He cleared his throat and bent to grab a paintbrush. “I’ll go along the edges with a brush since I can reach more easily. You go behind me with the roller. Sound good?”
“Works for me.” Calder switched to the roller with a long handle.
As they got to work, silence fell between them, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable or tense like it had in the past. All the same, Lucien racked his brain for another subject, wanting to keep this easy peace between them.
“I grew up in Arizona,” he volunteered suddenly. He inwardly winced when he caught Calder twitching out of the corner of his eyes. “I was a wild kid who never turned away a dare. Got into a lot of trouble. I once jumped off the school building with homemade wings.”
A scoffing noise jumped from Calder’s throat, but it wasn’t derisive. Merely playful. “You did not.”
“Yep. Broke an arm and a leg with that stunt.” He swiped paint along the crown molding, which Dane had already painted with a brilliant white and masked off.
Calder shook his head, a smile still playing along his lips. “I can see you pulling something like that.”
“The kid who made the damn wings was too chicken shit to try them himself.” He chuckled for a second. “I did enjoy flying through the air for all of two seconds.”
“Insane,” Calder muttered.
“Probably, but it was enough to get me to go skydiving at eighteen. Fucking loved that.”
Calder shuddered. “I’ll take the water over the sky any time.”
“Ever worry about sharks?”
“Nah, though I did see one once when I was diving. It was fantastic.” Calder started rolling paint on the walls.
“A great white?”
Calder laughed and shook his head. “That’s everyone’s first question. No, it was a school shark. They get to be only five to seven feet long and are very skittish around divers. I think he got separated from the rest of his school.”
Lucien shuddered. “No, thanks. I would have been out of there the second I saw him.”
Calder grinned at him. “You would have stayed. He was beautiful and sleek. A silver flash in the water and he was gone.”
Okay, so maybe when they weren’t fighting, Lucien could sit and listen to Calder talk all day. Even about sharks, one of his few great fears in the world. He made them sound wondrous and precious with just a couple of words.
“Were you a firebug as a kid?” Calder suddenly inquired.
Lucien blinked at him, trying to get his brain to catch up to the new topic. He’d been lulled into deep blue depths with a forest of kelp and sleek sharks zipping by him. “No, thank goodness. But I did play with the idea of becoming a fireman at one time. Instead, I opened a microbrewery.”
Laughing, Calder spread more paint. “Those couldn’t be more opposite careers. Why a microbrewery?”
“Love beer, and a good friend of mine was great at brewing it. But we were both shit at marketing.” He shrugged. “It didn’t take off.”
Calder’s eyes narrowed on him. “Was it a boyfriend?”
Lucien paused, listening to that subtle shift in tone. Was that accusation in Calder’s voice? Or something almost predatory? Lucien mentally laughed it off. “How’d you guess that?”
“There was something in the way you said ‘good friend.’ Let me guess, you two broke up, and that tanked the business.”
“We did. And yeah, it did. Learned a hard lesson: Don’t mix business and personal. It’ll blow up in your face.”
Truth was, Brad had broken Lucien’s heart, and to this day, he didn’t trust anyone enough to let them get that close again. What the fuck was he going to do when he met his actual soul mate?
Which brought back to mind what Grey had told them.
“What do you think about the tangled thread between you and me?”
Calder went still, throwing Lucien a quick glance. “I have no idea.”
Lucien had a few ideas, mostly about the attraction that annoyed him.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from Calder as he returned to using the roller. The muscles in his arms flexed and strained. A strand of inky black hair fell over his eye, and he blew it out of the way. His hair looked so soft, begging for his touch.
Sighing, he tore his gaze from Calder, returning it to the wall. “We have to find a way to get along. Clay and Grey were right—we put the others in danger when we’re paying more attention to fighting each other than fighting the pestilents.”
“We’re not doing so bad right now,” Calder pointed out.
“True,” he agreed. He sent Calder a sheepish grin and swiped more paint onto the wall. “Tell me about your first boyfriend.”
“His name was Adam, and he was in my science class when I was a junior in high school. We went out for six months, but it was a secret since he wasn’t out. I was, so I eventually got tired of having to hide all the time,” he said with a shrug. “I broke it off with him. After that, I only dated men who were out. You?”