CHAPTER 11
“What was I doing?” Brynn murmured to herself as her eyes scanned her bedroom. “I know I came in here for a reason.”
Now she just had to remember what that reason was.
Scatterbrained didn’t scratch the surface of how she’d been feeling. Between work, the play, online counseling, and the man that had wormed his way into her every waking and sleeping thought, her brain was totally fried.
Axel had been in town for three weeks today, but their interactions were still sporadic and impersonal. He hadn’t contacted her by text or phone since the auditions. She saw him some mornings after her walks, and a few times at the theater, but all of their meetings were short and not terribly sweet. She missed him.
Really, truly missed him.
She missed his voice. She missed the sparkle that he got in his eye every time she smiled. She missed his dry sense of humor. She missed the way his roughened hands felt wrapped around hers. She missed the feeling of connection that she had with him, one that she’d never felt with anyone else.
“No,” she reprimanded herself, knowing that her emotions were misplaced.
She needed to get a grip and put a stop to this. She missed a man that was living in back of her house. Working at the same place she worked. Whom she barely knew and showed zero interest in getting to know her better.
It wasn’t healthy. It was borderline pathetic.
Brynn was beginning to think that she might need to revisit the idea of dating again. She still wasn’t sure if she was ready, but ready or not, it might be past time.
She jumped when she heard her phone ring. Suddenly she remembered why she’d left the kitchen. It was to get her phone. She wasn’t as obsessive about having it near her when Ryder was home. Not that she’d seen him all day.
Ryder had been outside with Axel since he’d woken up at noon. These days, if her son wasn’t with the twins or Fiona, (now officially his girlfriend), he was hanging out with Axel, helping him do repairs. That relationship wasn’t helping her schoolgirl crush. Apparently, seeing a man teach her son things like how to install an air conditioning unit, clean out gutters, repair a cracked driveway, and replace some roof tiles was sexy.
Who knew?
The phone rang again and Brynn had to search for it. She finally found it buried beneath her comforter. She pulled it out and saw that it was her mother calling.
Besides the daily updates on her father, Shea had been checking in on her new tenant, asking Brynn how the work he’d promised to do was coming. Each time Brynn updated her, she could practically hear her mother telepathically saying I-told-you-so.
Brynn had definitely been skeptical when her mother had called and told her that some stranger was not only paying rent but was also going to be handling the repairs and upkeep that both she and her mother had been putting off. But it turned out her doubts were unfounded. Not only had Axel lived up to his end of the deal, he’d gone above and beyond the list of tasks her mother had given him.
Right now he was out drywalling the garage, which actually hadn’t even been on the list that her mother had sent him. Yesterday, Axel had knocked on her back door and asked her why there was Sheetrock stacked against the walls in the empty garage and Brynn told him that her plan was to one day convert the space into a game room for Ryder.
Then he’d apologized for bothering her and left. It had been the most they’d spoken since she’d shown him the theater on his first day of work.
This morning, she’d looked out and seen that the project she’d started, and by started she meant she’d purchased and stored the drywall in the unfinished garage two years ago, was being completed by a tool-belt-wearing Axel.
He looked really good in a tool belt.
She took a fortifying breath before answering the phone. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hello, Sunflower. Did you see that your father was on CNN this morning?”
“No, Mom.” Brynn exhaled as she lowered down to sit on the edge of her bed. “I told you, I don’t watch any news about him. He’s just a man that hasn’t been in my life for thirteen years, and was barely in it before that.”
“A man that happens to be your father.”
“Not to me, he’s not.”
“You don’t get to make that decision. It’s not healthy the way you block him from your life.”
Brynn closed her eyes and took a deep breath before speaking in a calm tone. “Please, don’t tell me what’s healthy and not healthy for me.”
“Just because you have a fancy degree doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I never said anything about my degree.”