I took the brush from him, and found myself standing perhaps just a tad closer than was strictly necessary; I could feel the broad warm sweep of his bicep against my arm, his hip bumping mine.
“Look, try it like this.” I dipped the end of the paintbrush in the paint tray in his hand, dabbed the excess off, and carefully traced a line of paint around the outside of the light switch.
He frowned at me. “You make that look easier than it is.”
“You just need a lighter touch.”
“I don’t have that.”
I laughed. “Clearly.” I watched as Lucas eyed the roller, with something like longing in his eyes. I held out as long as I could, and then I laughed again, enjoying his cranky discomfiture. “You are so easy to bait, you know that?”
He glared, but I could see a hint of humor wanting to creep out from under the grouchy exterior. “Whaddya mean?”
I gestured at the roller. “I meant for you to do the rolling, because I’ve always been better at the fine-tune sort of details, but you just grabbed the brush and started…painting, we’ll call it. So I just let you go with it.”
He looked at the wall where he’d been painting, and then at the area I’d done, and huffed a laugh. “Yeah, you better do that trimming stuff. Gimme that roller.” He limped toward the roller where I’d set it on the floor, rolled it through the tray, and then began applying the pale green paint to the wall, taking up where I’d left off.
His limp seemed to come and go, which confused me. I wanted to know more, but I knew I’d already pushed him into talking during lunch, and wasn’t sure how much farther I could go.
He was just such a puzzle. By turns insightful and obtuse, articulate and nearly incomprehensible, confident nearly to the point of arrogant yet self-effacing. He was simply an enormous human, standing at least six feet four inches tall and weighing well over three hundred pounds—yes, a certain portion of it was carried in his belly, but it was also breathtakingly clear he was a massively powerful man. Or, at least, he had been, and could be again.
He just needed to find the motivation to become a little healthier.
I focused on painting, but mentally I was berating myself for getting sucked into this. I did not have the emotional wherewithal to be his motivation. We barely knew each other. I was a widow still trying to make sense of my life without my husband. I had five daughters who needed me—or at least, I liked to tell myself they needed me, even if they didn’t need me on a daily basis like they once did.
Ugh.
I just couldn’t afford to get hooked into things with Lucas—he was unhealthy, and by his own admission had suffered one nearly fatal heart attack, and yet seemed to show no signs of feeling the need to change anything.
More worrisome yet was his almost throwaway statement that for a long time he hadn’t seen the point in trying to get healthy…meaning, he hadn’t seen the point in trying to stay alive.
“I can almost hear you stewing, over there.” Lucas spoke without pausing in his rhythmic application of roller to wall—he was tireless at this job, methodically covering far more of the wall in less time that I’d been able to. “You got shit on your mind, you may as well spit it out.”
“You know, I don’t know if I’ve heard you make a single statement in the entire time I’ve known you without at least one curse word included,” I said, eyeing him sideways.
“I grew up surrounded by gruff old soldiers and woodsmen. I learned to swear when I learned to talk and walk and hunt and spit.” He dipped, rolled. “Gettin’ me to eat more salad and less cheeseburgers is one thing. Gettin’ me to quit cursing? You got a better chance of puttin’ me in a frilly pink tutu and dancin’ ballet, and you can imagine how likelythatshit is.”
“Pick my battles, then, is what you’re saying,” I asked, grinning at him.
He snorted. “Yeah. Somethin’ like that. ’Course, you ain’t gotta pick nothin’, if you know what I mean.” He paused, letting the roller rest in the tray, eyeing me with interest. “So. What’s on your mind, princess?”
“Princess?” I asked, with a wrinkle of my nose.
“No?”
I scoffed. “No.”
“Darlin’?”
I nodded and lifted a shoulder. “I can live with that, if you must use such overly precious language.”
“First I curse too much, now I use…whatever the hell you just said. Startin’ to think maybe you don’t like me for me, Liv.”
I frowned at him, pausing with my brush at the edge of the tray. “Hey, now. I don’t think that’s quite fair. I can like you for you and not like every single element of your personality.”
He tilted his head to one side. “I guess that makes sense.” He went back to paint rolling. “So? What are you thinking about?”
“How likely I am to get you to tell me how you hurt your leg.”
