Page 22 of The Boo Next Door

"I almost did in the graveyard." She considers. "The lady's monster came out behind us. That's cheating."

"That's engineering."

"It was really good cheating," she allows, and marches off into the night, and Lila materializes at my shoulder with fog fluid on her sleeve and her hair coming out of its knot, and she watched the whole exchange, I can tell, because her face has gone soft in a way she'd deny under oath.

"You keep a door for the scared ones," she says.

"Somebody has to."

"Yeah." She looks at me the way she looked at the joinery in the gym, like she's figured something out about the build, and then past me at the little pumpkin-marked door itself, lit soft in the tunnel dark, and whatever she's adding to the file, it takes her a second. "Somebody does."

Dottie finds us at the cider table at close, as promised, standing next to each other. She surveys the gym, the parents, Ruth counting the bake-sale cashbox with the joy of a Renaissance banker.

"Well," Dottie says. "I've been running committee sentences for thirty years, and that's the first time one's ever come in ahead of schedule." She hands us each a cider like a judge returning confiscated property. "Co-chairs. Go home. You're released."

She shows up at my door at nine with the bourbon I know for a fact she bought at the general store an hour ago, because Marge texted me a thumbs-up with no context, community in action. She follows me into my kitchen and doesn't make a joke about it, which is how I know.

I cook, because I said dinner and I meant it, and she sits on my counter drinking her bourbon out of one of my jam jars, narrating my technique to the room like a golf announcer, and it's the best hour of my year. That's not a figure of speech. I checked the year. It's this hour, then the shed, then the cat coming down the maple, and I notice the list is all her, all the way down, and I stir the pan and keep that finding to myself.

"You brown butter," she says. "Of course you brown butter. You absolute fraud. Flannel and a fire helmet on the calendar and secretly you brown butter."

"It's chemistry, not a personality."

"Everything's a personality, Grady. Your clamp wall is a personality." She takes another inch of bourbon and surveys my kitchen with the appraisal she does everywhere, reading the room's joinery. "You know what this house is? I figured it out from the porch a week ago and the inside confirms it. It's a portfolio. Every corner's a demonstration. Perfect miters, perfect reveals, not one picture on the wall that isn't level, and none of it says anything about you except hire me." She points the jam jar at the one exception, and of course she found the one exception — the shelf by the window, a lopsided pine box holding river stones, the first thing I ever built, age nine, with my grandfather's hammer. "Except that. That one's a sentence."

"That one's a box."

"That one's the whole memoir, and someday you'll read it to me." She sets down the jar. "Come here."

She hooks her heel behind my knee as I pass the counter, not pulling, just — placing it there, a fact in the room, and the pan comes off the burner, and I stand between her knees with my hands on the counter on either side of her, careful as a man setting a beam.

"Terms," I say, against her jaw, because even now, especially now, I need the load numbers. "Say them plain."

"Tonight's not strategic," she says, plain. Her hands come up into my hair. "That's the whole term. There's one term."

I kiss her the way I've been not kissing her for two days, and she makes a sound against my mouth like an argument ending, and the jam jar gets set down blind somewhere on the counter with a click that's the last administrative act of the evening.

Upstairs, I learn her the way I learn anything that matters — slow, in order, with my full attention. The flannel goes first, my flannel, returned at last, and under it she's warm and shivering at once, and she talks, because of course she talks, a running commentary that keeps snagging and restarting every time my mouth finds a new place. The line of her throat. The curve of her shoulder where the paint always ends up. The soft plane of her stomach, which makes her laugh, and the laugh becomes a gasp halfway out, and I file the location of that transformation for the rest of my life.

"You're doing the thing," she manages, fingers in my hair, "the inventory thing, the — cataloging⁠—"

"Learning your shape." I say it into her hip. "In case I have to build you from memory."

"That's the most romantic threat I've ever—" and then she stops being able to narrate for a while, because I've been patient for nineteen days and I am done being patient. I take her apart with my hands and my mouth, unhurried, thorough, the way I'd never let myself imagine over the fence line. She's not quiet about it. She was never going to be quiet about it, the woman narrates paint drying, and every sound she makes lands in me like a spark in dry stock. When she gets close the first time she grabs my shoulder like a strap in a storm and says my name as a warning, and I stay exactly where I am, exactly as I am, steady, until the warning becomes a demand and the demand comes apart into something wordless and rolling, my name in the middle of it, half-laughed, wholly mine, and the sound of it rewires something in my chest I'd tagged as load-bearing and permanent.

"Okay," she breathes, after, staring at my ceiling like it's new construction. "Okay. The patience thing. That's a personality too."

"Told you it was chemistry."

"Shut up. Come up here."

I come up there, and she takes her turn, because Lila Merriweather has never once watched a demonstration without demanding the tools. She pushes me over onto my back and works her way down my chest with her mouth, narrating in that low unraveling voice — an inspection report, honestly, this is load-bearing, and this, God, this is just decorative and I approve — and her hands map me slow and greedy at once, learning me the way she learns a build, and by the time her mouth finds the hollow of my hip I've got one arm thrown over my eyes and I'm breathing like a man carrying a couch upstairs.

"Look at me," she says. Not a request. I look. That's the frame I keep: her over me in the lamplight, hair wrecked, eyes dark, absolutely certain, my whole careful life dismantled around the bed like packing material.

"Lila." My voice comes out half gravel. "I need⁠—"

"I know what you need." She moves up my body, unhurried, cruel, magnificent. "Say please anyway. For the record."