Page 26 of Reclaimed Dreams
Chapter8
27 years ago
Dom leaned his sweaty shoulders against the fireplace so that he wouldn’t leave a wet print on the freshly hung drywall. After three hours, he’d just finished hanging the living room. Only eight more rooms to go. Wrists on his knees, he dropped his aching head in the space between, stretching his neck and his patience.
He’d hoped to be farther along, but between working at the end of already long days and doing everything by himself, it had taken months to even get this far. Little Francesca had her crib wedged into a corner of their bedroom in their rental, because Jo rightly didn’t want to move an infant into a construction zone.
He was busting his ass, but it wasn’t good enough.
True, he’d finished the electrical rewiring and had swapped out the old galvanized plumbing for copper. At one point most of the walls in the house had been missing, which allowed him to see exactly which nests belong to the rats and which ones were the squirrels before he cleared them all out. He had also rerun ductwork and replaced soiled insulation while repairing termite damage. He was determined that this house would be solid once he was finished with it. So likely they’d be able to move in by the time Frankie was five.
The sound of the front door creaking open snapped his head up. No one should be here this time of night. He’d be damned if he let another break-in happen on his watch. Picking up his screw gun, he slowly stood and moved behind the wall he’d just covered with plasterboard. Tentative footsteps crossed the foyer, and he jumped out in that direction, hoping to scare the burglar away.
Jo dropped the cooler she had in her hands and screamed. “Dom Valenti, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He was laughing too hard to answer. She smacked him on the shoulder, and he dropped the gun and pulled her into a sweaty hug.
“You scared the life out of me! Let go! You’re all smelly.”
“I thought you were someone breaking in. I just laid all that copper pipe, and I haven’t finished covering it all with drywall yet.”
“Here I go out of my way to bring you supper, and this is the welcome I get.”
“Come here, I’ll give you a proper welcome.”
Dom pressed his lips to his wife’s, and despite the disarray around them, it felt like coming home. These quiet moments alone together were few and far between with so many little ones running around. He took advantage and reminded his wife just how much he loved kissing her. She blossomed for him, opening her mouth, seeking his tongue with her own, diving her hands into his sweaty hair, and reminded him right back how much she loved kissing him.
Some thought was trying to make itself known, but it struggled to get through the sudden onslaught of passion pulsing through his brain.
Dom backed Jo up to the staircase and walked her up a step so he could reach her better. On a normal day, he’d have boosted her up, hands under her ass, and pinned her against the wall, the better to ravish her, but she was still recovering from delivering Francesca. These were always the hardest weeks to stay away from her, because the end of celibacy was in sight but still so far away. He missed his wife, but he knew she had to heal and focus on the baby right now.
The baby. Right. The kids!
“Where’s the baby?” he asked, pulling back from her puffy lips.
“Elena brought Seth over and offered to babysit so I could come help you, since Tony’s out of town.”
Dom finally got a good look at his wife, in her ratty painting T-shirt, overalls, and with a kerchief covering her hair. She was the cutest subcontractor he’d ever seen. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to do too much. I can handle this.”
“I know you can, but I want to know that I helped do the work too. And even I know that hanging drywall is easier with two sets of hands.”
“Mmm, I know what I want to do with my hands.” He slid them from her hips up over her breasts, where she tensed.
“Dom, so help me God, if you make my milk drop, I’m going to leave you here by yourself to suffer.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “I guess we better put them to more boring use. Drywall it is.”
For the next two hours they worked side by side, hanging panels in the kitchen and dining room before calling it quits. Jo spread a blanket on the floor in their dining room and handed Dom a container of chicken parmesan and a cold bottle of beer before collapsing prone on the floor.
He shoveled the now cold pasta into his mouth gratefully.
“Are we crazy to think we could do this?” Jo asked with her eyes closed.
“That we could renovate a house? Absolutely not.”
“It’s just with you and Tony working so much and the baby coming a little early, it feels like we’re wading through neck-high mud. Are we ever going to finish? We’ve moved so many times. I just want to be in our forever home so we can finally settle in.”
“Trust me, babe. Now that the drywall is going up, we’re in the home stretch. It’ll start looking more like a house, and we’ll get you and the kids in here as soon as possible.”
