The builder, who apologized, said he couldn’t get out to the house until Thursday to take a look at it, four fucking days from then.
“You do that,” I grumbled into the phone. “In the meantime, you need to be thinking of ways to fix my goddamned floor. I want this done right next time, and I want it done quickly. The move in day was last Friday, and you’ve already sailed past that day. I need this house done. My lease is up on Monday, a week from now. You have until then.”
The builder, I could tell, wanted to argue, but we’d signed an ironclad contract. I’d given him eight months to complete the project, or he forfeited his profit margin.
“That was harsh.”
I looked up to find Tally standing there, her face full of humor.
I laughed humorlessly. “Come look at my house and tell me what you think of this.”
The instant I saw her, everything that seemed out of whack not even ten minutes ago suddenly straightened.
“I’m assuming you still need to get the driveway done?” she stated as she carefully picked her way over the fucked-up driveway.
I gritted my teeth and barely restrained the urge to growl.
“Actually, it was just done on Monday of last week,” I glared at the canyon sized divot in my driveway that ran straight down the middle of it.
She looked at me startled. “Uhhh,” she blinked, unsure what to say. “That’s…bad.”
I agreed with a nod of my head.
And each truck that passes over it, causing deep dents in the gravel, makes my heart hurt even more.
“Yep,” I confirmed. “I already called the driveway guy, and he’s coming out to fix it as soon as it stops raining.”
She pursed her lips.
“But isn’t it supposed to continue raining for the next two weeks?”
I nodded my head.
“Yep.”
It sure was.
“And if it looks like this after just one day—and, which, might I add, it’s still raining—what’s it going to look like tomorrow? Or the next day?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m just hoping that it holds at least at the top, because if it doesn’t, then I have no way to get back here with my bike. Or move, for that matter.”
She grimaced. “That sounds kind of sucky.”
It did, and it was.
“The outside looks great,” she changed the subject.
I grinned at her.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Very Dallas Cowboys, though,” she admitted.
I burst out laughing.
“Yeah,” I blew out a strained breath. “I didn’t intentionally choose the Dallas Cowboys’ colors as my house colors, but I didn’t want all that fancy ass rock and brick on the house. And I suck at choosing colors. My mom helped me choose the blue, and my sister chose the gray to go with it, but when you paired the two together they made it look a whole lot different than I’d originally intended.”
She stopped at the backdoor and toed her shoes off when she saw all the other shoes belonging to the other workers, and wiggled her sock clad toes.
The socks she was wearing had words on them.
“Do your socks say ‘fuck this shit?’” I asked, bending down to get a better look.
“My mom got them for me on my first day of nursing school,” she admitted, sounding strangled. “She knew how nervous I was and went out of her way to make it easier for me.”
I chuckled as I pushed open the door, and immediately narrowed my eyes when I saw yet another flaw in the floor.
“The floors are pretty,” she said. “What’s wrong with…oh.”
I snorted. Yeah, oh.
“They were supposed to use paint thinner to get the floors clean before they sealed them, tackling the overspray of white paint that they got on the floor as they were painting the trim. This shit,” I pointed at what I assumed was putty from where the painters dropped it. “Should’ve come up, too.”
“And that?” She pointed at a bubbled-up piece of the floor.
“That, I assume, are air bubbles underneath the sealer,” I said. “Wait until you get a look at the living room. You can see footprints in the stain.”
So I took her around the house and showed her every single detail that had annoyed me over the past week as they finished up.
“What’s that?” She toed something with the heel of her foot.
I looked down, and my eyes narrowed.
Bending over, I tried to get the nail up, but stopped trying when I realized they’d sealed a goddamn nail onto the fucking floor.
This was just one more thing in my day of fucked up.
The whole project had started out okay.
The slab had been poured on Christmas Eve. The framing had started on the first day of the year…and that was where things started to go wrong.
The framers refused to come some days due to the mud that surrounded the house, but since there would be so many contractors coming up and down the driveway, I didn’t want to put twenty grand into something just for them to ruin it.
So I’d held off, and it had added nearly a month onto the construction timeline because of rain delays.
Then the roof went on, a different color than I’d originally chosen—with five thousand more in costs due to a fuck up because of the builder’s inability to calculate shit correctly.
Followed by the Dallas Cowboy paint. Then the trim that was all wobble jobbled due to the shit job they’d done on framing.
It literally was one thing after another with this house, and it all kept coming. Leading me to now, standing in my house, pointing out imperfections in the paint, the scratch in the newly-installed counters, and the crappy floor job.
“It isn’t that bad,” she finally said. “A few cosmetic things…but this is one seriously beautiful house. I would kill for a house like this.”
I’d kill to have you in my house, snuggled up to my side. Your deliciously curvy body there beside me every night for me to do whatever I damn well pleased with it.
Luckily, I was able to hold my tongue.
My cock, however, was a different story.
At least I was wearing jeans today, making it much easier to conceal.
“It’s definitely my dream home,” I told her. “And the day I’m finally moved in, with my shit in here instead of a goddamned storage facility for the last year, it’ll feel more real. Right now, it’s like I’m in limbo, waiting. Always fucking waiting.”
She grinned.
“I hear that if you’re married when you’re building a house, it’s the most harrowing time of your relationship due to all the stress of construction,” she grinned. “And since you’re not married, you have to carry all of that without anyone to help share the load. Pairing all of that with your duties in the ER and as a teacher, I can imagine you’re stressed.”
I laughed.
“Kind of like being a single parent to an infant, who is holding down a full-time job while going to nursing school and doing clinicals?” I teased.
She snorted.
“Yeah, kind of like that.”
“Sir!”
I turned to find Jody hurrying toward me.
Meeting him halfway, I stepped out onto the porch and then moved even further so that I wasn’t in the way of the men working.
“We’re going to fix it!” he promised over and over again. “I talked with the builder, and we think that we can find a way to make it look good.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.