The mountain was so real.
Rob insisted they clean up everything at Kari’s house before going over to his. All brushes rinsed, paint cans sealed tight and put away, the tarp folded up, all other paraphernalia gathered and set aside.
Which was ironic, given the disastrous state of his office.
“Look, here’s the thing,” he said, his hand on the knob, his eyes not quite meeting Kari’s face. “Mostly I just open the door, toss the thing in my hand inside and close it. It’s not pretty.”
“Let’s see it, Fox.” Kari folded her arms across her chest and Rob remembered how good that chest had felt pressing into him.
Not the time for that. Not that there ever would be a time. Rob took a deep lungful of air and opened the door.
Kari stepped into the room and did a slow perusal of the disaster. He wasn’t sure when it had tipped from “manageable but messy” to “total shit-show.” But there it was. And her reaction showed on her face. He was ready for her to shake her head, say, “Nope. Not doing this. Not doing any of it you weird hoarder,” and walk out.
Instead, she gave him a long, silent look. It stretched out, making him want to fidget. Then it stretched further and he wanted to dig a hole and bury himself in it.
Then she broke the eye-lock and scanned the chaos and said, “Got a recycling bin and some file folders?”
“Sure.” Bemused, Rob went out back and fetched the big blue plastic recycling bin that sat there. When he got back to his office, Kari was already sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting things into piles.
“Why on earth would you save so many catalogs?” she asked, dumping a pile of them into the bin with a thump.
Rob shrugged. “I don’t know. It all just got out of hand somehow. Easier to open the door, dump, and run.”
“Easier still to deal with stuff as it comes in. Sort everything right over the recycling bin. Toss the things you’re never going to open.” She shot a minatory glance in his direction and he gritted his teeth. She was right. He could see how a simple change in his habits could have made this mountain of mess never have happened. If he was still with Liz, she would accuse him of doing it to make work for her, pouting extravagantly while she dealt with it. And her was Kari, just…dealing with it.
“I guess so. It’s just…”
She held up a catalog and he winced. “Are you really shopping out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog?” She glanced at the label. “Or, more correctly, if Miss Mia Fox wants the VS catalog, don’t you think she gets it at her own place?”
“True.”
“What about any of these?” She fanned out a collection of catalogs, none of which he had ever opened.
“Nope.”
“Are you ever going to do any catalog shopping? Ever?”
Rob hadn’t considered this before. Catalogs, like the weather, just came. “I guess not. I’m not a shopping guy, and if I need something, I use the internet.”
“Grab your laptop. You’re going to start un-subscribing to all of them.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure you can. Why are you so surprised?”
Rob shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it. Let me get my laptop. I think it’s on the coffee table.”
She gave him another one of Those Looks. “You sure this is your office?”
“No, I’m beginning to think we’re in a hardwood floored, centrally heated and air-conditioned dumpster.”
She nodded. “Get your laptop. You’re about to become catalog-free.”
Feeling sheepish, Rob went into the living room and fetched the computer. He brought it back and settled on the floor across from Kari, his knees protesting as he lowered himself. “Ugh. This is no way for an old man to sit.” Fishing his reading glasses out of his breast pocket, he slid them on.
“You can’t be much older than I am, if that.” Kari rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the stack of catalogs and other junk that was in her lap.
“I’m forty-eight,” he said. “If you’re close to that, then I’m a unicorn.”
Kari tilted her head, considering him. “I’m forty-two. That’s not so far apart.” She squinted. “Do I see a horn on your forehead?”
Rob blinked. He had recalibrated his estimate of Kari’s age a few times, partly based on her relationship with her niece. At first, when he thought they were sisters, he figured Sam was in her late twenties and Kari was in her early to mid-thirties. When he’d been told they were ten years apart, he’d adjusted Kari into her late thirties. At most.
This was going to take some thinking about.
Kari shook her head, amused. One of these days, her age would catch up to her. It had happened to her mother. Mor had been youthful-looking and vital, fooling people into thinking she was much younger than she was for most of her life.
Until she got sick. Then she went downhill so fast, considerations of her looks were left for Kari as she sat by her mother’s bedside, clutching the hand that was wasting as fast as the rest of the body it was attached to. Suddenly, Mor was unrecognizable. Gone was the older mother who had attended Kari’s school events, the quality of her skin making her the envy of women younger than she was. Gone was the old woman whose spine was straight and whose light blue eyes still glittered with health. In illness, her skin showed every year with compound interest, her spine bent with fatigue, and her eyes dimmed. As if a vengeful god had taken back Mor’s unearned gifts and repaid her with interest.
Then the old woman’s secrets had poured out and Kari had been left with yet another unlooked-for legacy to bear all on her own. One that she had bungled with Sam. But maybe she could retrieve it. Anxiety welled in her at the thought of the dinner she’d host at some point.
In her newly painted dining room.
That thought made her smile, gave her a tiny sliver of confidence.
“What’s that smile for?” Rob’s voice intruded on her thoughts.
“Just that I’m happy I have a nice dining room now for that…maybe stressful dinner with Sam and her new guy. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now, what was responsible for the entire telenovela drama that played out on your face before the smile?”
“What?” Horrified, Kari tried to remember what she had been thinking about only moments before. Mor. Of course. “Just…remembering the tangle my mother left me in with Sam.” She bit the inside of her cheek.
“But that’s going to get fixed. You guys will figure it out.” Rob’s voice sounded bracing. She wondered if this was a thing he did for his daughter, this “buck up little buckaroo” act.
“Maybe.” Something he said made her sit up straighter. “Wait. How do you know how a telenovela works?”
Rob laughed, smoothing his hand over the computer in his lap. “I don’t. But Mia watched that show that was modeled on telenovelas—the one about the romance novelist in Florida?”
“And you watch it with her. Like the home improvement shows.” Kari suppressed a smile. “I can’t even deal with how cute you guys are. Anyway.” Wrenching her brain back to the job at hand, she told Rob about the website he could sign up for to unsubscribe to catalogs en masse.
Far better to keep this…whatever it was…on catalogs and paint colors and far away from anything resembling that heart-meltingly domestic picture.
After taking a break for lunch, they spent the next hour or so tidying, with Rob entering the seemingly endless names of the various catalogs he didn’t want into the web form. Slowly, Kari’s oasis of order in the surrounding chaos spread. When the piles of papers she deemed he should keep, set out in tidy piles around her, reached a critical state, she demanded file folders and he found a box of them in the closet. She labeled each one with a careful, tidy hand that somehow managed to convey her personality. It reminded him of the motifs in her sketchbook and on her wall.
And now that personality, in the smallest way, was inscribed in his own home.
He swallowed hard at that thought.
Next door. Romance equals disaster. Romance with someone next door is disaster on a scale you have never imagined.
Kari got to her feet, placing the neat stack of folders on the otherwise empty desk. “That’s a start,” she said. There were still piles of unaddressed paper in the corners of the room, but Kari had gotten him past the roadblock of getting started to undo the mess he created.
He stole a glance at her. She was pressing her hands to the base of her spine and arching her body to ease an ache in her back. Swallowing, he returned his gaze to his laptop. That image of her—back arched, breasts rising up, eyes closed and going internal with some physical sensation—wasn’t going to help him in his quest to keep her at arm’s length.
No, it made him want to get her far closer. He wanted to offer to massage away those aches. To have her join him on the sofa, leaning back in him while he dug his thumbs into the knots, easing the pain out of tight muscles.
Nope. Shut that right down. He stared at his computer screen as if it was his job.
Sighing, Kari bent her back one way, then the other, feeling the stretch move into the sides of her torso. Her lower back ached. But the desk was clear. If Rob wanted to, he could actually use it.
It was a victory, of a sort. Not on par with the way he had fixed her sink or shown her that painting a room was a bit more involved than she had thought, but a victory nonetheless. She opened the almost empty filing cabinet and set the file folders in it. Straightening, she glanced around the room. “We’ve made a lot of progress.” It wasn’t anywhere near organized, but it wasn’t a disaster zone anymore. And when he hauled out the almost-overflowing recycling bin full of catalogs and other detritus, there would be room to maneuver in the small room.
Rob was still sitting on the floor, his reading glasses making him look annoyingly nerd-attractive, apparently enthralled with whatever was on his laptop screen, but he looked up and gave her a weak smile. “I can’t begin to thank you for what you’ve done.”
Kari leaned on the desk, ran her fingers through her hair. Even her scalp felt tired. “Seems very mundane compared to what you’ve helped me with over at my house.”
“See, I was thinking the same thing…but in reverse. I think you know what I mean.” Rob twizzled two fingers back and forth.
“So.” Kari heaved a sigh. “You helped me do a thing I couldn’t do and I helped you do a thing you…supposedly couldn’t do.”
Rob’s dark brown eyes held hers. “No, not supposedly. You broke the logjam of whatever was making me do whatever I was doing. I have my office back.”
“It just seems so easy.”
“For you. Painting a wall is easy for me. Replacing a faucet is easy for me.”
“Stop being so rational. And how does someone so rational manage to end up with that many unwanted catalogs?” Despite her skepticism, his appreciation for her help was starting to make her feel warm. It was cozy, this mutual aid.
“Enough. I surrender.” Rob waved a hand in the air and then extended it to her. “Help an old man up?”
“Old. Right.” Kari remained where she was, hands on her hips.
He laughed, his head bowing, shoulders shaking, looking as tired as she felt. He looked up again, and his dark eyes seemed to freeze her in place.
“Okay.” He clasped his hands in his lap. “How about I make you a cocktail in exchange for helping me up off this hard, goddamn, other curse-words-I-shouldn’t-say floor?” He closed his laptop with one hand and raised the other to her.
Kari looked at his extended hand, nodded, and put her palm in his, hauling him to his feet. “I suppose I should have asked how extensive your bar was before taking you up on that offer. But now that I’m in no position to bargain, I suppose I should just roll with it.”
Rob set his laptop down on the desk, then rolled his shoulders and rocked his head from side to side before looking at Kari again. “I’m thinking we need a French 75.”
“A French 75?” Kari blinked. Rob suddenly seemed far too worldly. Far too…much.
“Yes. Champagne—or sparkling wine. Gin. Simple syrup. Lemon juice. Any issues with any of these?”
Kari blinked and shook her head. “No issues, just…you have simple syrup? What is simple syrup anyway?”
Rob raised his clasped hands above his head, stretching to one side, then the other, his face contorting. Then he let his arms fall to his sides. “Simple syrup is just dissolved sugar in water. I like cold brew coffee straight from the fridge, but with a little sweetening. Granulated sugar doesn’t dissolve in cold water…so. There you have it. I always have simple syrup on hand.”
Kari thought furiously. “And the Champagne?” Who has Champagne just hanging around?
“Sparkling wine. Not necessarily the real stuff from France. Mia loves it.” His eyes met hers again. They seemed so dark, so infinite.
Oof. Right in the feels. Again. “You keep sparkling wine on hand for your daughter.”
“I do. And also for any occasion that seems to merit a celebration.”
A laugh sputtered out of her. “Throwing away a bunch of catalogs and filing other stuff merits a celebration?”
“Honey, you have no idea.” Rob’s dark eyes lit with laughter.
“Oh. No. I think I have some idea.” Kari suppressed a smile, thinking about how he had painted her dining room. He’d made it seem so easy. But dealing with his junked-up office had been easy for her. It was right in her wheelhouse, after all. But…he had told her that painting a room was in his wheelhouse.
And he was just so fun to be around. Even dealing with a mundane task like this. He was funny. He was comfortable. He was…
Kari shied away from that thought. No. He’d shown no interest in anything other than friendship. She wasn’t going to make a fool of herself here.