Dirty Work: A Bad Boy Romance (8 page)

“Did you seriously think I’d make you fuck me for helping you with the basement?”

 
“What? No, I didn’t—”
 

“How could you even begin to think that, Fiona? It was a just a game. You could’ve said no at any time. Do you think I’m some kind of monster?”
 

“Jake, I—” But he didn’t let me speak.
 

“If you think I could do something like that, then you don’t know the first goddamn thing about me. If you think you can’t count on me in an emergency, then maybe we never knew each other at all. Maybe it
was
just about getting laid. That’s what you always thought, right? That all I was ever after was a good time? Drinking beer, having sex, playing video games, hanging with the guys. That’s all there is to me, right?”
 

He slammed the beer down on the workbench, causing liquid to slosh out all over the place. “Screw you, if that’s what you think.”
 

“But I don’t—”

But he’d left.

Chapter Seven

THAT EVENING WAS one of the worst nights of my life. I was exhausted, I had a basement full of water, I had wet furniture and cardboard boxes everywhere. Everything was dirty, including me. But all of that paled in comparison to Jake’s anger, and the genuine hurt I’d sensed behind it.
 

I still couldn’t believe that he’d thought I hadn’t called him because I was afraid he’d demand sex. That hadn’t entered my mind at all. I wish he would’ve let me explain. If there was one thing I did know, it was that I could count on him in an emergency. I knew that with all my heart.
 

So why, then, had I been so reluctant to trust him in non-emergencies? His other point had hit home. Maybe I
had
thought that he was only out for a good time. What did they say about living together? Something like, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Jake really liked milk, and I liked giving it to him.
 

I’d always known he was a good man. But yeah, maybe I hadn’t thought he’d taken us living together all that seriously. He’d always seemed so reluctant to talk about our relationship. Our future. So maybe I’d assumed he didn’t think we had much of one besides good times and good sex.
 

Around nine, I warmed up a small dinner in the microwave. Mike had deemed it safe to turn the electricity back on, but not the gas since the water heater was in the basement. The water heater Jake had fixed. I wondered, if I’d never called him over for things like that, if I’d never made that bargain with him, what would have happened.
 

I tried to convince myself that I wished we’d never started playing again once we broke up. But it wasn’t true. What I actually wished was that we hadn’t broken up in the first place. But then I supposed we’d still have the same problems we did before. Why did it have to be so complicated?
 

I ended up throwing the food out. I couldn’t eat. I was too upset.
 

On Sunday, the gang came back, minus Jake, and the guys got a pump set up. Slowly, almost too slowly to see, the water drained out of my basement. Lisa and Alison helped me sort through the mess upstairs. They made superficial small talk. I’m sure they could see my red eyes and nose, but they understood when I said I didn’t want to talk about it.
 

A little over twenty-four hours later, the basement still had a few puddles, but was much better overall. Mike turned the gas back on. He dismantled the pump and gave me instructions for the next steps, cleaning and sanitizing anything the floodwater had touched, and eventually making plans to seal the cracks in the floor. “You’ll be fine, kiddo. Turn on lots of fans, and keep all your stuff upstairs until it’s completely dry. You don’t want your things to get all moldy. And let us know when you’re ready to move furniture back down there. Unless Jake—”

“Thanks, Mike,” I interrupted. “For everything.”
 

He nodded and left.
 

Rather than work on mopping up the remaining puddles in the basement, I went to the garage to see how the stuff out there had fared. I opened the garage door, relieved to see that the sky was relatively clear.
 

Jake had pulled a lot of his things out and spread them around, but there were still a dozen unopened boxes. I cut open a few that were near me. They were mostly full of clothes, and the garments weren’t in very good shape. Though the cardboard had dried, the clothes inside hadn’t.
 

I sorted his jeans, vests, flannels, and sweatshirts into piles and started a load of wash. At the bottom of one box, I found a little stuffed dog. It was tan with over-sized, sad puppy-dog eyes. We’d gotten it at a local carnival. In a playful mood, I’d led him over to one of the games booths and asked him to win me something. It was a shooting game, and I’d figured that with his years of video-game training, he’d be able to get a prize no problem. But he’d said no, he wanted
me
to win
him
a prize. He’d coached me, showing me how to hold the gun and helping me aim, purchasing more tickets so that I could play until I’d won. We’d named him the little guy Spike.

Now, Spike was dark and dirty. I could see a line where the water had been. I looked at his sad eyes, hugged him to my chest, and started crying.
 

* * *

Thursday night, I texted Jake. I kept it very simple. I said that all of his things were dry. Could he come tomorrow night to pick them up? Or, if he wanted, he could store them in the basement again.
 

After a couple of hours, he texted back:
Be there after work.
 

That was all. But it was enough. He was coming over, so I had a shot. I was determined to make the most of it.
 

On Friday evening, I was a nervous wreck. I’d taken off work a few hours early to get ready, but I felt like I needed about five more days to get mentally prepared. I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say to him, but hopefully the right words would come when I needed them to. I’d certainly practiced enough.
 

I paced the living room for about a half hour until he arrived. When I saw his truck pull into the driveway behind my car, and I hurried to the garage and opened it.
 

He walked up the drive looking so damn handsome. He’d come straight from work, so he had faded blue jeans on and a long-sleeve cotton tee that showed all his muscles.
 

“Evening, Fiona,” he said when he spotted me in the garage. His eyes rested briefly on the forest green dress I was wearing. It was new, and it made me feel very feminine. The neckline fell in loose folds just above my breasts, but it was tight over my waist and hips. It ended mid-thigh.
 

“Going out later?” he said, one eyebrow raised.
 

“No,” I said without elaborating.
 

He stared at me for a second longer but didn’t say anything else. Instead, he looked around the garage. All of his clothes were clean and folded into neat stacks on top of a sheet on the workbench. The little stuffed dog from the carnival was clean and perched on top of a sweatshirt. The rest of his belongings had been dried out to the best of my ability and stacked in plastic crates.
 

“Thanks for doing all this,” he said. “I expected those clothes to be ruined.” He walked over and ran his hand over a neatly folded sweater. “Guess I’ll start loading up my truck.”
 

“Could you come inside first? There’s one more thing in there.”
 

He squinted at me. “That old desk, you mean? You can keep it if you’d like. If there’s not too much water damage. If there is, just toss it out.”
 

“Please come inside for a minute, Jake.”
 

He looked at me for a long moment, then shrugged. We went inside.
 

Once inside the doorway, he paused, noticing the smell immediately. Not the damp smell of wet wood and cardboard that I’d spent the week getting rid of, but the far more welcoming smell of his favorite mac ’n’ cheese with crumbled bacon and toasted bread crumbs. He walked into the kitchen and stared at the table set for dinner. I’d gone all out with the good dishes, a crimson table cloth, and even two low candles—candles he’d last seen in my bedroom.
 

“What’s all this?”
 

“I’d like to talk to you. And I thought you might be more willing to listen if I made your favorite meal.”
 

He looked at me, his head tilted to one side. “Another round of bartering, then? Trading food for listening? Seems like our last trade-off didn’t end so well.”
 

“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. Will you please have dinner with me?”
 

After another long moment, he nodded and went over to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. He dried them on his shirt. Same old Jake.
 

“I got your favorite kind of wine,” I said, going to the fridge and pulling out a long-neck bottle of a beer he liked. That got a half-smile out of him. I opened it and poured a soda for me. I needed my wits about me tonight.
 

I sat down across from him and watched while he took a huge serving of macaroni. He put a large scoop on my plate, too. I ignored it, instead picking at my salad.
 

I watched as he took a big bite, and his eyes closed, a look of bliss on his face. I’d seen that expression many times, mostly in the bedroom. After a few more bites, he looked up at me.
 

I took a deep breath. “There are two things I want to say to you.”
 

"Okay,” he said evenly.

“The first is about Saturday. About not calling you when I discovered the flooding. It was never about thinking you’d expect to have sex afterward. Our bargain never entered my mind. If it had, there’s no way I would’ve assumed that you’d hold me to it. I would never think anything like that of you.”
 

He chewed slowly, looking thoughtful. “Thanks for telling me that,” he said at long last. “So why didn’t you call me?”
 

“I don’t know. I guess I decided to take the simplest route. I’d been thinking about you, about the last time we were together, for days. And I knew that it had to end. That it wasn’t right to be with you when we weren’t together.” He looked like he was going to interrupt, so I rushed on. “Don’t get me wrong. It was fun. It was great. But I’ve never wanted a friends with benefits arrangement. Not with you. I’ve always wanted us to have the real thing. To play around without that—it wasn’t enough for me.”
 

I picked up my napkin and rubbed my hands with it to try to keep them from shaking.“When I figured out the basement was flooded, it just seemed simplest to call Lisa first and let her take care of calling in the others. It was a big shock to see all that water, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m sorry. I should have called you. I know it was mostly your stuff that got wet.”
 

He was silent for a moment, and then said, “You saved more of it than I thought possible.” He scooped up some macaroni on his fork, but then set it down on his plate. “What was the other thing you wanted to tell me?”

I took a deep breath. “That I never wanted you to leave.”
 

“But you told me to.”
 

“I know. But I didn’t mean it. We were arguing, and I felt like nothing I was saying was getting through to you. I felt like I was shouting from the rooftops that there were some serious issues we needed to work through, and you flat out refused to acknowledge it. And without acknowledging it, there didn’t seem to be any way to fix things. To make them better.”

Pausing, I tried to gather my thoughts even though I’d been rehearsing this speech for days. “I guess I was trying to shock you into taking it seriously. So I said to get out, the same way you might call someone a really nasty name during a fight. You do it because you feel like there’s no other way to get the other person’s attention. I didn’t mean for you to leave. I was heart-broken when you did.”
 

Jake’s fork remained still. He was watching me. I wondered if I was actually getting through to him. If he laughed this off, I knew I’d never have the strength to try again.
 

Finally, he spoke in a low tone. “I loved you, Fiona. I didn’t want for us to be having problems.”
 

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. This was it. He was finally talking about this. But before we went any further, I wanted to make sure he truly understood. “I didn’t want you to go, and I am truly sorry that I ever said that.”
 

“I didn’t want to leave, either. But I was just so shocked when you said that. I couldn’t believe you didn’t want to try anymore.”
 

“But I did want to try. I just felt like I wasn’t getting through to you.”
 

“I guess you weren’t. I—I guess I thought that if I pretended everything was okay, it would be. I guess I wasn’t ready to deal with it.”

He was silent for a long while. I watched as he took a swig of beer, then set it down. I wanted to say something else, but I knew the expression on his face. He was thinking about what he wanted to say. I waited anxiously, refusing to rush him. This was what I’d hoped for. He was thinking about us. He was talking about us.