Page 34 of Control (Everyday Heroes 3.50)
My strangled cry makes the dogs yelp when I catch the shadowy figure hulking in my back door.
“Need a hand with those?”
“Jesus, Reznor. Don’t you ever knock?” I snap at him as I lean against the counter, hand against my heart. I tell my body to stop shaking as the dogs greet him with wags and licks, when I want to greet him with a knee to the crotch for scaring me so bad.
Maybe not.
Maybe I want to greet him with licks too.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
“Oh, sorry. I’ll get it one of these days,” he says and flashes me that grin of his that says he’s in no way sorry. Of course, it does funny things to my insides even while giving me heart palpitations. And when he lifts his fist and does his knock on the side of the door—knock-knock, knock-knock-knock—I just shake my head.
“Please. Make yourself at home,” I say, turning my back to him and looking at the mess I have strewn all over the floor.
His footsteps behind me are followed by a long low whistle. “Now that looks like a project if I’ve ever seen one.”
“IKEA is the devil,” I mutter. I stare at the screws and wood and instructions—in Swedish—and whoever forgot to put the English ones in the box is probably laughing at me over a beer right now. “How a woman goes from spending her nights out on the town to putting together furniture is beyond me.”
But it’s not beyond me. I know the truth. I’m the one looking at every random stranger I meet on the sidewalk in town wondering if he’s the person who was in my house. I’m the woman who can’t even sit and have a latte at the Coffee House without wondering about the people around me.
He stifles a laugh, pulling me from my thoughts as he walks past me and squats down to inspect the million parts. “Should I even ask what this is supposed to be?”
“Fuck if I know,” I mutter. Sitting on the floor, I’m immediately surrounded by fur-babies wanting my attention. After they settle and I’m nowhere closer to understanding what the hell to do, I pick up the instructions again to pretend I’m handy...when I’m most definitely not. “It’s a wall unit.” I wave to the bare wall on the opposite end of my grooming room. “It’s a new house for my supplies and products I sell.”
“Hmpf.” He takes the directions from me without asking as he lowers his knees onto the floor and thumbs through each page slowly. “Where’s your Allen wrench and Phillips head?”
“Phillips head?”
“The screwdriver that looks like it has a plus sign on the end.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s right here.” I lift it up and he takes it from me. “Wait. What are—”
“Shh. Just let me work on it.”
“I can handle it myself, thank you.”
His eyes flash up to mine and his hands pause midway through lifting a melamine board. “Looks that way.”
“I’m serious. I’m perfectly capable and like to do stuff like this.”
“By all means then,” he says and reaches toward me with the tools and wooden dowels in his hand. His eyes meet mine and challenge me to show him just that.
So I do. I take the tools and the dowels and then spend the next few minutes attempting to understand what I don’t understand, my frustration only heightened knowing he’s sitting there with Kiki, the Yorkie, sitting in his lap, both of them watching me.
I last a while before I’m challenged to make the drawers. It’s when I stare at the diagram and the screws that all look the same in front of me, that he takes the instructions from me and says, “Let me,” and I acquiesce.
And without another word other than being asked to hand him this or hold that, he begins to assemble the damn thing. Piece by painstaking piece.
His brow is etched in frustration as he picks up parts only to set them back down next to the twenty other parts that are almost identical save for one tiny notch you can’t see unless you turn it a quarter to the right while holding it at a forty-five-degree angle.
But I like watching him work. I sit in silence and study him. His concentration. The way he picks up the beer I brought him by the neck and takes a swig of it while surveying the progress. The quick glances he gives me followed by the soft smile before he looks back at the cabinet. There’s something very comforting about having him here when I’m used to being alone. When I usually prefer to be alone.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
He gives me another one of those glances but this time his hands still and he angles his head to the side for a beat before speaking. “I’m antsy,” he says, his confession surprising me while he returns to building. “I’m used to being on call twenty-four/seven. Waiting for that alert to go off
, to grab my ‘go pack’ and head off to someone else’s nightmare to try and fix it.” He grabs a screw and I love watching his hands as he uses them. “Now I have nothing to do. The quiet is hard for me at times. I asked for a break, and I got it...but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss my guys and the job in general.”
