His head cocked to the side. “Fuck no. Never owned property in my life and definitely never had a loan.”
That was intriguing, but I didn’t have time to get into it, he wasn’t done talking.
“I just know that shit goes down and it sucks. But if that shit happened to you with what I’ve watched you put into this place the last six years, it would do more than suck.”
He was not wrong.
He was also still not done.
“You refinance only if you’re gettin’ a better rate, you roll that second mortgage into it but you don’t borrow more to build the laundry or a gazebo. You don’t do those at all until you got the cash to pay for it or I got a good amount of time at Glacier Lily to put them up for you.”
Again, there was a lot there, all of it we had to go over, and I decided to start with the part that interested me most.
“You’ll put them up for me?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh, how are you gonna do that, Deacon? We’re not talking cleaning gutters here.”
I saw a veil slide over his features. He didn’t shut down, but he still shut me out.
He did this further by answering simply, “Got the skills.”
I took a moment to decide whether to push that or not.
In that moment I saw his expression remain veiled and we’d just shared something beautiful. I didn’t want to do anything to mar that, like push it when he wasn’t ready. So I let that go.
“The laundry would be a very nice added service,” I told him. “That’s probably the biggest request I get. There’s a Laundromat in town but people don’t like to schlep their stuff to town. And those coin-op machines cost a whack to use. It would pay for itself.”
“It could also start payin’ for itself when you can pocket that shit, not you earnin’ back what you put into it, givin’ it away, takin’ more time to do that since you’re payin’ interest on what you borrowed.”
He was again not wrong and this was sounding familiar.
“My dad would say that,” I told him.
“See your dad isn’t the scarecrow either,” he replied and I grinned.
“No, he isn’t.”
“No increase on your loan, Cassidy,” he ordered.
“You’re being bossy again, Deacon,” I returned, my grin dying, my decision not to mar this beautiful moment in cabin eleven suddenly forgotten. “Even if you do me the huge favor of building it for me, I have to pay you something and buy materials.”
“Pay me?” he asked, his tone weirdly incredulous.
“Yes,” I answered, my tone understandably determined.
“Pay me,” he repeated, but it wasn’t a question this time. It was an opportunity for me to take back what I said.
“Yes, Deacon. You wouldn’t be cleaning out gutters; you’d be building a building.”
At that, he looked to the pillow and told it, “She’s naked in my bed in eleven, my cum leakin’ outta her,” his eyes came back to mine, “so this conversation ends here.”
“We should get this straight,” I pointed out, because we should. Relationships crashed and burned after arguments about money and I didn’t want that for ours.
“We can do that when you’re not naked with my cum leakin’ out of you in my bed in cabin eleven,” he returned.
I sighed because he was right.