The hardware store is a good half-hour drive, not that I mind. It’s something to do.
A cold wind whips across me on my way inside, so I double-back and search the rear seats for a sweatshirt. I find two: a girl’s thin gray cover-up, and a Kenzo hoodie emblazoned with a tiger. Someone probably fucked back here.
Scratch that. They definitely did, because I find a condom wrapper on the floor mat. Seven goddamn bedrooms in that house, but people have to bang it out in my vehicle.
And on my kitchen island.
And in the pool.
And—according to the cop one of my neighbors anonymously summoned—at the top of the plank stairs to the shoreline, in broad daylight.
I kick the wrapper onto the pavement and inspect the sweatshirt. Apart from some resin on one of the drawstrings, it’s clean. Hopefully. I pull it on and go inside.
“Handyman” is miles off my résumé. I think the last time I stepped foot in a hardware store was when Mom dragged me to pick new tiles for the Jersey house.
I was nine. She put the camera right in my face and narrated every second. After a while, I just shut up. Clearly, I wasn’t her partner in this errand; it wasn’t an errand at all. It was another blog post. And I was a prop.
An employee asks if I need assistance, but I shake my head and keep moving like I know where the hell I’m going. Something about requiring help to find the most basic household tool feels pathetic.
One benefit to wandering these aisles like a lost child is that I get to enjoy the smell. Fresh lumber mingles with something light and chemical, like adhesive or floor cleaner. I’ve spent all summer smelling so much weed, suntan lotion, and espresso, I went numb to it all.
“Son of a bitch!”
At an aisle marked “Household Basics,” I stop. A girl is standing on the bottom shelf, tugging at a five-gallon bucket on the shelf above. Her fingers stretch as far as they can, but just barely brush the plastic.
“Here,” I call, jogging to her, “let me get that for you.”
“Oh.” She starts, then hops off the shelf and flexes her wrist. “Thanks. I’ve been at this for, like, four solid minutes. I was starting to feel like an idiot.”
“Not your fault. They shouldn’t put these up so high.” Even worse, the buckets are stacked in columns that make it impossible to pull down just one. When I finally get a hold of one, I’ve got to balance a tower of seven others and lower it without smacking either of us in the face.
“Wow.” She smiles, wrapping her arms around the top bucket and wiggling it off. “Strong.”
“It’s not heavy. Just awkward.” I slide the tower back into place. When I look at her, she hugs the bucket against herself and blushes.
She’s beautiful: endless curves, freckles across her nose, rich brown eyes, and loose curls that wind around her face like a roadmap, always leading me back to that smile.
Something about her almost seems familiar, but that’s true of a lot of locals. Which she must be, if she’s still here in the autumn.
“Theo Durham.” I stick out my hand.
She stares a moment, then swings the bucket to her feet with one hand, the other wiping on her jeans before she extends it. “Hi, Theo. I—”
Above us, something shifts. By the time the girl follows my stare to the leaning buckets, I’ve already set myself in motion.
I grab her and spin her out of the way a split-second before the plastic avalanche begins. Not many fall—ten, by my count—but the sound is unbearable in this yawning space, every thunk bouncing off the concrete and echoing all the way to the rafters.
“Shit,” I whisper, then look at her to make sure she’s all right.
Her eyes are wide, but she quickly bursts into breathless laughter. It’s a gorgeous sound.
“Anyway,” I laugh, “you were saying?”
She swallows, gaze wandering up from my mouth until she reaches my eyes.
“Ruby,” she says. “My name’s Ruby. Uh, Paulsen.”
Through her white cabled sweater, I see her chest rise and fall rapidly. A rush of color crawls over her face.
It’s then that I realize I grabbed her hips.
I’m still holding her by them, in fact, and have her pressed to a column of the metal shelf, barely an inch between us.
“Ruby,” I repeat quietly, before sliding my hands off her and stepping back.
A staff member emerges at the end of the aisle, asking if we’re all right. I tell him we’re fine and help clean what fell. One bucket cracked, but he refuses my offer to pay for it.
“These shouldn’t be up here,” he explains, then nods farther down the aisle. Several identical buckets are stacked on a bottom shelf. “That’s where they go.”
I glance at Ruby, who blushes again, cringing as she swings her bucket on one finger. “Live and learn, huh?”
While I amble slowly to a hammer display I just noticed, making sure she knows I intend for her to follow, she adds, “Emphasis on ‘live,’ in particular. Thank you for saving me.”
“Ah, you would’ve been fine. Just a bump on the head.”
“Or a concussion,” she says, “if the buckets had knocked me down, and then I hit my head on the concrete floor.”
I heft one of the hammers. “Do you always jump to worst-case scenarios like that?”
“Have enough worst cases happen to you, and it becomes a habit.” Ruby nods at the hammer. “Is that all you’re here for?”
“Yep. Got some stairs to fix.” That, and my own relentless boredom.
Wordlessly, she plucks the hammer from my fingers and sticks it in her bucket like a trick-or-treat pail, swinging
