Mom Handed Us One Lease, So I Handed My Stepbrother My Bed novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Floor in Front of the Fan

Jakob's POV

I fixed her blinds with a strip of cedar and a staple gun while she watched me from the doorway of her room.

It took four minutes, because I am good with wood.

I would have taken four hours if I thought she would keep standing there.

She had changed into a thin white tank top and no bra, and the late sun came through the cloth.

"There," I said. "No one on Pereida Street is looking into this window again."

"My hero," Maricela said.

"Don't."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because I'm not."

I set the staple gun on her dresser and made myself stand still.

In August my father had called me on a roof in Fredericksburg, with a stone saw in my hand, crying.

He asked me for something, and I said yes.

I said it fast, because he was crying, and because I had never once told him no.

I had not met her then, except across a steakhouse table and on a dance floor.

I had met her now.

I had her fingerprints on my forearm, and her taste in my mouth, and I could not take the yes back.

I could not tell her what it was, either, because it was not mine to tell.

The envelope sat on my desk with a mug on its corner.

Every time I walked past it, I heard my father's voice on that phone call again.

"Saldana," I said.

"Yes?"

"We should stop."

The room went quiet.

Out in the kitchen the new fan ticked, and a car passed in the alley.

Her face did not change at all.

"Stop what?"

"This. Before Thanksgiving."

I rubbed the back of my neck.

"It's getting harder. I'm going to look at my father across that table, and I don't know what he'll see."

"You're scared."

"Yes," I said.

"Of Gretchen?"

"Of what it does to you," I said. "When it comes out."

She crossed the room.

She did it slowly, barefoot, until she stood so close that I had to look straight down.

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