Page 20 of Fate, Interrupted

“I’ve been coming here for three years. It’s mine in all the ways that count.”

He smiles, brief and real, and I like being the reason for it more than I should. My chest gives an inconvenient little squeeze.

He glances up at the fan. “What happened to the one you have?”

“Dying. Loudly and without dignity. And the pull chain kept grabbing on the one before that...” I stop, because I am describing a ceiling fan malfunction to Silas Coulter in a hardware store and this is apparently my life now. “It was a whole thing. I need one with a remote.”

“The brushed nickel is good,” he says, looking up at the display. “Motor’s quiet. Blade pitch is decent. Housing doesn’t rattle.”

I study him. “How do you know that?”

“We use them in the laundromat locations. High ceilings, runs all day. If the housings were going to rattle, they would have by now.”

This is not the conversation I expected to be having with him, and it is somehow more disarming than any of the conversations I could have expected. Silas solved my problem without making a thing of it with that already-decided efficiency of his. It would be maddening if I didn’t think about how attracted I am to him. “So, the brushed nickel,” I say.

“Unless you want to keep climbing restricted ladders to check the others.”

“I was going to do that anyway,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “I watched you unchain it from the end of the aisle. I could tell you were on a mission.”

I process this. “How long were you standing there?”

“Long enough,” he says.

“Not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’ve got.”

“Were you there long enough to see me pull my underwear out of my crack?”

“You pulled your underwear out of—you pulled your underwear down?”

“No, that’s a trick question, and your face shows how long you were there.”

A full-throated laugh escapes me, and I throw an elbow, bumping his rock-hard bicep.

I look at him for a moment. This man watched me unchain a ladder with an employees-only sign on it and waited to see what I was going to do with it. He didn’t step in to do it for me, instead only stepping in when the ladder wandered.

“You could have said something when you saw me climbing.”

“You looked like you knew what you were doing.”

“I did know what I was doing. I always know what I’m doing.”

“The ladder wasn’t stable,” he says.

“The ladder was fine.”

“You grabbed the shelf.”

“As a precaution. A totally unnecessary precaution that I took entirely on purpose.”

When I look at him, everything in the immediate vicinity is temporarily irrelevant. I look back up at the ceiling fan.

“I’m taking the brushed nickel,” I say, mostly to give myself something to do. “I’ll need someone to install it.”

“I can send someone,” he says.