Page 52 of The Lipstick Flip

And then, finally, I was out of bed. I stumbled into the bathroom. Shut the door. Had enough brains for once in my life to lock it. I turned on the tap.

What you don’t do is cry about it.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The pressure just kept climbing, building in my chest, then in my throat, then in my head.

Crying never fixed anything.

I could hear myself trying to breathe through it. Thin breaths. Whistling breaths.

That fucking trailer. That fucking day. That fucking Playgirl. Why hadn’t I thrown it away? Why hadn’t I burned it or—

The knock at the door sent a jolt through me: adrenaline, and then, like fire following gasoline, anger.

“Howie?” Noah asked. He tried the handle; it rattled against the lock. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”

But that must not have been enough because Noah said, “What’s going on?”

What was going on was I wanted to be left the fuck alone. What was going on was I wanted five fucking seconds of privacy, five fucking seconds where I didn’t have to—to be.

I swallowed the words before they could get out. I dropped my head between my arms and rested it on the cool porcelain of the sink. They were just feelings. Feelings weren’t final. Just because you felt something didn’t mean you had to react to it. All the fucking bullshit you hear in recovery.

But God, for one second, it would have been nice to be angry. To lose my fucking mind. And go out, and score, and not have to feel anything after that. For somebody else to have to take care of things. For a while.

I splashed cold water on my face. I toweled it away. I opened the door.

Noah was standing there. Worry left tracks around his eyes.

“Bad dream,” I said. “Sorry.”

Noah didn’t say anything, but his eyes moved to the scar on my stomach. Where I’d been shot. His face smoothed out, and he took my hand and squeezed it. “That’s okay. Do you want to talk about it?”

Yes, I thought. For one dizzying moment, yes.

“No,” I said. I kissed his temple, turned him back to bed, rubbed his shoulder. “It was just a dream.”

17

After Christmas, everything started moving faster.

We were counting down the days to the holiday house tour, and it was the final push to make sure everything was perfect. Better than perfect.

And Noah, to his credit, showed up for me and Si. As soon as the paint was dry in a room, he started moving in furniture, hanging pictures, adding the little touches that transformed it from an old house with good bones into something, well, beautiful.

For my part, I was busy with my punch list—first making it, and then fixing everything. One thing I’d learned from Si was that this was the stage that separated a decent contractor from a good one. This was what made people come back and hire you again. This was what made you someone they could count on. I’d learned a lot of the basics from my dad, but he was also the same guy who’d told me, if he didn’t know how to fix something, to slap duct tape on it or paint over it.

On the other hand, this part of the job was also a pain in the ass. Making the punch list meant touching everything. Every. Fucking. Thing. I started with the fucking doorbell—because one house we’d worked on, we’d had the whole place ready to go, and the inspector had rung the doorbell and tripped the main breaker. That had been fun. And then, from the doorbell, I worked my way in. I checked every door. Not just once. You opened the door hard. You opened it slow. You shoved it to see how it wobbled. You tested the locks. And then you tested them again. And then again. Every cabinet door. Every pull. Every light. Every light switch. Every window. Every faucet. It meant crawling around on the floor to see if the toe kicks had been installed properly. It meant getting up on a ladder to discover that one of the subs Noah had hired to help us finish this place had left the remote for the ceiling fan taped to one of the blades. It meant making my way through the house on my fucking knees to scrape up every paint drip, drop, and spatter. It meant—in one case—finding out somebody hadn’t bothered to finish screwing in the toilet paper holder, and it fell off the wall as soon as I touched it.

It took time. A lot of time. And in a business where time meant money, this was the place people cut corners.

But not Si. That had been the whole point, after all. That this wasn’t a lipstick flip.

And, so, I didn’t cut corners either. Even though it’d be nice if once—just once—I could do things the easy way.

Noah couldn’t be there all the time, of course. He still had his job. He still had his family in town. A few nights, I managed to squeeze in a quick dinner with them. Fortunately, Jonathan had a workaholic’s appreciation for crunch time, and that went a long way toward smoothing things over. I thought, maybe, that it was a good thing for Noah, too. Because it gave Noah a reason to be at the house, helping me, instead of with his family.

And it seemed like whenever Noah wasn’t at his actual job, he was working on the house. Part of that was the decorating, arranging furniture, setting up the candles and books and whatever else he’d bought—in one room, he’d put what looked like a giant stainless-steel dildo, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what it really was.