We ate in comfortable silence. Just the sounds of forks on plates and distant traffic. So she said, “I made up an AC problem because I wanted to see you and I’m apparently terrible at normal dating.” You did? Are you mad?
Confused, flattered. I drank coffee but wondering why you didn’t just call ask me to dinner. I was scared.
What if you said no? What if I’d misread everything? At least with a fake AC problem. I had plausible deniability. Can I ask you something? Sure. Last night. Was that just physical? I was attracted to you from the first call
, but I don’t do this. I don’t sleep with clients. It’s a rule. But you broke it. Yeah, because you made up an AC problem to see me again.
Because that’s either crazy or brave, and I respect both because I haven’t stopped thinking about you either. She smiled. So, what now? I have three service calls today. You have a job, art gallery. I’m the owner.
I can be late. She came around the island. Can I see you again properly? Like a date? Yeah, dinner tomorrow. I left smelling like her shower.
My first customer grinned. Rough night. Something like that.
That would change everything. I just didn’t know it yet. Dating Diane was different from anything I expected. She was confident, direct, unapologetic, no games, no testing, no wondering where I stood. If she wanted to see me, she called.
If she was thinking about me, she said so. It was refreshing and terrifying in equal measure. We fell into a rhythm over the next few weeks. Dinner twice weekly at places she chose because I didn’t know the good restaurants in her part of town.
Me staying over when I wasn’t too exhausted from 14-hour days crawling through attics.
Her showing up at my queen’s apartment with takeout and wine when I had early morning calls. Curling up on my secondhand couch like it was as comfortable as her designer furniture. You could decorate, she said one night,
looking around my bare walls. some art. Maybe a plant that isn’t already dead. I’m never here long enough to see it, I said. That’s exactly my point.
But she didn’t push. Not then. She was good about not pushing. Most of the time, but there were complications that grew like cracks in concrete, small at first, easy to ignore, until suddenly they weren’t.
Your hands, she said one night, 3 weeks in. We were lying in her bed emperor size. probably cost more than my van.
And her fingers trace the cuts and calluses on my palms like she was reading Braille. They’re always torn up. Every time I see you, there’s a new cut. Occupational hazard. Sheet metal’s sharp.
Compressor fins are sharper. Does it hurt? Not really. I’m used to it. I flexed my hand, felt the familiar tightness of healing cuts and old scars layered like a topographic map.
My dad’s hands looked the same. His dad’s too probably. family tradition. She brought my hand to her lips, kissed each scar gently, deliberately, like she could heal them with attention. I worry about you crawling through attics in this heat. I looked it up. It was 95° yesterday. That means it was over 130 in those attics.
You could get heat stroke. You could fall through insulation. The articles I read were terrifying. You Googled HVAC safety hazards. I googled, “Why is my boyfriend always injured and exhausted? The results were concerning. It’s the job, but you have an engineering degree. You could do something else.” I pulled my hand away.