Stay Frosty

Boyd

I’m more nervous to knock on her door now than I was on our first date. My knuckles graze the door and make a faint sound. No answer. That only serves to increase my heart rate. I knock again, louder this time.

“One second!” Sophie shouts from inside. She sounds panicked.

Crank up the speed of my heart a little more.

My foot taps on the concrete stoop of its own accord as I wait. At least sixty seconds pass before Sophie comes to the door. She pulls it open wide, and she looks like she’s been caught in a deluge. She’s sopping wet, with her drenched hair matted to her head. “Help.”

I duck inside and close the door behind me. “What happened?”

“Shower…” She makes an exploding sound and a matching gesture with both hands.

“Utility closet?”

She points to a door beside the kitchen, so I run in and find her small furnace, washer and dryer, and fuse panel. I search along the water pipes to find the shut-off valve. The sound on the other side of the wall eases and stops by the time I walk through her bedroom, into the ensuite. Her bathroom is soaked from top to bottom, with water pouring out onto the hardwood in her bedroom. The stand-up shower only has a door covering half of its width, so there was no chance of containing the spray.

“How did this happen?” I try not to chuckle at Sophie when she walks into the room behind me, looking defeated. Even Wilson is wet, but he looks thrilled. I bend down to give him a scratch behind the ear and he responds by doubling the speed of his wagging tail. “Hey, buddy.”

“I called the super to fix the issue with my water pressure. He came and told me it was just my shower head, but that’s not his job to change it. Direct quote: ‘It’s not a building problem; it’s a you problem.’” She mimics the super’s voice, making it even harder not to laugh. “I looked online, watched a few tutorials, and felt confident I could handle it. Pete the Plumber’s YouTube channel made it look easy, so I followed along and all was fine. But the problem was not my shower head. I turned it on to get ready, but a surge of water blew off the shower head and well… all hell broke loose.”

There’s no stopping my laugh now. She looks incensed over the situation, and I can’t blame her, but the way she explains it is hilarious. “Pete the Plumber? Why didn’t you call an actual plumber?”

She places both hands on her hips, drawing my attention to how her dripping wet tank top and yoga pants cling to her curves. “I’ll have you know, I’m capable of doing things on my own. This was not my fault.”

I straighten my expression to match her serious one. “No doubt it wasn’t. Why don’t we get what we can cleaned up, then I’ll take a look at it?”

The tentative smile she offers sends mixed signals. Like she appreciates my offer to help, but hates accepting it. The same protective instinct I had the first night I called her consumes me again. She doesn’t need me to come in and fix things, but I want to.

“I’ll be right back.” She exits the bathroom and returns a minute later with a mop and bucket to start soaking up water that has pooled on her bedroom floor.

For the first time, I look at her space. She has a pink upholstered king-size bed in the same shade as her sofa, topped with a crisp white duvet and floral throw pillows. Wilson has his own bed under the window, but I suspect the furry grey blanket spread across the foot of the bed is for him. The art above the headboard is a woman’s silhouette, but somewhat abstract in strokes of pink and grey. I stare at it for a moment before Sophie interrupts.

“I had that painted in France. You know… ‘paint me like one of your French girls’?” She winks at me, and I realize what she’s implying. That painting isn’t just a woman… It’s her.

Now my urge to study it is even stronger, but I need to distract myself. “Do you have some towels I can use to clean this up? Then we can just throw them in the washer? Otherwise, this will take hours.”

She turns to face a tall, narrow shelf behind the door, then bursts out laughing.

I poke my head around to see what’s so funny and discover all the towels are already wet. The two of us have a good laugh as I pull them off of the shelf one by one, mopping up what I can from the floor with any remaining dry spots, then haul them to the laundry room. Sophie walks in behind me, now wearing dry clothes, carrying her wet ones. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, exposing the delicate column of her neck. She’s stunning. Even when she’s flustered, soaked, and defeated.

“Guess I can’t wash these until we turn the water back on.” She tosses her clothes into the washing machine and shuts the door.

“Let me see what I can do.”

We take forty-five minutes just to get the room dry, then another hour for me to take off the stop valve, clear out the debris that has collected in it, and reattach it with new Teflon tape. I reinstall the shower head and when I’m confident it’s not going to flood Sophie’s house again, I return to the shut-off valve in the laundry room.

Sophie is in the bathroom when I re-enter, standing in the centre of the patterned black and white ceramic tile floor. She’s facing me, not the shower. “Thank you for this. You didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to. It was really no trouble.” I step forward, stopping a few inches in front of her. This wasn’t what I had planned for the evening. We were supposed to go skating and then see where the night took us. I thought we’d be debating which food trucks to try. I wasn’t expecting a busted shower to bring me within five inches of Sophie in her bathroom.

“Thank you,” she repeats. Her eyes trail up my face without her moving her head, so she’s looking at me through her thick lashes.

The racing heart I was dealing with when I knocked on her door was nothing compared to how fast it’s beating now. I breathe out her name, “Sophie.”

She doesn’t hesitate to reach her arms around the back of my neck and close the gap between our lips. The tingling sensation is automatic, shooting from my mouth, right down to my knees. I could turn into a puddle if I wasn’t convinced she had mopped enough already for one evening. Everywhere her hands graze along my skin and through my hair leaves a new sensation, intensifying the feeling of her soft lips caressing mine.

Too few seconds later, she pulls her head back, but doesn’t release her grip on my neck. “This would have been so much more romantic if I was soaked because it was raining.” She smirks with her glistening lips. “I’ve always wanted to kiss someone in the rain.”

I lose all sense.

With my arms around her waist, I tug her into the shower and turn the water back on. It flows from the faucet at a steady pace, but the initial jolt is cold. Sophie yelps, so I turn her back against the far wall and shield her by leaning forward, placing one hand on either side of her head. My pants and back are soaked, but I hardly notice because I’m distracted by the hungry look in Sophie’s eyes.

She grabs at the loops on my pants and pulls me against her. “Kiss me.”

I don’t waste a second before I comply. I’m convinced even without the water, we’d steam up the entire room. The way she keeps her hold on me, clutching me close, is a level of hot that tap water could never compete with. She whimpers into my mouth when my teeth graze her lips, granting me permission to take this up another notch. I spin her around so the warm water rushes over us both, drowning me in a mix of water and Sophie.

We finally pull our lips apart, standing under the shower like a low-budget version of The Notebook. Sophie’s brown eyes stare into mine, blinking away the dripping water.

“I hope it rains every day.” My voice is hoarse. Raspy. Laced with wanton desire.

She chuckles at my lame line, but it quickly morphs into a full on laugh. An unencumbered belly laugh. It leaves me confused what she finds so funny about what I thought was an intense few moments. I may be out of practice with jokes, but it wasn’t that bad. I turn to shut the water off so I can figure out what’s so hilarious.

“We…” She takes a deep breath, easing her laugh. “We don’t have any towels.”

Whoops. That was an oversight in the heat of the moment. If we used the towels in the washer, we’d be worse off. I really didn’t think through my own situation, because it’s hovering around freezing and I have to get home in wet clothes.

We both stand in the shower with dripping clothes, laughing and sneaking glances. At least, I know I am. This woman is an enigma. She’s shown me so many facets of her personality and I’m not sure which is the dominant one that defines who Sophie is. But that’s part of her intrigue. She can’t be boiled down to one adjective.

“How did you get so good at plumbing?” she asks, clutching her arms around me and shivering.

I wrap my arms around her, pulling her into my chest. “I do a lot of repairs at the café.”

“You’re a very dedicated worker, Boyd Edwards. Your boss is lucky to have you.” She tilts her head up to look me in the eyes once again.

“It’s my café, Sophie. I am the boss.”