Page 59 of Snowed In with Benefits

“Fine,” I growl to myself. I cross the workshop and go out to find her. She’s not far. She’s in the living room, looking out the window. The light is hitting her hair and she’s got that look on her face, the one she gets when she’s seeing something she wants to capture. Probably trying to find something else to take a picture of.

“Josie.”

She turns around. Her face is a little guarded and I know it’s my fault.

“You can take pictures. If you still want to.”

Her face lights up. She looks like she’s trying to contain it, but she’s not exactly good at hiding her emotions. It’s one of the first things I noticed about her. She wears her heart on her sleeve, even when she thinks she doesn’t.

She beams at me and it soothes the thing in me that was beating me up for leaving her disappointed. I like seeing her look like that. I feel almost proud of it, somehow, and that makes me feel even better. I bring her back into the workshop.

“You let me know if there’s anything you want off-limits, anywhere you don’t want me to go, anything you don’t want me to look at,” she says.

I shrug. I still feel weird about having her in my space, but the decision has been made. “Take pictures of whatever you want,” I tell her.

She smiles shyly. She’s pleased, and that pleases me. I don’t know why. It just does. Her eyes do that thing they do when she’s hunting a good shot, the same look that cats get when they’re hunting a grasshopper. Intense. Focused but scanning. Tracking the light and shadow.

I sit back down and get to work. She’s moving through the space behind me, beside me, back to the other side. I hear her camera clicking. I feel her presence the way I feel a shift in the temperature, the way I know when a storm is coming. I focus on my work, but my attention is split and, like wood, I can’t unsplit it.

She stops at the shelf near the back wall. I know what’s there. The older pieces. The ones I made when I lost Grandpa, when my hands were shaking and my head was full of noise and the only thing that kept me from losing it was the feel of a blade against grain. Those pieces are rough. Unfinished. Some of them are ugly. I carved them in the dark, literally and otherwise, and they show it.

I wait for her to say something about them. She doesn’t. She just takes pictures. I hear the shutter click three, four, five times. She’s spending more time on those rough pieces than on the finished ones, and I don’t know what to do with that.

I sand the same spot a few times too many. I set the sanding block aside and grab the knife. She’s on my right now, taking pictures of the set of chairs I keep meaning to finish. There’s one chair in the kitchen that wobbles and another one that had a chip taken out of it. Don’t remember how that happened. Point is, I could fix them or I could make new ones, and I decided to make new ones.

She turns her camera toward me and makes a startled sound. I look up. She looks a little pale.

“Your hand! What happened to your hand?”

“It’s fine.”

She sets her camera down, barely looking at where she puts it. Her whole attention is on me and my damn hand. I don’t like it. I look down at my hand to see what’s worrying her so much and find that the blood has soaked through and there’s a large red spot on the rag.

“It’s not fine. Let me look at that. It needs to be cleaned, you need to let me clean that. When did you do this? It had to be after I was in here the first time, I would have noticed. Where are the first aid supplies? You guys can’t possibly be out here like this without a first aid kit.”

I point to the wall that connects the workshop to the house. There’s a red box hanging by the door tucked halfway behind some lumber. She doesn’t hesitate. She goes right to the box, weaving her way around my projects, leaning over a pile of scraps I’ve collected there, and reaches way up for the box. I should have grabbed that for her. I forget how short she is.

She comes back with a no-nonsense look on her face. She sets the kit on the workbench and sits beside me, gesturing for my hand.

I hesitate. I could do this myself. I’ve done it a hundred times. Cuts, splinters, burns. You work with your hands long enough, you learn to patch yourself up without thinking about it. But she’s not waiting. She takes my wrist and gently pulls my hand into her lap. My heart beats a little harder as her fingers gently brush over my skin. She’s so close. Her scent is everywhere. She unwraps the rag. She’s focused, steady. The blood doesn’t seem to bother her.

She takes the antiseptic out of the kit and soaks a cotton square with it. My hand is still on her lap. Her lap is warm, her thighs are soft under the back of my hand. My body responds and I clench my jaw. Not a good time. There might never be a good time.

Her fingers brush mine as she starts cleaning my cut. She’s holding my hand in one of hers and cleaning with the other. Her focus, her undivided attention, it’s doing something to me. I hear it again in my head, the same thing I’ve been hearing for days. Her moans. The smack. The thing they thought I slept through and I didn’t, the picture that my mind has been completing with only sounds to go off.

I don’t sleep like the dead. Beau said that. Beau was wrong. I heard everything. I heard her come apart for Hunter, heard the shift in the air when Beau walked in, heard the sounds change when it was his turn. I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to every goddamn second of it, and my body responded the way a body responds, and I hated myself for it. Not because it was wrong. Because I wasn’t invited. Because I wouldn’t have known what to do if I had been.

She tightens the new bandage, her hands warm and soft on mine. I grunt, turned on and trying to smother it, trying to focus on the minor ache in my hand rather than the roaring ache in my crotch. She winces at the noise.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s fine.” It’s not fine. I’m not hurt, but it’s not fine.

She looks over her work then sits back. I take my hand back and look at her handiwork. It’s competent and precise. Better than what I usually do for myself. I usually just wrap it and move on. She actually cleaned it properly, applied the antiseptic evenly, bandaged it tight enough to hold but not so tight it cuts off circulation. She’s done this before, or she’s just careful by nature. Maybe both.

“Thank you,” she says.

I give her a look. Isn’t that my line right now? “For what?”