Page 42 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
His voice jars me from what I thought was my private admiration of him. Heat fills my cheeks at the realization he knew I was there staring.
“I—I don’t know how to . . . ,” I respond, suddenly flustered under the scrutiny of his stare behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses.
“There’s no skill needed, Socks.” He bends over the toolbox and, after grabbing a hammer, holds it out handle first. “It’s not flowery or girly, but it does the job. Just don’t hit your thumb.”
My eyes flicker from the tool to his face before I cross the few feet between us and take it from him. And now that I have it, I have absolutely no clue what to do. Luckily he senses I need direction, because he summons me over to where he was working.
Taking the pencil from behind his ear, he proceeds to measure and mark small circles in the middle of the two-by-four he lined up on a section of handrail, while I stand there feeling stupid with the unfamiliar weight of the hammer in my hand. Plus now that we’re so close, my instinct to avoid him has returned with a vengeance.
“I want you to hammer nails into each of those marks, okay?”
While a big part of me is surprised and even excited to do something constructive with my hands, I’m also afraid I’ll make a mistake and mess something up. I must look like a deer in the headlights, because he belts out a laugh before taking a step closer to me.
“C’mere. I promise it’s as easy as it looks. You take this nail here and then you tap the top of it until it bites into the wood.” He steps behind me, body ghosting mine, before taking hold of my hands and directing them into proper positioning. And hell if he didn’t just make hammering a simple nail on its head a lot more complicated.
Because I’m sure I could have figured it out—it’s not rocket science after all—and yet once our bodies are touching, the scent of his cologne in my nose, the feel of his warm breath hitting the side of my face as he leans his head forward to demonstrate with our paired hands, the attraction hijacks my concentration. His comments from the other night return to front and center in my mind, when they weren’t buried very far to begin with.
He holds my hand over the handle, and his fingers help me grip the nail as we tap the head of it into the first marked location on the wood. “See? Simple.”
No, complicated is more like it.
But I bite my tongue, nod, and concentrate through the distraction of his presence when I take control of the hammer and tap the nail in farther. He steps back after a few more taps and I feel like I can finally breathe again, think again without him clouding my thoughts.
The work is slow going. For every one nail I tap in, I swear he taps in four or five, but there is some truth to his comment about it being therapeutic. There’s a sense of stress release in the repeated activity of pounding the hell out of a little metal nail: the clink of the hammer, how it starts to disappear into the wood, then one final hard hit to make sure it’s completely seated.
“Eight brothers, huh?” I ask, trying to stick to a safe topic.
“Yep.” The thump of his hammer interrupts his sentence. “Before I was adopted, I lived in a boys’ home called the House. There were eight of us over the time I was there. We all kind of grew up together. Consider each other as brothers.” Thump. Thump. Thump. “I was adopted eventually. The lady who ran the House, she and her husband ended up adopting me after a bunch of shit happened that’s complicated. But it didn’t matter to us. I mean, yeah, we don’t have the same last names and it’s not official by any law, but that doesn’t matter to us. We’re brothers.”
“That’s seven, right?”
“Yeah. My adoptive parents had a son. So eight.” He shrugs and, without warning, turns on the table saw and effectively ends the conversation.
We work in silence after that. The ferry’s horn sounds out occasionally. Zander mutters a harsh swear every once in a while, but other than that, it’s just the steady (him) and unsteady (me) thump of hammers. When I run out of spots on my marked board, he sets up the next board for me with minimal words exchanged.
“Maybe someday, you’ll trust me enough to talk about it.” His quiet comment spoken over his shoulder as if he’s talking about the weather throws me momentarily. Causes that little flicker of panic to come to life.
“How do you know this is going to hold up? The deck?”
Smooth, Getty. That redirection was really subtle. I mentally put the heel of my hand to my forehead as he belts out a long laugh that tells me it sounded as ridiculous to him as it did to me.
“Very casual,” he says with a nod. “But I appreciate the attempt.”
The smile is slow but on my lips nonetheless, and I love that he can do that to me—make me laugh at my idiosyncrasies. It’s not something I’m used to by a long stretch.
“Okay.” I work my tongue in my cheek as I try to figure out how to answer him. “How about I’ll talk to you as soon as you talk to me?”
His snort comes loud and clear. “The difference, though, is you can look me up. Know who I am. Where I came from. I’m not hiding any of the truths, just trying to figure out how much I want to listen to them.” He hits the nail with enough force that the sound echoes off the clapboard of the house before he looks over to me and lifts his sunglasses up so I can see the blue of his eyes.
I avert my gaze instantly, afraid he’ll be able to tell from the flush on my cheeks that I did give in to temptation. Ventured to the library yesterday to use the Internet to see whom I’m living with. And of course, after taking all the time to build up the courage to go in there and overcoming the worry that he’d somehow find out—small town and all that—the damn computer was broken. Shipped out to the mainland for repairs.
“You, on the other hand,” he continues, pulling me from my thoughts, “are a goddamn mystery in all aspects, so your offer isn’t exactly fair.”
Our eyes hold each other in the waning sunlight; the challenge to give him a better answer is communicated without words.
“Let’s just say I have Daddy issues. Is that a good enough answer?”
His sharp, self-deprecating laugh is the last thing I expect. “You and me both, Socks. So no good. That cancels each other out. Next confession . . .”
