He doesn’t answer. “Show me what you were working on,” he says instead.
“It’s not quite finished, but I can show you the basics.” I scoot closer to him and he raises his arm to rest on the back of the glider. I settle in close to him, and the warmth from his body starts to seep into me, through the hoodie and the t-shirt. I scoot a little closer.
When I look up at his face, he’s staring down at me with one eyebrow raised comically. “You want to just climb inside my shirt?”
“Would you mind?” I laugh at the face he makes and then I hold my tablet so he can see. “You need a new logo, marketing materials, and a website. And I just happen to be a pro at all three.” I point to the logo. “What do you think?” I hold my breath, because his opinion is important to me. “Do you hate it?”
He stares at it. “You did that?”
I nod as heat creeps up my cheeks.
“You made that all by yourself?” he clarifies. “It’s not, like, stock art?”
I shake my head. “I literally just drew it. Me. Just now.”
“With your own two little hands?” He looks delighted and appalled at the same time.
I hold my hand up and extend my fingers. “My hands are not little.”
“That’s amazing,” he says. He smiles. “I really, really like it.”
“I need to make some tweaks.” I flip to a different app and show him the basic website I started. I parked it at a dummy domain, so it’s not live or anything. “And this is your website. I can set it up so that you can let people book appointments with you online, pay you online, and all that stuff. I don’t do all the building and coding on that stuff. I have a guy who does that.”
“A man?” he asks.
“A team. Men and women. Why?” I stare at him, confused.
“Just curious.” He sticks out a finger and flips back to the logo. “You’re really good at what you do.”
I have never ever in my life felt pleasure so fiercely as I do in this moment. “Thank you.”
“So you can do all that for me?”
I nod. “I can. Along with fliers, business cards, mail marketing, and other stuff.”
“You’d have to let me pay you.”
I roll my eyes. “I will, as soon as you let me pay you for my landscaping, power washing, and painting.”
“Yeah, that’ll never happen,” he says curtly.
“Exactly,” I reply.
I unzip the hoodie and point to the logo on the shirt I’m wearing. “Hate to break it to you, but this logo is terrible. With the right marketing materials, you can get a lot more customers.”
“Hey, I made that logo myself,” he protests.
“And it looks homemade.”
“Don’t go disrespecting my logo, Clifford,” he says with a mock frown. “And zip that hoodie. I can see your nipples.”
My face goes hot. I don’t zip the hoodie. I leave it partially open.
“You’re a witch,” he mutters.
A car slows as it drives by, and Grady looks toward the road. “Who was that?”
“Probably just someone curious about my landscaping. You need some signs to put in people’s yards where you’ve done work. I can make some of those for you too.”