It was a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood, already cut down to size to fit the window. Ollie must’ve taken measurements while Ty was talking to Jake in the kitchen.
Ollie leaned the wood against the side of the house and wiped his palms on his jeans. “You have a hammer in the garage or something, yeah?”
Oh good, so they were going to continue to ignore the elephant in the room. “Yeah.” He hoped Ollie bought nails.
They spent the last of the daylight boarding up the window. Ollie pulled a pair of work gloves from somewhere, which Ty thought was unfair. If he was going to look that sexy, they should make up first. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. They worked mostly in silence apart from the necessary phrases. Ty didn’t even get to make a joke about getting nailed.
But it wasn’tawful. He was still pissed, and he thought Ollie was too, but the raw edges had scabbed over. By the time they finished, Ty was sore from standing on tiptoe to hold the boards in place and drained from the rest of the day, but he didn’t feel like he had to run back to his bedroom to hide.
Could they get away with postponing the dissection of whatever had happened earlier?
“Listen,” he said when they had put the tools back in the garage and Ollie, blessedly, had taken off the gloves, “I’m tired and sore and everything sucks, and I’m going to sit in the hot tub with a beer.” Ollie had bought the beer, but fuck it, it was Ty’s fridge. “You’re welcome to join me.”
Ollie looked at him like he’d grown a second head. After a moment he said, “I-I need some time. I’m not ready to talk about tonight.”
As if. “I would probably fall asleep in the middle of it anyway.”
Ollie waited a beat as if he were making sure Ty was serious. Then he shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”
Awkward or not, the hot water felt good. But Ty got half a beer in and stopped, conscious of the way the temperature made him metabolize alcohol. The last thing he needed was to get a little too loose and somehow end up in another fight. He still had to go to work tomorrow.
Somewhere overhead, an owl hooted.
“If that thing drops a headless rabbit in here,” Ty threatened.
He had his eyes closed, but he heard Ollie strangle a laugh.
Nothing was fixed. But maybe it wasn’t all the way broken either.
OLLIE TOOKTheo to school Tuesday morning.
Ty could’ve taken him—he had to go anyway—but if Ollie was going to be unemployed, he was at least going to be a more hands-on parent than he’d been the past two months.
Last night had been… bad. Ollie barely slept, and not only because the sound of shattering glass had apparently triggered his PTSD. The stupid owl was at it all night too, calling out at three in the damn morning until Ollie was fantasizing about taking a trip to Bass Pro Shop first thing and sitting up all tomorrow night in a fucking deer blind. The house was in the middle of nowhere. Ollie was a good shot. No one would hear it.
Probably firing a gun would not help his PTSD, but it might make him feel better in other ways.
Not sleeping much had consequences—namely, a lot of time to sit and think about why he’d acted like an asshole. Ollie could stop sleeping, but he could not stop thinking, and that was a problem. Thinking did not help.
So he dropped Theo off at school, and then he went back to the house, which was huge and empty. No convenient owl presented itself.
Ollie decided that if his brain couldn’t make itself useful, at least his body could, and he got out a broom and a dustpan and set to work cleaning Ty’s father’s office.
He only meant to pick up the glass. He didn’t want any of it getting tracked into the rest of the house where someone might hurt themselves. He put on his work gloves to pick up the big pieces, and then he knocked the jagged edges out of the window and collected those too. He swept. He used a little dustpan to get the small pieces. He vacuumed.
And then it seemed like he couldn’t stop.
The office was the one room on the main floor Ty didn’t seem to have touched, apart from moving the TV. It still held all his dad’s files and stacks of items and hoards of whatever the man’s deteriorating mind thought was important at the time. It wasn’t Ollie’s business. He should probably stick to the task at hand and keep out of it.
But he couldn’t. Cleaning… it helped. The more he focused on the task, the less he thought about his problem with Ty, which was actually his problem with himself. With his mind concentrating on something else, his subconscious was free to beat itself against the wall until enlightenment dawned on him.
And a small part of him that he was studiously ignoring pointed out that if Ollie went through this room, if Ollie read the stupid documents and put them in piles and decided what might be important, Ty wouldn’t have to.
Whatever else Ollie had going on in his brain, he didn’t want Ty to have to face his father’s office. He couldn’t take back the shit he said last night, but he could spare Ty this additional pain.
Besides, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.
When Ty and Theo got home, Ollie was still at it. Reams of paperwork covered all the surfaces in the room and had spilled out into the hallway.
