He narrowed his eyes at me, and I met his gaze squarely; I wasn’t going to lose this staring contest. Finally he nodded.
“Okay. That’s fair.” He squinted again, this time in thought. “Did you just build it?”
That startled a laugh out of me—the thought of me wielding a hammer and putting this deck together. “No, I had it built a while back.”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head and looked like he was doing some mental calculations. “You’re going to want to clean it before you stain it, then. Do you have a pressure washer?”
I blinked. “Uh. No.” Was that something I was supposed to have? “Can I rent one?”
He waved a hand. “Nah. My dad has one. I’ll drop it off tomorrow, and then next weekend we can stain it.”
“Next weekend . . . wait. Isn’t that when Ren Faire tryouts are? Don’t you need to be there for that?” The closer it came to Ren Faire time, the more excited Caitlin had become, so it was definitely on my radar. Mitch was another one in town who, like Simon, had been part of the whole thing since the beginning. I couldn’t imagine him missing out on it.
But he shrugged. “Eh. Between you and me, I’m kind of a shoo-in. I don’t think Simon will mind if I skip tryouts.”
I had a feeling that Simon would absolutely mind, but I wasn’t going to argue with Mitch about it. “Okay, then. Come by sometime in the morning. Whenever you like, I’m an early riser. We can talk strategy while we work.”
“Strategy? What kind of strategy do we need to stain a deck? We get some stain, we put it on the deck. Boom.”
I rolled my eyes so hard my head fell back on my neck. “For the dinner.”
“Oh.” He looked thoughtful. “Good point.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t keep you at my house all day. You can still go out Saturday night.”
He looked blank. “Saturday night? Do I have plans I don’t know about?”
I tilted my head. “Isn’t Saturday your prime hookup time?”
“Funny.” He’d started looking around as we talked, his eyes scanning the kids who were still milling about. It belatedly occurred to me that he was in charge of all these kids, making sure their parents picked them up and they got home without incident. I probably shouldn’t have shown up to distract him, but he didn’t seem annoyed about it. The man was capable of multitasking.
“Funny?” I leaned my back against the wall of the building, indulging in a little stretch. I sat all day, with a fairly long drive both to and from work. My SUV was comfortable, but my days involved a lot of sitting and not a lot of moving. By the end of the day my back was always stiff. My gaze went to the track, a few hundred feet to the right of the main building. Sometimes I missed running.
I shook off that thought too. What was it about Mitch lately that made me thoughtful? “How’s it funny? I’ve seen you at Jackson’s plenty of times. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Meh.” He shrugged, his shoulders massive under his T-shirt. “It’s losing its appeal, if you want to know the truth. I end up there a lot of times because there aren’t a whole lot of options in this town.”
I had to admit he had a point. “Okay, then. We can—”
“Nope.” Mitch’s voice was harsh, and I jumped at the sound of it. What did he mean, “nope”？ He was the one who’d suggested Saturday. But he wasn’t talking to me. He’d reached out to one of the kids walking by, snagging the back of his T-shirt collar. “Say that again,” he said to the kid.
The kid flopped in Mitch’s grip like a freshly landed fish. “Oh, come on, Coach. I didn’t mean—”
“Say. That. Again.” Mitch’s voice was low and dangerous, and I didn’t want to acknowledge the shiver that went up my spine at his tone. I hadn’t heard what the kid had said; the small group of boys had been walking by as we’d been talking. But like I said, multitasking.
The boy huffed, blowing his ash-blond bangs out of his eyes. “I was talking about my little brother’s birthday party. It was so stupid. Who plays laser tag anymore?” He looked up at Mitch with an am I right? expression, but Mitch remained stone-faced. After a ten-second staring contest, the kid huffed again. “I said it was gay,” he mumbled.
“Yes,” Mitch said, his voice and expression still stone. “You did.” He let go of the kid’s shirt. “Now go run your laps.”
“Aw, come on! We just finished practice, and my mom will be here in like five minutes.”
Mitch shrugged. “Not my problem. You know the rules. That’s a slur. We don’t say stuff like that on my team. So either you run your laps, or you’re off the team. Your choice. I’ll tell your mom where you are if she gets here before you’re done.”
“Ugh.” He let the backpack fall off his shoulder and tossed it petulantly against the wall. “Don’t tell her what I said, okay?”
“Go.” Mitch pointed toward the track I’d been looking at wistfully, and the boy trotted off in that direction.
“Wow,” I said when the boy was out of earshot and his friends had scurried away. “You’re quite the taskmaster.”
Mitch shrugged. “I don’t like people using that word like that.” He leaned against the wall, echoing my casual stance, but tension lined his shoulders. “If I catch them saying it, they run a mile around the track. They know the rules.”
“No, that’s . . . that’s good.” The world was nasty enough, and if Mitch could make it that little bit nicer, one small-town boy at a time, more power to him.
“Anyway.” His expression cleared, and his shoulders dropped. He rolled his head on his neck, and I heard a faint crack. I’d always thought of Mitch as the kind of guy without a care in the world, but he cared. About a lot of things. Huh. “Next Saturday?”
“Next Saturday.” I nodded. “It’s a date.”
* * *
? ? ?
Sure enough, when I came home from work the next night, there was an unfamiliar contraption leaning against my front door. I was genuinely stumped for a full thirty seconds until I remembered that Mitch was loaning me his—or his father’s—pressure washer. Cleaning the back deck with it was one of the noisiest but also most satisfying tasks I’d ever undertaken. Once I was done, it looked like it had the day the contractors finished building it, and I considered leaving it that way and not bothering to stain it.
But Mitch shook his head when he got there that next Saturday morning and I broached the subject. “It looks great, but you want to stain it. How long ago did you say this was built?”
I hummed while I tried to remember. “A couple years ago? Something like that?” It was certainly after the accident—this deck had been a present to myself after the settlement from the lawsuit the accident had spawned had come through. The contractor had knocked out the window in the dining room and turned it into a pair of French doors. This deck was my favorite place to linger with a cup of coffee on the weekends.
“A couple years?” Mitch shook his head in disgust. “You’re lucky the wood didn’t split.”