Previously on What's Left of Me:
Dafydd Williams starts a new job
and meets a new girl. Emily is vivacious and perceptive, and, like Dafydd, is trying to find her place in the world. They're
drawn to each other
immediately, and have an
intimate night out
ending in mutual oral. Unfortunately, after a long week of training, they're too tired to consummate the relationship fully, and make plans for Friday to finish what they'd started, and to decide what they want to be to each other. But they've got make it through their first week of work first.
I'm trying something new with formatting of text messages. Thanks very much to
Penny Thompson
for walking me through it, and to
Lucky
for their excellent How-To on special formatting.
In this chapter you can expect trading of nudes, oral, handstands, workplace chat and some light exhibitionism.
The rest of the day passed in a pleasant summery haze. It'd been a hell of a week. On Monday, I'd gotten in my car in the morning full of trepidation; now, on Saturday, I felt like I had a new lease on life – still bills to come due and payments to make, and the bank could take it away at any time, but it was
something
. It was the start of something, at any rate.
Of course, I hadn't technically begun work yet. Lots of things could still go wrong. But worrying about what could have gone wrong was what'd blown up my life the last time around, the last time I was contemplating a girl intertwined with a career, so I figured optimism was the order of the day. There's an old saying in Tennessee or Texas or someplace: fool me once, shame on you, but you can't get fooled again. That's the essence of it, anyway. My father used to say something like it, and snort like the bull contemplating the matador when he did.
Maybe that's why I went shopping, or maybe it was purely practicality. New job, new girl, new clothes; and if I could be comfortable on the water and in the heat, so much the better. Bye-bye, most of my first paycheck. I pretended it was an investment. At least I had a little nest egg. I'd made good money from the engineers and the consultants and hadn't spent much of it.
Emily and I had said our goodbyes that morning outside Lannigan's, sharing a gentle kiss before going our separate ways. I'd wanted to hang onto that moment of uncertainty for as long as I could; once we'd separated we'd begin the process of thinking about
us
, if there could even
be
an us, and what that would mean. I wasn't ready to go down that road, or to think about what might lie at the end.
So as I went through the day, I tried not to dwell on it. Not easy to do, unfortunately. I wondered how the conversation with Max and Jordi had gone, whether Serah'd been awake to join in the teasing. Wondered what Emily had said. Wondered what her plans were this weekend, the big weekend she'd said she had. And whenever I looked at a shirt or a pair of shorts I'd wondered:
would she like this?
I hoped so. The last thing I wanted was to pick her up for our first day of work looking like Doctor Granola the Yoga Clown.
By the time I'd driven down the dusty dirt road to the house, it was well into the afternoon, and too hot to do the chores I needed to finish before Monday, at least not pleasantly. Mowing the lawn and the other grassy spaces – drain field, around the garage and the shed where my father's tractor lived – could take hours. And that wasn't the only thing I needed to finish over the weekend, with a further list of things that had to be done by the end of the month, by the end of summer. And I had to do laundry, meal prep, take out the garbage – the endless and inevitable tasks that're the cost of being an adult, especially one living alone.
I made a sandwich and took a nap. I obviously couldn't be expected to work on an empty stomach. I'm not a Terminator. Then I got to work.
**
On Sunday morning, I was on the roof with a push-broom, sweeping the metal clean, clearing out the gutters as I went, when my phone dinged.
There's a perfect time for working on my roof, and it's that time of morning that's neither early or late but simply 'morning'. The morning dew has burned away and the paint's not slick with moisture, but the metal's not been heated by the baking sun of a summer afternoon. If I was lucky, there'd still be birds around, and sometimes one would light in a low branch where I could look it in the face and feel, absurdly, like a temporary peer. The property looked so green from up there. Walnut trees don't stay green long, but when they're thriving and lush there's nothing like them anywhere, outside the rain forests. The thing about walnuts, though, is that they drop leaves and twigs and branches at the drop of a hat; that those twigs clog gutters up something fierce; and that the leaves stain like anything if left alone. They've got a mild acidity to them, and as I'd already primed and painted this roof once I'd rather not fucking do it again, not if fifteen minutes or half an hour of maintenance every now and then could prevent it.
I'd have looked absurd up there if there were anyone to see, sweeping away with my broom, singing along to the sea shanties pumping through my earbuds courtesy of singers from Port Isaac and Padstow. I'd never gone to either place, and probably never would. They were both in Cornwall, I knew, that little spit of land in the southwest of England which under Roman dominion had been mostly left alone. Beyond that, they were responsible for quite a lot of shanties, if the recording I had was any indication.
My phone dinged again. And again. Once more for good measure.
Should probably check it.
I thought. Shame I'd left it on the patio.
Fortunately, the house is only one story and the roof's not steep, so it wasn't much trouble to get down and fetch my phone, though it took a moment to navigate the edge of the roof and the fragile gutter, and to step down onto the top step of the ladder ("DANGER: Never step up or down onto the top of this ladder," the unheeded warning read) without it overturning.
It was Emily, of course.
hey
Then:
buddy
Then:
BUDDY!,
accompanied by a picture of her pouting face; it looked like she was in her room.
Then:
if u dont text im gonna have to send u
🍑 📸
Well. Thank God I got to the phone just in time. I texted back:
Don't threaten me with a good time!
, and barely had the text left when my phone was signaling an incoming video call.
"Finally!", she huffed in the most transparently fake way. "I thought you were dead! Looking good, by the way."
I had my hair held back with a headband, though I hadn't really dried it after showering that morning and, under the mounting heat and humidity and mechanics of drying, it was fuzzing out all over the place. I'd trimmed my beard again that morning – left too long it starts to look like a wasp's nest stuck there under my chin, the ugliest sort of neckbeard. My shirt was a cotton button-down in a godawful white-green-yellow tartan pattern with a few buttons undone, and my new sunglasses perched on my head.
"You're
such
a liar," I said. "I look like I've been working on the roof all morning." That was only a slight exaggeration. "What've you been up to? Lounging around? Taking selfies?"
"Maybe one or two. And no, I've been busy. I went shopping yesterday, needed some pants with pockets."
"Don't all pants have pockets?"
