30
RAIDEN
“There,” Georgiana calls from the loft. “You can throw up the pillows.”
I’m standing in the kitchen and she’s peeking down to catch everything I’ve been tossing up. We’re putting in the soft furnishings and our Tic Tack Tiny has come alive in an almost perfect replica of my model. There’ve been a handful of adjustments, since we met with a few technical speedbumps, but we’ve managed to navigate our way over them without too much drama.
My heart swells with pride as I take the narrow stairs up to the loft and get a bird’s-eye view over the living room area and kitchen. The decorative things Georgiana bought in Burlington have pulled the whole lot together, and downstairs already looks ready for a magazine shoot.
I’m here to help her make the bed, but the king-size takes up a lot of space and I have to bend. At least with the shed-style roof you can sit up in bed and hopefully not feel claustrophobic. If you open the skylight, you can stand up straight and enjoy a three-sixty-degree view over your surroundings, which for us is currently still the barn.
Tomorrow, the convention’s transport truck arrives to pull our house to the weighing station and onwards to the convention’s location on the outskirts of Boston. Once we’ve made sure our baby is looked after and everything is perfect for the judges’ inspection on Friday evening, I’m taking Georgiana to my apartment where we’ll wait out the Labor Day weekend until it’s time for the auction. The actual winners of the competition will be announced on the TV show and that’s still a while off. We were considering coming back to Ashleigh Lake, but I’m ready to sort out my life in Boston and finalize plans to move back here. As for Cash, he knows I want to start my own business, but if things go sideways, he’ll always have space for me.
If I don’t work for Cash, I can’t go to work for anybody else. Nobody else will match the pay he is giving me, so this is it. The one and only fork in the road for me.
“Tuck that in.” Georgiana holds out the fitted sheet’s corner to me.
I get busy helping her, and between the impracticality of getting a cover on the comforter in the confining space and a short-lived pillow fight, we both fall back onto the bed, out of breath. I reach for her hand. “The view is pretty crap right now.” I’m staring through the skylight into the barn’s rafters; ideally it should be blue skies, forest or a dusting of stars.
“The view is perfect if you ask me.” She’s studying me, then leans in and kisses me.
I cup her cheek and pull her closer and soon we’re stripping each other’s clothes off as we just can’t get enough of each other. I’m at the point where I always carry a condom on me like a teenager and I’m not trying to be cool.
“Let’s try out my dimensions.” I pull her up to straddle me to check her head for space. “Nothing worse than a head bang—”
“When you’re banging?” she laughs. “I’m good, I’m more worried about you.”
We’re still fooling around and soon we swap places and I’m on top, settling between her legs. We slow each other down with soft caresses and gentle kisses until we pick up the pace again. We keep on kissing long after we’ve peaked, and I never want to stop. This woman is something else, and she’s mine.
“Now that we’ve inaugurated this bed,” she whispers as I wrap her in my arms, “we’ll have to change the sheets again.”
“I’ll help.”
“Look where your help got us.”
I kiss her nose. “I blame you for this.”
She kisses me back with a husky laugh. I simply love being like this with her, my fingers playing with her hair, her fingers tracing hearts over my own as she rests on my shoulder.
“Tell me, what does your perfect tiny house look like?” My head is already filled with a thousand ideas for a small home, something that won’t be mobile, but that I’d love to build in the forest by our private beach on the lake.
“What do you mean?”
“This one had some constraints, and I wanted to go neutral with the interiors to appeal to the biggest crowd, but what would you choose, if this was yours and you could move in tomorrow?”
“Gosh, I love everything about this place, because it’s all you.”
When she says things like this, my heart gets drunk on love for her. “But honestly?”
“Well, maybe I’d add some light strings, some real plants to match the polymer ones you have in your model, some photos of us…and I’d change the throw pillows to add some color and then I’d also put some color in the kitchen with the crockery.”
I’m cracking up with laughter. “Not enough color for you?”
“I love the light wood, off-white you have going here, it’s very contemporary, but Mexican and Caribbean influences have been big all my life and I love colors. My mom would go crazy for this look, but for my own place, I’d love something more bohemian.”
“Fair enough. What else? Does it need to be on wheels?”
“No, mobile is fun, but I’d love to develop the space around it too, I don’t know… I’d love to have it somewhere by the lake with a firepit and some loungers and maybe more light strings outside for atmosphere. And a veggie patch and a woodpile for the fireplace in the winter.”