David cringed. “I should have taken those down before you all came up, shouldn’t I?”
“I’ve seen naked men before.” Mason clapped him on the shoulder. “But they’re one of a kind pieces and I wouldn’t want anyone damaging them while we’re trying to clear this place out for you.” He stepped away, but almost immediately turned back around, pointing at David. “Oh, and I found your Chemex. It’s a good idea, but it’s kind of unfinished.”
“Me? An unfinished piece of art? Can’t be true.”
Mason shook his head as he turned back around and David…well, David was still quite taken with Mason, and he filled out those jeans spectacularly. So David took in his butt as he walked away.
He’dalsoseen naked men before, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t mind seeing one more.
David only saw the problem he’d created once he was already enveloped in it. He’d started by going full-on cleaning mode, helping haul stuff out to the service elevator. Then he did find his coffee fountain and started thinking about that, how much he really would like to get back around to it. It took him an extra couple minutes to pass that off to someone, but in the process, he caught sight of the charcoal flower sketches he’d done a few years ago. Well, the ones he’d started. It was supposed to be a study of the arboretum over on Lake Washington. One flower a week. He’d lasted about six weeks. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t go back to it, now that he’d seen them and been reminded. He had an image in his mind of a coffee table book, allhis sketches bound together so guests could flip through it and take a look.
When Mason found him in the back of the moving truck, David was frantically typing notes into his phone of the projects he’d uncovered so far. He wasn’t going to go back toallof them, after all, so he was winnowing down. He’d decided against trying to pick up needle felting again and…well, that was the only one he’d firmly decided to set aside so far, but if he could catalog them, he’d be in better shape to handle everything.
Mason hauled himself into the truck and set down a box of dried out clay. “I don’t know if you want to keep this. We can go through all this before we bring it back in. Everything okay?” Mason looked over his shoulder, and when he met David’s eyes again, his brows knitted together in the middle of his forehead. “I know this can be a lot, and we reallycanhandle this if you need to just head to the hotel and chill. We’ll get hold of you when we get to stuff where we need your input.”
“Oh. No.” David laughed, and it was a bit too loud and a bit too sharp, and he clapped a hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry. This is totally not about my feelings. This is my self-indulgence. Like a kid playing with all the toys he forgot about after his mom says to clean his room.”
Mason chuckled. “I get it. Just flag me down if it ever gets to be a little too much.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled a few times. “Looks like you head back to work tomorrow. Are you usually pretty dead after you get home, or are you going to have some energy to spare.”
He had a cubicle job, designing and maintaining the front end of a bunch of client websites. “I’m usually pretty ready to do something different when I get home. What do you need?”
“Well, you used to watch the videos. Remember when we’d make the design collages?”
David grinned. “Right up my alley.”
“Cool. Is it going to be better for you to meet here, like we did this morning, or at a meeting room in the hotel?”
“Right. Hotel.” David had gotten a little bit lost in the moment. “I guess I should pack a bag at some point before all my clothes are tucked away in the back of this truck.” He shook his head. “Let’s meet at the hotel.” He set down the little box he’d been holding, full of tiny polymer clay charms, from the few months when he’d sold bracelets and necklaces as a side hustle. “And I’ll go get ready. It might actually be nice.” There was a strange squirming in his gut, even as he tried to convince both himself and Mason that this was a good thing, but feeding into that would only make things worse.Act happy and you’ll be happy. At some point, he could figure out what about all this struck him odd. “I’ll have my own working bathroom, someone to do my laundry, change of scenery.”
“We aim to please.” Mason tucked his phone away. “I’ll text you the details once we have everything settled.”
“Groovy.” David shot finger guns at Mason then turned around to head to the service elevator, trying not to burst into flame from the embarrassment.What the hell convinced me to shoot fucking finger guns at him?
Chapter seven
Mason
Ittookthebetterpart of the day for them and the crew to finally clear everything out of David’s condo. Mason had to stop part way through to help Eliza with some calls and conversations. Well, maybe he didn’t have to, but he volunteered as soon as she asked for someone else to join her. They needed to get water and power turned off, chat with the condo board, make sure that Westshore Hardware and Supply was ready when they started calling in orders, and a whole bevy of other fiddly things like that.
It was easier than seeing a hundred different unfinished projects floating past him. Although, as he settled into the office chair in his hotel room, he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t noticed them. They weren’t his business. It wasn’t any of their jobs to judge or question their clients, and Mason had no intention ofsayinganything to David, but all those half-done projects, whenDavid was clearly capable of some beautiful work…they needled Mason, a constant pricking at the back of his brain.I would want to flay my skin off if I had that much stuff around me, begging for attention.
Of course, David kept it mostly tucked away in closets and rooms and boxes, so maybe that wasn’t an issue. Mason sincerely doubted if he’d be able to compartmentalize them all that well.
He closed his eyes and took a few breaths to center himself. Then he pulled over his laptop and opened up half a dozen windows. First, he plugged everything into this project’s spreadsheet and double-checked it. Then he opened up his journal. He’d been writing in the same file, transferring it from system to system over the years, since he was fifteen. Not like he did it perfectly every single day, but especially since they’d been on the road so much, it helped him keep his head on straight.
One thing hedidn’tdo was let himself read the previous entries. That wasn’t the point. He was supposed to be getting the thoughts out there into the document, not keep reliving everything that happened before. If it was a good memory, then he’d trust himself to actually remember it. And if it was a bad one, then he would just as soon avoid the reminder.
Mason didn’t need to write down everything that had happened. He just took a few minutes to jot down what was on the top of his head. That included all the unfinished projects, and the stuff he felt like they hadn’t done very well. But inevitably, thinking about the job led to thinking about David, and thinking about David led to writing down how sexy he was. Even when Mason was exasperated by the lack of follow-through all those projects demonstrated, he found his eyes raking over David, taking in every inch of him.
It was hardly the first time they’d run into some eye candy on the job. Pine Point Fixer-Uppers dealt with a lot of guyswith bodies hardened up and bulked out by construction, landscaping, all that kind of stuff. Difficult work that took lots of muscles and led to plenty of those guys lifting up the hems of their shirts to towel the sweat off their foreheads.
Mason wasn’t blind…but none of them looked like David. He journaled about the shawl, which brought to mind soft caresses over David’s bare chest and shoulders. He noted the soft flow of his hair and the way his slacks hugged around his thighs. And he noted down how he wished someone like that would actually notice him.
He knew this was the kind of journal entry he would never want to read, so before he closed the file, he highlighted the entire thing and changed the text to white so it disappeared into the background of the page.
Then he opened up the program they used for the collage. He had admin access, so he dove into the back-end to make certain everything was in order. It wasn’t that he couldn’t trust the tech department that HomescapesTV had update his original site, but he wasn’t going to leave it to chance. He did a quick check over everything there, predictably finding nothing. Then he entered a new file into system for tomorrow: David’s Condo - Episode Eight.
A knock at the door took Mason by surprise, but he closed the window, then his laptop, and headed over. Jake and Bunny were on the other side, and they stepped in without him saying anything.
