This made me happy.
I took a sip from my beer and found I was at the dregs, the part of the beer I refused to consume.
I dropped my hand and turned back to Deacon. “I need another one, honey. You want one?”
“Yeah, but I’ll get ’em,” he said, hands to the arms of his chair, pushing himself up.
“I’ll get them.”
He looked down at me. “Got ’em, Cassie.”
I smiled up at him, even happier.
Gutters cleaned. Someone to go grocery shopping with. One meal every now and then I didn’t have to cook (and it was a good one). Great sex on a more-than-regular basis. Waking up not alone but tucked close to someone who meant something to me. And when I needed a beer, I didn’t have to haul my booty in the house to get it.
Oh yes, life was sweet.
Deacon went into the house and came back with fresh cold ones. Then he sat at my side, lifted his feet, and tangled them in mine.
Definitely.
Life was sweet.
* * * * *
“Seriously, no,” I said low.
“Is this gonna happen every fuckin’ time?” Deacon asked back, openly annoyed.
“No, because we’re gonna get this straight now.”
The gutters were done on all the cabins, cleaned, and the areas that needed replacing were replaced. Now, Deacon wanted to start work on my roof.
And he was intent on buying the shingles.
I was of an opposite mind.
Thus, we were standing in my foyer, facing off again.
I’d let him buy the groceries, no argument, not even to bust his chops because I’d had my words about him wandering off again so I thought that was enough for one day.
But he bought the gutters, including the replacement materials we needed for the cabins.
I was getting the shingles.
“You budget for shingles?” he asked.
“I have money,” I answered.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“No, but you know that since I didn’t even know I needed shingles. But it doesn’t matter. You’re clearly worried about the state of my roof and I don’t figure you’d be this fired up to take care of it if that concern wasn’t valid. And I’d rather have a problem fixed before it becomes a real problem. You take care of problems, even if they require money. Which, as I said, I have. Dad won’t let me pay him back and that’s partly because he wants me to have savings for a rainy day. This is literally that: taking care of something for a rainy day.”
His eyes slightly narrowed before he asked a bizarre question. “You buy your ex out?”
“Sorry?”
“That guy you scraped off, you buy him out of his part of this business?”