He’s there on the roof now, and I watch as he hammers new shingles, his whole body moving in powerful unison. I shiver, tingles rolling down my spine and gathering at my core. Damn it. I can’t stop the way I’m reacting, but I’ll just have to push through it. Why couldn’t this have been different? Why did he have to disappear? Just thinking about it makes my heart ache. We were supposed to go to the movies together. Something so simple, and he never showed. I knew that he was going to go to bootcamp. We talked about it, how we would write letters and call and try to see each other.
But he never came back. It was like he turned into a ghost. The only reason that I knew he wasn’t dead was that the whole town found out that he left his father a note saying that he was joining the army. And that was that. He was gone. No warning, weeks early, without so much as a goodbye.
It’s been years, and I know that something like that really shouldn’t hurt after all this time. But I can still feel the hole of those emotions in my chest, so deep that it has ragged edges. I loved Wallace. We were so deeply in love that I couldn’t imagine any other person holding a place in my heart. They say you never forget your first love, and I guess that’s true. What they don’t say is that if your first love hurts you, you never forget that either.
Wallace slides down the ladder and grabs a bottle of water from the cooler. He raises a hand to me and smiles before he takes the cap off and pours some of it over his head like he’s in a fucking commercial. Shit. I feel like I’m melting, and it’s not from the heat. I never thought that I’d be uncomfortably wet like this in the middle of the work day, but here we are.
He knows what he’s doing too, the bastard. The cheeky grin he aims at me while drinking some water says enough to me. Pushing my buttons, trying to get under my skin enough to give him a second chance. Maybe he’s just trying to do it to drive me crazy. Well, I can play that game, and I will. If I have to be uncomfortably aroused at work, so does he.
I grab a bottle of water for myself, bending down right in front of him, making sure he gets a clear shot of my ass. He forgets that I know him too, and he’s always been an ass man. When I right myself his eyes are a little glazed, and I smirk at him. “Back to work,” I say lightly before going back up the ladder with another batch of shingles.
It’s a battle from there. I make sure that Wallace has a good view of me working and I brush by him unnecessarily to reach for tools whenever I can. He gives me slow smiles and subtle muscle flexes and stares that are melting my underwear beneath my clothes. I hate how much it’s affecting me, like no matter how much is between us, my body doesn’t care. It wants him anyway.
The work we do is a lot, but it’s not enough to get it done by the end of the day. “I can give you guys overtime if you stay to get it done,” I tell the crew, but none of them can. Some of them have other commitments, and I know a couple of them don’t take overtime because they’re afraid of regular hours getting cut.
“I can.” The voice comes from behind me, and of course it’s Wallace. “You don’t even have to pay me.”
I smile, but it’s not real. I’m hiding my nerves. “Great. We’ll see if we can get a bit more done. We’ll just have to get it finished in the morning, I guess. See you guys later,” I tell the rest of the crew, as I grab my hammer and return to the roof. After a full day of flirting back and forth, I’m not sure what’s going to happen when we’re alone. This isn’t something I planned for. But it’s summer, and there’s at least a couple hours of daylight left before work actually has to stop.
Oddly enough, the flirting fades. Not entirely, because I can’t stop sneaking glances out of the corner of my eye, and Wallace keeps catching me doing it, but it’s not as hard or as fast as it’s been the whole day, and we work in silence. Until I need more supplies, and I need to climb down to get more, and Wallace climbs down too. He follows me around the side of the house to where the supplies are, and when I reach out for them, he catches my arm and pulls me against him.