“I’ll drive, then. Truck’s a little messy, fair warning.”
“I can handle it.” She pulled up her jacket hood and opened the front door where she promptly received a slap of frigid sleet right in her face.
She stepped back inside the house and closed the door.
She wiped the sleet off her face and looked at Chris.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
3
THEY ATE IN, which was fine. More than fine as Chris had filled the fridge per Dillon’s request with all the basics. She threw together a salad while Chris cooked chicken on the George Foreman grill. It wasn’t haute cuisine but it tasted a lot better than that mouthful of icy rain and sleet had earlier. While they ate she flipped through her pictures on her phone and showed Chris photos of the beach and her last whale-watching excursion. None of the pictures in her phone were of her and Ben together. He was camera shy, he’d told her. Another red flag she ignored.
Chris took out his phone then and showed her before, during and after pictures of the cabin as he’d cleaned it up and remodeled it. She couldn’t believe how thoroughly he’d transformed it.
“This place used to be such a dump,” she said. “Remember?”
“It was a nice dump, though,” he said. “Lots of good memories here. It was fun working on the place. It needed help.”
“How much is all this costing Dillon?” she asked, waving her fork around the newly remodeled cabin. Now that Chris had fixed the place up so beautifully, she was half-tempted to see if Dillon would sell it to her. Although with all the renovations, it was probably out of her price range.
“Not as much as it should. I gave him a discount on the labor. The interior work was about five. The exterior another five.”
“That’s not much for this kind of makeover.”
“You can swing a lot of bargains if you know what you’re doing.”
“And you definitely know what you’re doing.”
“I do now.” He took a bite of his salad and it appeared he was trying to cover up a smile. Of what? Pride? Pleasure in her compliment? Because this felt like a date?
“Is Dillon selling the place?”
“Did he say something to you about it?”
She shook her head. “No. Just a guess. I know Oscar’s not the mountain-life sort of guy. He said he hates nature so much that when someone says being gay is ‘unnatural’ he takes it as a compliment because nature is so gross and horrible.”
Chris laughed. “Oscar’s great. You’ll like him.”
“So are they selling it?”
“Not selling it. They’re planning on renting it out. He asked me to fix it up and gave me a ten thousand dollar limit. I used every penny.”
“He can afford it,” she said. Dillon made mid-six figures at his law firm, and Oscar was several years older and very well-off from his investment banking job. She didn’t begrudge Dillon his success, though, not with the hours he put in. She much preferred her forty-hour workweek and her evenings and weekends off to enjoy her life. And she had been enjoying it. Until meeting Ben’s wife, that is. But tonight...she was kind of enjoying tonight.
“So...can I ask something?” he said.
“You just did.”
He glared at her.
“Ask,” she said.
“Why’d you come back?”
“My brother’s getting married? I would assume that’s a good enough reason.”
“No, you said you changed your flight to come back early. You had a weird look on your face when y