
