Page 95 of Snowed In with Benefits

Emmett barks a laugh and Beau grins. Later, after breakfast is cleaned up, we all get suited up to work outside for several hours. Beau lends me a pair of work gloves that are comically too big. Hunter finds me a knit cap and pulls it down over my ears himself, tugging it into place like I’m a kid getting ready for recess. I catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror on the way out—oversized coat, borrowed boots, gloves flopping past my fingertips—and I look ridiculous. I look like someone who belongs here. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and I love that. We all tromp over to the barn and look at the sagging, tilted awning.

“Board’s rotted through.” Emmett points to one of the posts holding up the awning. It’s curved in an unnatural way and looks like it’s about to give. “Gotta replace it.”

“How do we replace it without having the whole thing come down on us?” I ask.

They don’t spend a great deal of time explaining it, they just show me. They pull a sturdy four-by-four out of the barn and hammer it into place beside the rotten one. It’s uneven with the rest of the poles now, which bothers me, but it isn’t there for long. They cut out the old four-by-four and hammer the new one into its place, all without losing any structural support.

That isn’t the only rotten, cracked, or warped piece on the awning. We all work together, replacing this and reinforcing that. I find myself hauling wood from the barn, holding poles still while the men hammer them into place, working harder than I’ve worked since I left the catering business. My body responds eagerly, as if it’s been waiting for me to use it for some good, honest work.

“A little to your left,” Hunter tells me at one point. “No, too far. A little to the right.” He huffs. “You know, for a Goldilocks, you’re not great at finding the perfect spot.”

“Neither was she,” I shoot back. “Took her three tries every time. I got it in two.”

He laughs, then hammers the wood I’m holding into place.

“We should get her up on the awning,” Beau says thoughtfully. “She’s the lightest of us, she could find the bad bits without bringing the whole thing down.”

“Great, just put my life in danger,” I say, mildly dismayed. I know they won’t actually put me in danger.

Emmett doesn’t say anything. He just picks me up. I squeak as he holds me over his shoulders and tosses me onto the roof, holding his hands there in case I slip back. I don’t. The shingles are rough enough and dark enough that there isn’t a lot of snow or ice up here.

“I’m going to pass you the circular saw,” Hunter says. “You need to find the edges of that sagging bit and cut it out. Then we’ll put a new board up there and re-shingle it.”

I’m sweating in spite of the cold, both with effort and with nerves. I’ve never done anything like this before.

“What if I cut it in the wrong spot?”

“Then we’ll get a bigger board,” Hunter says as he passes the saw up to me handle-first. “There’s nothing you can do up here that we can’t fix.”

The saw is heavier than I expected. I wrap both hands around the grip and feel the weight of it, the realness of it. Nobody is going to take this out of my hands. Nobody is going to tell me to come down and let the men handle it. Preston wouldn’t have let me near a power tool. Preston wouldn’t have let me near a ladder. He would have hired someone and told me to stay inside where it was safe, and I would have, because I thought that was love. This is love too, I think. Or something close to it. Handing someone a saw and saying go ahead, I trust you, and if you mess it up, we’ll fix it together.

I smile at that. Feeling a little more confident, I find the edges of the sagging wood. It’s not hard. The soggy wood is splintering away from the good wood, making the shingles stick out at an awkward angle. I get between the shingles, into the crack, and start cutting. It feels good to be this productive, to do things I’ve never done before. I get the far side cut, then shimmy back over to the near side. I cut that too.

“You remember those old cartoons, the ones where a character would cut a hole in the roof and the roof would fall instead of the hole?” Hunter asks.

“Why on earth would you bring that up right now?” My voice is shaking with nerves.

“I dunno. Seemed like the thing to say.”

“He’s just fucking with you, Josie. You’re safe. You’re on the supported part of the roof.” I hear Beau sock Hunter in his arm and I huff a little nervous laugh.

“Going for the third side,” I tell them.

“Go slow,” Emmett says. “It’ll probably fall before you’re finished.”

He’s right. I get about halfway through the cut when the whole thing slumps down, creaking and groaning like it’s relieved to finally give up. I turn off the saw. Emmett reaches up through the hole and helps me down, letting me scramble down his body like a tree. I grin up at him, then stand on my tiptoes and kiss him. He looks surprised and pleased, which pleases me in turn.

Hours later, when the sun is low in the sky, we finally have the awning looking solid. The roof is flat and stable, the supports are straight and true, and the whole thing looks a million times better, the fresh coat of sealant making it shine.

I step back and look at it. Really look at it. My hands are sore and my shoulders ache and there’s a blister forming on my palm where the glove rubbed, and I built that. Not alone—I couldn’t have done it alone—but my hands were on every board. I held things steady while they hammered. I cut the bad wood out of the roof. I hauled and carried and climbed and sweated, and now there’s an awning that will hold through the winter because I was part of making it hold. I’ve never had that before. I’ve never looked at something solid and real and known that it existed partly because of me. It’s a small thing. It’s an awning on a barn in the middle of nowhere. But it’s the first thing I’ve built with my own hands, and I can’t stop looking at it.

I’ve completely sweated through my clothes, apart from the coat. We tromp back inside. I’m a little breathless and sore and my cheeks are flushed, but I’ve never had more fun completing a task. We strip out of our outer clothes in the mudroom and I get a whiff of my own scent.

“I need to change,” I say with a laugh.

“I call dibs on first shower,” Beau says, and nobody argues with him because he was standing too close when the roof came down and got covered in snow as a result.

I head upstairs to change. There’s a pile of clean clothes that I’ve collected over my weeks of staying here. I strip, then go through the clothes. Emmett’s flannel. Hunter’s t-shirt. Beau’s sweatpants. Or the other way around, Hunter’s sweatpants, Beau’s t-shirt, Emmett’s thermal. With a small shock, I realize that I’ve been carrying all three of them with me every time I get dressed. Something about that makes me grin. I like having their combined scents encapsulate me all day.