Big Flipping Deal Ch. 07

With that she went quiet and focused on digging her thumbs into the tight spots between my shoulder blades. Great, I thought. Way to go completely morbid. She probably thinks I pegged her as a serial victim after the black eye from Max and then her dad punching me.

"How's your head doing?" she asked. Her hands slowed in their movements at my back.

"Better. It still hurts, but I feel like my skull's about to explode anymore."

She kept massaging, but more softly, slowly.

After a few quiet minutes, she said, "Nick?"

"Yeah?"

I waited to see what she'd say, and just before the silence got awkward, she spoke up again.

"I'm really glad I met you. You're a good guy."

"Thanks," I said. "You too."

Oh shit, what the hell did I just say? I rolled over half panicked. "I mean I'm glad I met you too. I wasn't saying you're -"

But she laughed and patted my cheek. "I knew what you meant. Look, I'm going to head home and try to get some extra sleep. See you in the morning?"

An invitation for her to stay over flashed into my head - where it bounced off my still-aching eye-sockets and fell apart well before it could reach my mouth. She looked tired, I felt tired, and my head still hurt, even if not as badly.

So I nodded and said, "Sure, see you tomorrow."

Something about the smile she gave me kept me from feeling too abandoned or disappointed.

Sunday we got a good chunk of the new tile put in. As with our tile job on the kitchen counter, I got mortar all over my hands and clothes by the end of the day.

"I am not cut out for tiling," I said, trying to wipe the stuff off with a cloth. "It looks nice when it's done, but getting there is like torture."

"Oh, it's not that bad," she said, from the vantage point of someone who'd managed to stay spick and span all day. Well, except for the way the heat pulled the sweat out of her, which she couldn't avoid any more than I could.

"Sure it is," I said. "Even the words are unpleasant. 'Mortar' - that's like a deadly artillery weapon, right? And 'grout' ... I don't know what that sounds like, but it doesn't sound good."

"Hmm," she said, putting a hand on one hip and leaning against the doorframe. "And what does 'caulk' sound like? Because I'm thinking it sounds pretty good right now."

I coughed a little. "Well, uh, I have done more caulking than tiling."

"Uh-huh. I bet you're really handy with caulk."

The playful edge to her smirk made it clear she was totally kidding. But my cock did not quite get the joke and started swelling up in my pants.

"It can get a little sticky," I said, my mind flashing back to those first few fantasies I had of her. "You can't just go squirting it around all over the place or you'll get in real trouble."

She laughed and swatted me on the shoulder. "Come on. Let's go to the bathroom that works and wash up and I'll take you to dinner."

In the little guest bathroom, I got my hands mostly clean, watching Lindsey in the mirror as I scrubbed and soaped and scrubbed some more. She seemed to enjoy watching me too, and instead of subsiding, my hard-on grew dangerously insistent. As I shook my hands over the sink and reached for the hand towel, my brain said, What the hell ... just go for it.

"Hey, Lindsey," I said, drying my hands, "you know what?"

"What?" she asked, smiling.

"I would really like to fuck you in this bathroom, right now."

Her eyes flared and she straightened up. "Damn, I really scored with those caulk puns, didn't I?"

"That, and you're really sexy when you sweat."

"Hah!"

"And," I went on, deciding to confess, "I've been having this fantasy about doing it with you here basically since the first day we met."

Her head turned half away and down, shyly, though she kept her eyes on mine. "Me too. Not quite from the first day, but it's definitely occurred to me. In fact, I, um, even brought a little thing of lube in my purse. Only ..."

My pulse had lurched into high gear when she said she'd brought lube. But the tone of that 'Only' told it to slow down.

"What?" I asked.

She twisted her foot in frustration and laughed. "I'm really, really hungry right now! And I feel super gross. Like, caked-with-filth gross! Can we go to a drive-through and eat in my car and maybe do the work-site sex tomorrow?"

"The AC's supposed to be fixed tomorrow, though," I grumbled. "That was a pretty big part of my fantasy ..."

"I'll have them leave it off after they test it," she said with a grin. "Promise."

* * *

But we didn't have sweaty worksite sex in the guest bathroom the next day. Lindsey called me at work to let me know the AC guys were done and then apologized and said she needed to head home for the evening because she didn't feel well.

Then, around 7:30, she called me again at home while I was messing around on my keyboard.

"Hey, Linds," I said, pleasantly surprised to see her name on my phone's display. "Are you feeling any better?"

"Hi, Nick." Her tone had a tense quality to it that I didn't like. "Listen, can I come over?"

"Sure, of course. Is something the matter?"

"I'm kind of freaking out."

I paused before answering, "Like, freaking out about us? Or freaking out that we picked the wrong tiles for the bathroom?"

Her laugh sounded weak, but at least she managed one. "Yeah, those colors are so last month. So it's okay for me to come?"

"Hell, yes. At this point I'll be a neurotic mess about the tile color if we don't figure it out tonight."

She laughed again, stronger by a smidgen this time.

"Good," she said, "because I'm sitting in the quick-mart parking lot, and I'll be there in a couple of minutes."

"Oh," I said, blinking and looking around. Thankfully, I hadn't been home enough the last few days to make much of a mess. "I'll see you in a second, then."

"Okay."

I made sure to save the song file I had open, even though I'd barely gotten started on it. Then I took a quick walk through the house to see if anything needed tidying. All I found was a glass on the end table by the couch, and before I'd gotten all the way to the kitchen with it, I heard Lindsey's BMW pull up outside. Setting the glass in the sink, I headed for the door and opened it just as she slammed her car door and turned toward the porch.

"Hey," I said. Her expression had a conflicted look, but she smiled when she saw me. Holding the door wide, I tried to ignore the way she filled out her t-shirt and denim skirt. "What's up? Are you okay?"

Instead of walking past and into the house, she put her arms around me for a chin-over-the-shoulder hug. I held her tight, not sure whether to worry or be relieved by the feel of her in my arms.

"I'm okay," she said, letting go and then twitching her nose with a hint of rue. "I warned you I'm a relationship mess. Can we go in and talk?"

"Yeah, I'd love to," I said, gesturing her through the door with one arm. "Even if it's a mess, I don't care. Let's talk. Can I get you something to drink?"

"A glass of water, I guess."

She walked to the couch as I returned to the kitchen and filled a couple of glasses with ice cubes and water. When I got back, she'd taken one end of the sofa, with her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up under her. She ran a hand through her hair as I approached, then reached out for the glass I handed her.

"Thanks."

I sat down. She sipped her water and watched me. The angle of her knees and body kept me from sitting right next to her, something I took as a signal. To avoid intruding on her space, I settled into the other corner of the couch facing her.

"So what's up? You said you were freaking out, but you look pretty stable to me."

"I'm better, now that I'm here," she said. She tipped her water glass up again and looked around the room as she drank.

"Well, I'm better now that you're here too, even though I wasn't freaking out before."

That brought out a smile. She twisted a finger in her hair, not saying anything, just fixing those blue eyes on me.

"What?"

"Now that I'm here, I feel dumb," she said. "Maybe we should just hang out. I don't know if I want to talk about it."

"You're weird, Lindsey," I said, taking a drink of my own water. "Obviously, I'd sell my own grandmother to hang out with you - but if something's making you feel uncomfortable or unhappy, that's not dumb. If you needed to come over here to talk about something, we should talk."

She turned and put her glass down on the end table at her side, then unlimbered those long smooth legs and scooted to my end of the couch, where she put her head on my shoulder. I let my arm relax around her and waited.

A deep breath expanded her chest and then sighed out of her.

"I guess ... I keep getting scared because I'm a novelty to you, Nick."

That caught me off-guard, and if we hadn't been snuggled together, it might even have offended me.

"That's way off," I said. "You're not just a -"

"No," she jumped in, putting a hand to my chest and lifting her head to make eye contact. "No, I don't mean I'm just a novelty ... you're better than that, I know. But I'm still something new and exciting and fascinating to you, and when you're not around, when I'm by myself, I start wondering how long it's going to take before that wears off. And even when we're together, I get worried that we'll go too fast or too far and cross some line you're not ready for. Or if we don't go too fast, I worry what lines you might never be ready to cross."

As much as I wanted to, I couldn't argue against those possibilities. It's not like you haven't worried about some of the same things, I told myself. But ...

"You know you'd be new and exciting and fascinating to me even if you had a vagina, right?"

She laughed and squeezed me. "I do now that I'm here, where I can feel you and hear your voice and see it in your eyes. It just needs to sink in some more so I know it when you're not around. Do you think you can deal with me getting nervous and freaked out and needing to be reassured once in a while?"

"Is it going to mean you coming over unexpectedly all the time and cuddling up on my couch with me? Because there's only so much of that a guy can take, you know."

She hit me lightly on the chest and sat up, rolling her eyes - but smiling.

"I'm done talking to you," she said, twisting to reach for her water glass. "What were you doing before I called and brought all my hysterics over?"

"Eh. Messing around with my keyboard. Nothing important."

Lindsey stood up, drinking from her glass and looking at me and reaching for my hand all at once.

"Come on," she said, with a tug to get me out of my seat. "Show me. I want to hear some of this music you write."

"Okay. But don't expect too much ..."

I stood and headed for the bedroom. Her hand didn't release mine until I sat down at the computer, where she transferred her touch to my shoulder and leaned across me to watch as I explained the software I used and how I worked with it to make up for my lack of musical proficiency.

"Blah-blah," she said after a bit. "So you're a terrible keyboardist and you use the computer to cheat. Let's hear something."

"Sure," I said, painfully aware that I'd been caught stalling. "There's not much to this one yet, so ..."

"Oh, just play it already."

"Right. Yeah." Resetting the tempo from the glacial crawl I used to record things, I moused my cursor up to the play button and started it. Right away, the intro sounded trite to me, a high twinkling on synthesized bells. "I may change this -"

"Shut up, I can't hear."

The way her hand squeezed my shoulder said she meant it playfully and seriously at the same time, and I kept quiet and watched her. The reflected computer display made tiny gleams in each of her blue irises, moving and adjusting minutely as she followed the scrolling musical staves onscreen. All the song really had so far was a simple arpeggio bass-line under some synth wash chords. After a few bars, it modulated from the bright major key of the bells to a moodier minor one, then cut off abruptly at the thirty-six-second mark.

"Mostly, I just fart around until I have a structure that I like," I explained once the music stopped. "Then I improvise over that to get the melody."

"It's pretty," she said. "Play it again."

I did, and this time she reached over a few measures in and hit some keys on the synthesizer. But I still had it set on the synth wash, which swelled too slowly in volume to carry a quick tune.

"Is there, like, a piano sound?" she asked, pulling her hand back.

"About twenty of them," I said, clicking buttons on the Yamaha. It cost me a pretty penny, and came with a huge bank of instruments. Resetting the song to the beginning, I said, "Try now," and clicked the play button.

This time when she started to play at the fourth bar, what came out made me more ashamed of my feeble playing skills than ever. Her piano line danced effortlessly above the existing tracks, in step and on-key at a tempo about three times as fast as I could play. It wasn't at all what I would have added as a melody, but it flowed perfectly and it fit.

"Wow ... this is really cool," she said when the song cut off again. Her finger ran gently along the synthesizer's black casing. "I'm impressed."

"Do you want to record that?"

"Pff. I don't want to mess up your song."

"It's not really a song yet, and that sounded good. Here, play it again."

I ran the sequence over again, this time in recording mode. Lindsey played more or less the same melody she'd improvised before, maybe not quite so fluidly. When she finished and straightened up from the keyboard, I put the song on loop and let it run through a couple of times so we could listen. She nodded thoughtfully, as if appraising her own work.

"Okay," she said, "let me hear some stuff you've gotten more done than that."

I saved the file and then loaded and played a handful of my better songs - well, the ones I considered better. I hadn't had a chance to play them for much of anyone else, so for all I knew, every one of them sounded like crap. Lindsey seemed genuinely appreciative, though, and kept asking to hear more after each one finished. A few she even asked me to play again.

At some point my bladder alerted me that it needed emptying, so I excused myself to the bathroom.

"Can I sit and play with your stuff while you're gone?" she asked.

"Sure," I said. "Knock yourself out."

Through the bathroom door, over the sound of my own pee, I heard her doing a few scales, then hitting chords up and down the keyboard, then noodling a bit. I flushed and went to the sink to wash my hands, where I heard her start into an actual song. My brain had distracted itself with the awkwardness of urinating where a woman could hear me, the added awkwardness of comparing the noise of piss to the glittering sound of Lindsey's piano warm-ups, and the excitement of sharing something that we both seemed to enjoy. So I vaguely knew that the piece she'd chosen was Beethoven, but I didn't register the specific song until halfway through drying my hands.

Then I stopped still and just listened.

She'd reached the second or third recurrence of those high, alternating half-steps - a signature of Beethoven's timeless genius, the ability to take two notes and create something people would marvel at centuries later - then the three-note downward sway and the rising sweeps of eight-notes simple enough for even a novice pianist to make beautiful. And Lindsey was much more than a novice pianist.

I stood inside the bathroom door with a knot in my throat, blinking at the emotional tides of the music, until she reached the first of the fast, quick passages that get skipped or dumbed-down in beginner's arrangements. But she kept going straight into the concert version, and I heard a wrong note and a low "damnit" from her, but I could only think, Oh my god, she can play.

Opening the door as quietly as I could, I let myself out of the bathroom to watch her where she sat absolutely intent on the keyboard as her fingers glided and leapt across it. The focus and intensity of her eyes amazed me. I could only stare.

Then that first bravura section closed out, and she returned to those two high notes, up and down and up and down, repeating themselves longer this time. And I sniffed or something, and she stopped and turned.

"Jesus, Nick," she said, putting a hand to her chest when she saw me. "I didn't think my playing was that bad."

"No, no," I said, wiping my eyes. "It was beautiful. It's just ... that particular song."

Für Elise.

"Oh, shit." She jumped up with apology written all over her face. "I'm so sorry, I didn't even think -"

"No, really, it's fine," I said, trying to get my emotions under control "In fact, I'd really like you to finish. God, Lindsey, you're so good."

She looked hesitant. "Are you sure?"

Sitting on the corner of the bed nearest the computer station, I nodded. "Really. Please."

She returned to the keyboard, glancing over her shoulder before lifting her hands to the keys. "I'm probably going to fuck it up. Back in the day, I practiced this damn thing so many times I could play it in my sleep, but it's been forever ..."

"I don't care. You can make all the mistakes in the world."

She started again from the top, and I just sat there and let everything wash over me: the music, memories of learning the student version myself years ago, a few flashing images of Elise, her face and smile hazy across the decades - but most of all, the fact of this unbelievably talented, intelligent, sensitive woman sitting in my bedroom and filling it up with her presence and with the beauty of ages.

By the time she finished, I was completely streaming, and when she saw, she stepped over and sat down to put her arms around me.

"I am so incredibly lucky I met you, Lindsey," I said over her shoulder as we held each other. "You can get as nervous or scared or worried as you want. It won't make any difference to me."

She nodded against me. Then she said, "I hope you're right, Nick. Because I'm kind of terrified that I'm falling in love with you."

I breathed in the smell of her hair for a minute.

"Well," I said, "I would have expected to be terrified too. But I'm starting to get my head around the idea that I could go head-over-heels for the right pianist."

"Stop it," she laughed, pulling back and swatting me on the arm for the pun. "I'm being serious."

"I am too," I said, buoyed up by a cloud of relief as I tugged her in for a kiss. "I'm crazy about you. And I want to take what you've got under that skirt and make you feel the way you deserve to feel - joyful and happy and safe and ..."

"And?"

I met her waiting gaze with mine and let myself become entirely serious.

"Complete," I said. "And loved. I want you to feel loved, Lindsey."

Her eyes sparkled wetly. Then they closed as I drew her to me and put my lips to hers and kissed her. A tremor passed through her just before she kissed back in earnest, and I wondered how the hell I'd ended up here, on the corner of my bed, so overwhelmed with emotion for this person that I was ready to let her do things to me that a month ago I'd never have considered. I didn't have any answer, but from some back corner of my mind, Mrs. P's voice said, You're welcome!

Lindsey removed her tongue from my mouth to raise an eyebrow and ask, "What?"

"What, what?"

"You laughed."

"Did I?" I brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. "Sorry. I was just thinking about your aunt, wondering what she'd think if she could see this."