“How—” I croaked, reaching up to rub my throat. “How am I meant to live here?”
Hearing Logan blow his nose again, I almost laughed. “You hold ondo da memories, and you creade newd ones.”
“Nude or new?”
“Dew.”
“I always wanted him to tear down the wood paneling from the walls. There’s even some on the ceilings in a couple of rooms. I hate it,” I whispered. “I also don’t like the dark red in this room or the bright yellow in the bathrooms. The old appliances in the kitchen need to be updated…” I stopped and thought about it. “The whole kitchen needs to be updated if I’m honest. I just don’t know if I can.”
I was overwhelmed by it all, but then he offered, “I can’d help’d you.”
“Where do I start?”
Grabbing my hand, he tugged me toward the glass doors that led out to the large yard at the back. “We go droo id droom by droom and make a lisd.”
So that’s what we did. We went through each room in the house apart from his bedroom, listing what needed to be changed. I knew this was what Pops wanted me to do, so I pushed down how uncomfortable and wrong it felt and went with it.
If I took it on one room at a time, it might make it easier. But I couldn’t touch his bedroom yet. I wasn’t ready for that.
What made it easier was that Logan never let go of my hand once. It was strange, and it didn’t feel like it used to, but something about it helped keep me sane.
We had a long list of stuff to do by the end, and my eyes were almost watering at how expensive it was going to be. I was going to turn part of the basement into a laundry room and just redecorate the rest of it once the wooden paneling was down. I had a preference for light colors, so I was going to paint the whole house white.
I wanted to restore the old fireplace in the front parlor and keep a lot of the original features, but I kind of just wanted it all to be a blank slate that I could add to when I decided on things.
Something else had happened while we were doing it all: Logan’s eyes and nose had stopped running as badly, so he was back to talking normally and not sniffing or blowing his nose constantly. He still sounded nasal and was wearing the sunglasses, but I was relieved I didn’t have to hear any more snot production in his sinus farm.
Sitting down on the couch in the living room, I nodded once, my decision made. “Okay, so, rip shit out, paint it all white, get rid of stuff I don’t want to keep, make a list of shit I want to restore, and then separate the work I can—”
“We can,” Logan interrupted, passing me a beer from the fridge with a discreet sniff. My parents had cleared out the food, but I knew for a fact the booze would still be in there and in the freezer. “I’ll help as much as I can, your parents will, too, and so will mine. This house is yours, and we all want you to feel comfortable in it.”
Smiling at him, I took a mouthful of beer and thought it over. Help was cheaper, and it also added extra sentimentality to the place. I liked the idea of that.
“Okay, so we’ll make a list of what we can all do, then I’ll get bids for other stuff.”
Rolling the bottle between his hands, he focused the full weight of his stare on me. “Have you thought about when you’re going to move in here?”
“Yes,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “No. I mean, yes, I have, but at the same time, no, I haven’t.”
Raising his eyebrows, he smiled wryly at me. “That sounds like a whole lotta mess going on inside your puny brain.”
Here’s the thing, I had a small crush on Logan when we were kids. It wasn’t the type where I doodled hearts and wrote Mrs. Richards out, but I got a thrill spending time with him. I thought we had a special bond, something that meant something to both of us, but he’d been paid to make me feel like that.
It wasn’t that my crush had broken my heart after it all came out, it was that something special to me had been a total lie. So why was he being so nice to me now?
I wanted to believe in him and his offer to help, but I just didn’t trust his motives for it all.
Leaning forward in the seat he’d taken on one of the armchairs, and bracing his elbows on his thighs, he tipped his bottle at me with a frown. “That looks like some heavy thinking going on over there. Want to talk about it?”
No.
Yes.
No, definitely, no.
But did my brain listen? “Why are you being so nice and doing all of this? Last time it was money, what are you getting this time?”
He flinched visibly and dropped his head to look at his feet. “Bex, I never looked at the money I was getting as payment for spending time with you. I admitted to myself back then that I loved doing it and I was always looking for stuff we could do together so that I could spend even more time with you. Hell,” he straightened to look at me as he threw his arm out, “I spent more of the money on shit we did together
