Focusing on the joband unpeeling all those financial numbers from all the family drama didn’t exactlyhelpQuinn’s mood. But it was certainly a distraction. He couldn’t think about the implications of Ozzy running into him in the hallway when he had to compare finances across three different sets of documents, all while reading the constant backbiting and infighting of these frankly awful people.
Unfortunately for his coping mechanism, he was rapidly approaching the end of the work. There was still all the compiling and preparation and giving his notes on what he’d seen in the finances, but that was easy. Everyone was hiding money from everyone else, which probably also meant they were hiding it from the IRS, but that wasn’t any of Quinn’s concern.
What was his concern? Every time he got up to pee or get some coffee or stretch, his thoughts drifted back through everything.The incredible feeling of Jake behind him in the tub. The smell of him lingering on the air in the hotel room. The stupid chicken strips and fries they’d scarfed down for dinner. The panic of Bunny knocking on the door. Jake going out in nothing but his underwear, taking the blow and protecting Quinn.
Ozzy seeing him in the hallway. Ozzy talking to him. Ozzy knowing. Anyone knowing. The crew knowing. Having to face up to the crew again at some point with all of them knowing. How real that made it. How real he couldn’t afford for this to be.
Hunter moving in. Hunter leaving. Hunter disappearing off the face of the fucking earth.
How tied up in his feelings Jake already was. That was the big kicker, when he got down to the bottom of his spiral. He knew better than to get attached to Jake. Of course he did. He’d tried to resist, and it failed. He wanted to keep things casual because being around Jake was so nice, but casual didn’t work for them, apparently. At least not for Quinn. Not when it came to Jake.
He’d had one-night stands and fuck buddies for years, but Jake was knotted up all around him, inside and out. Extricating that when he left would be brutal, and it all could have been avoided.
In spite of all that, he ached to go back to his phone and try to smooth things over. His last texts had been an attempt to put Jake at arm’s length, to try and make the impossible task a little bit easier when he had to tackle it.
They’d been working on the house almost two weeks already. Made good progress, from what Quinn had seen. How much longer could they reasonably stay just to film this show? A week? Maybe two? Then Jake would be gone and Quinn would have nothing but his own stupid feelings to cope with.
So he kept his phone face down in another room, pushed all the bullshit to the back of his mind, and went back to hiscomputer to finish crunching the numbers on someone else’s tragedy.
Jake texted five more times that night before seemingly giving up, and all Quinn could do was pretend he was watching something on TV. His mind whirred and he kept mumbling to himself, hoping that repeating the same arguments in different ways would force some clarity into the situation. “It’s not that big a deal. He doesn’t deserve to get the cold shoulder because I feel lousy. But I shouldn’t feel the need to put my own comfort at risk by staying attached to him.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch, then glanced back at the TV. Whatever movie this was, it had that cliche scene of the woman running through the airport after some guy, and they’d just gotten together and were going in for a kiss.
Quinn pressed the button back to the home screen. “No love stories.” He skimmed over what was available for good content, but nothing struck his fancy. At a certain point, he was just pressing buttons mindlessly, not even paying enough attention to read titles as thumbnails flashed past on his screen. A big dragon breathing fire toward the camera. A coach talking to his football team. A woman leaning back on stage with a microphone.
A blond white guy with blue eyes, wearing a tank top that showed off the scattering of freckles across his neck and chest.
Quinn sat up straighter and looked it over, but there was no doubt at all: Jake was staring out of his TV screen. He scanned down for more information. It was a recommendation from the VideoHead app on his TV: If These Walls Could Talk: 1970s Disaster House Part 7, from Pine Point Fixer Uppers. Four yearsold, and maybe the Jake in the thumbnail looked a bit younger, but not much. He’d held up well.
This is the worst possible idea. The thought played clear in Quinn’s head as he selected the video, then navigated down. It was part of a playlist, and if he was going to make shitty decisions, he was at least going to do them in order. So he went to the first video of the playlist and settled in, somethingfinallyholding his attention.
Mason walked across the screen in front of a dilapidated ranch-style home. Plywood covered half the front-facing windows, the yard was half overgrown, half dead and brown, and the paint on the siding was peeling up into a variety of different colors, having apparently been painted over and over and over through the years.
Yet Mason was smiling as he stopped dead center and looked over his shoulder, then back to the camera. He shrugged. “Nothing we can’t handle, right?”
The rest of the crew came in. Bunny looked much the same, as did Aras. Evander was in all black with slicked hair and bright green eyeshadow. Ozzy wassmilingand leaned on Evander’s shoulder as they took their place in front of the camera. Robinson was shockingly thin, looking drawn and slightly manic as he bounced into view. Clearly the biggest change between then and now, and from what interaction Quinn had to draw on, he thought Robinson looked a lot better now. Seemed less…frantic.
Jake could have been walking through his door looking exactly like he did there. Quinn’s thumb hovered over the back button, ready to axe it all and go find something more reasonable, less likely to exacerbate the problem. He needed to focus less on Jake, less on all the crew, and more on himself and trying to quash whatever damned, unkillable infatuation had taken root inside him.
Instead, when the logo glided over the screen and sparkled in rainbow colors, Quinn set the remote down and settled in to watch. They did a walk-through of the house with the owners, an older couple who’d bought the house new, but couldn’t maintain it anymore after a couple years of medical issues. Neither of them were back to a hundred percent, and even if they had been, they were in their seventies. There was only so much they could do.
Mason guided the interview with them in their dining room. Soft, quiet, always redirecting the heavier parts of the conversation around to hope and positivity. The video showed them going through the website Quinn had used, albeit not the prettier, updated version. They landed on a cottage style interior with lots of blues and whites.
Each member of the team went over their own sections of the work, spliced together with footage of them clearing out the house and cleaning things up to get ready for demo. Mason walked through the main problems and the vision for the space. Aras talked about the electrical problems, including some obviously burned outlets that couldn’t be safe. Robinson pointed to some water damage on some of the walls and cabinets he would need to check out, and also walked the yard to talk about irrigation solutions that would be easy for them to maintain, which bled easily into Ozzy going over low-maintenance, impossible to kill plants and plenty of hardscaping, plus modifying the front and back porches to add ramps for easier access and mobility.
And then Jake. Jake was going over plans for the porch, and for opening up some of the walls to give them a little more space. Extra storage. A room for their grandkids to stay over and have a good time. His eyes sparkled when he talked about that space. “I loved going to my grandma and grandpa’s house when I was a kid. Got to stay up late, play video games they kept around justfor me, play outside. I want to give these kids such a cool spot, they don’t ever want to go home.” He laughed loud, his head tipping back. “I’m sure grandma and grandpa want their alone time, so they might not appreciate this room being quite so kid-friendly, but better to ask forgiveness.”
Quinn caught himself smiling and tried to force it off his face as Evander came on with Mason to talk over the whole unifying aesthetic before they started on the renovation proper. Quinn had to admit, he got why people liked it already. Everyone seemed knowledgeable and professional, but approachable. Well, maybe not Aras. But somehow, even Ozzy didn’t come off like a douche on camera, in spite of Quinn’s less than stellar opinion of him.
The demo started and, without a contracting crew to come in and do things, it was all hands on deck. Familiar royalty-free music played over a montage of cleaning and destruction. Jake in his tank top, swinging a sledgehammer through walls stirredfeelingsdown below for Quinn.
The videos made it a little easier to slip into a weird limbo space. He could forget about things much better watching this old footage of everyone. Quinn couldn’t say exactly why it seemed to work that way, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He could spend a little time with Past Jake and not worry that it would be so hard to let him go, not worry that he’d fucked himself up over a guy he had no shot with.
Chapter twenty-six
Jake
Three days. Jake hadn’theard a peep from Quinn in three days, and he didn’t want to pry. He deserved his space, even if it sucked balls for Jake.
Itdidleave a lot more time to throw himself into his work. Days two and three, he stayed later than everyone else, working on various projects right up until the street lights turned on. No need to piss Quinn’s neighbors off before he even moved in, but the time alone let him crank some real work out and not have to worry about Ozzy or anyone else talking to him about it. It also meant he had very little left, even with his additional, invented projects like the cupboard spice rack and Ozzy’s planter boxes and the wooden soap caddies for the bathrooms.
