Elements of Retrofit (4 page)

I shook my head and laughed at the incredulity of the conversation. “No.”

Then he stood up off the stool, leaning in close to me as he did. “That’s a shame,” he said. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth of his skin, to smell his aftershave.

Fuck.

Still leaning in close to me, he slowly took my plate then turned to walk around the counter and put the plates in the sink.

Apparently he spoke, but my head was still spinning at what had just happened, I didn’t hear him ask me anything. He waved his hand in front of my face to get my attention. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I replied, though the smug bastard smiled at me.

“I asked you how your coffee machine worked,” he said.

I stood up, walked around the counter and took the coffee from him, giving him a glare as I did. It didn’t help that he smiled.

If it were Ryan speaking to me like that, I’d chip him for disrespecting me. Yet, I found it sassy in Cooper. The way his eyes danced, the way his lips twisted in that playful smirk.

The strong smell of coffee seemed to clear my senses a little, sobering me, as I filled the machine, but when I turned to face Cooper again, he wasn’t next to me. He was back at the dining table. And he was back to being all business.

I put his coffee in front of him, answering his questions and discussing the insulation properties of different types of glazing and New York’s planning requirements for retrofits. He was inquisitive and had a thirst for learning everything he could, and the way he just switched from flirting to professional left me wondering if I’d imagined the flirting side of it.

I mean, why
would
he flirt with me? Not only was I twice his age, and the father of a friend of his, but it could be career-ending.

Well, not for me. I might get a slap on the wrist, but his career would be over before it even began.

Why
would
he flirt with me? Who the hell was I kidding? What the hell was I thinking? I could have kicked myself for even considering the idea. First the dream, then the fantasising about it. Now this?

I needed to go out and hook up. Find some one-night stand and fuck him senseless. Or be fucked senseless. I needed to lose myself, for just one night.

The fact that I’d fantasised about Cooper, about having him underneath me, should have been enough warning. It had been too long since I’d had sex. I was only interested in him, I told myself convincingly, because I’d gone too long without fulfilling sex.

I needed to go out. I needed to get laid. Then there’d be no more of this irresponsible infatuation with a twenty-two-year-old.

“Plans for tonight?” Cooper’s voice startled me.

“Um, yeah,” I told him. “I have plans.”
Only very new, not-thought-through plans,
I thought to myself.
But plans nonetheless.

“Where are you off to?”

“Just catching up with an old friend,” I told him, when the truth was I had no clue.

“I’m supposed to be going out with Ryan and some other guys tonight. But I might cancel,” he said, looking straight at me, as though he was trying to suggest something.

“You should go,” I told him. “You don’t need to be working here with me. Go hang out with the guys, have some fun.”

Cooper stretched his arms above his head and yawned. He looked to the table in front of us and changed the subject. “We got a lot done today.”

“We did,” I agreed. “I have a bit more to catch up on tomorrow,” I said, and he nodded. I quickly added, “You don’t have to come in tomorrow. I won’t tell Jennifer.”

He smiled at that. “We’ll see,” he said. “But yeah, I should let you go. If you have plans.”

I nodded. “I do.”

Cooper started to pack his papers up, he closed down his laptop and slid it into his satchel. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “Though, seriously? A peanut butter sandwich would have been fine.”

He collected his things and he’d no sooner walked out of the door than I was in the shower. Fuck. I had a hard-on from just being around him, his smile and his smell. It was the second time in as many days I’d needed to jerk off in the shower because the thought of him was too much.

It was the second time in as many days I imagined it was Cooper underneath me, over me, or his lips around me.

I didn’t even wait for nightfall. I got dressed and went downtown to a local bar I’d been to plenty of times. It was only early, so there weren’t many people, but everyone I looked at wasn’t right for me.

I just wanted some faceless, nameless guy, who I could take to a hotel. I only lived a block away, but I never took casual hook-ups home. I wanted the anonymity, the security. But as I scoured the faces of men for hours, and as other men approached me, none of them were what I was looking for.

None of them had that shine in their eyes, or that mischievous smile. None of them were young and vibrant, not like Cooper.

Fucking hell.

I ended up back at my apartment, pissed off and frustrated. I couldn’t even have a one-night stand without thinking about him. I stripped down and climbed into bed naked and this time, with images of him behind my eyelids when I jerked off, I imagined him inside me. I imagined what it would be like to be pinned underneath him, while he buried himself in me.

I came so hard my head spun.

But I slept like a baby.

* * * *

The next morning I was up early, as always. Even being a Sunday didn’t mean I still couldn’t get work done. Amazingly enough, for the first few hours I was up, I didn’t think of Cooper at all.

Until it was about nine o’clock when my buzzer rang. Lionel’s apologetic voice crackled through. “Sorry to interrupt you on a Sunday, sir.”

“It’s fine, Lionel.”

“Cooper Jones is here again.”

“Is he just?”

“Yes, sir,” Lionel said. “He said to tell you he has coffee…” There was a muffle of voices again and Lionel groaned. “And peanut butter, sir. He said to tell you he bought you peanut butter.”

I grinned into the intercom, grateful they couldn’t see me smile. “Send him up.”

Chapter Five

I unlocked the door and waited, and true to his word, he walked in with two large coffees and a jar of peanut butter.

I was smiling at him. “What are you doing?”

“If you work, then I work,” he said, handing me a coffee. “Jennifer’s rules.”

“I work every day.”

“I don’t mind,” he said simply. “If I want to be the best, I need to do what the best does.”

“Is that flattery?”

He lifted up the jar of peanut butter. “No, this is flattery,” he said with a heart-stopping grin. “I can’t believe you don’t have any.”

I smiled at him, and he stared at me. Neither of us spoke, and the air was electric. Fuck. “So, how was last night?” I asked, changing the subject and putting some distance between us.

“Oh, I never went,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Wasn’t up for it.”

I was oddly relieved he hadn’t gone out, hadn’t picked up anyone, or that he hadn’t taken anyone home. Fuck, this was getting ridiculous.

Then he asked, “How was your night?”

“Uh, okay,” I lied. “I was home pretty early.”

“No hot date?” he asked lightly, but there was a seriousness in his eyes.

I shook my head. “No.”

Cooper exhaled through puffed cheeks, seemingly relieved. “So, what’s on the agenda for today?”

He was wearing jeans today, not suit pants. He had a button-down shirt, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, so I wasn’t sure if he was here to work or not. It was definitely more relaxed.

“I, um, I’d like to get started on the Cariati file,” I told him. I didn’t exactly have anything for him to do, but didn’t want him to leave either.

This kid was doing my head in.

“Okay,” he said, excited. “You’re doing the facades for that job, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Can I watch?” he asked.

I looked at him disbelievingly. “You want to watch me draw?”

He nodded, but his cheeks tinted with embarrassment. “It’s like watching a masterpiece from the beginning,” he admitted quietly.

I couldn’t help but smile. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

His eyebrows flickered. “Really?”

He stared at me until I had to look away. I put my coffee down on the counter, pretending to be distracted. Jesus. I wasn’t imagining things. This kid was seriously flirting with me. Fuck.

I should have stopped it. I should have said no. I should have told him from the very beginning that this was a bad, bad idea.

But I couldn’t. While the logical, sensible side of my brain was telling me to put an end right now to this nonsense, the selfish, infatuated, stupid part of my brain wanted it.

My body wanted it.

I looked back at him, at his smug little smile, then snatched the jar of peanut butter from his hand. I looked at the jar and turned it over in my hands. “Flattery in a jar, huh?”

He smiled as he sipped his coffee then looked around to the dining table. “So, are we working today?”

Work. Right. “Yes, we are,” I said, getting my brain back on track. “You can keep going with the specs on the Lewington job while I get started. It takes a while to grid it all out.”

“I can’t believe you really start each job by drawing it out,” he said, walking over to the table. “You know it’s the twenty-first century, right? We have computers now.”

“I like to see it develop in front of me,” I tried to explain. “If I draw it out, it seems to give me a better feel for the overall tone. I’ve spoken to the Cariatis many times. I know what they want. I can see it in my head, and it comes out better by my hand than with a computer.”

I looked up then, to find Cooper staring at me. He was smiling, as if some errant thought made him happy. “That’s amazing,” he said. Then he added quietly, “You’re amazing.”

I was taken aback by his blatant compliment, pleased, but a little embarrassed. I looked at the table instead of him. “Oh. I’m not sure about that.”

“I am,” he said confidently. “And there wasn’t even any peanut butter involved.”

It made me laugh and as I sat down, I opened my grid pad and pulled my draughting leads from my satchel. Cooper looked at the specialised pencils. “Do they still make those?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s not a quill and inkwell, you know.”

He laughed. “No, in the museum they have the quills and draughting leads in separate displays.”

I chuckled, despite his constant jibes at my age. “Comments like that counteract the peanut butter.”

He grinned, and instead of looking even slightly remorseful, he looked at me like I’d just proposed a challenge.

I tapped the table with my index finger. “Enough with the smartass comments. Work.”

Like I hadn’t spoken at all, he said, “How about we have a little bet?”

“Pardon?” I asked. “As in a wager?”

“More of a professional, social experiment,” he mused. “How about, for the next four hours, you do your drawing of the façade, and I enter in the exterior details into the CAD programme. At the end of the four hours we’ll see, one, who was more productive, and two, who was more accurate.” He opened his laptop and looked at me expectantly.

“And what exactly is the wager?”

“The loser buys lunch.”

I smiled at him, at the gleam in his eyes and at the daring of his smile. “Deal.”

I slid the spec sheet across the table to Cooper. “You’ll need that,” I told him, and started with my grid paper and went by memory alone. It was a remodelling job on an old building, strictly confined by city building codes.

I knew those codes like the back of my hand, I knew what the owners wanted and I knew how to make it happen. So, picking up one of my draughting leads, I got started and not even the annoying
tap-tap-tap
of Cooper on his laptop keyboard could distract me.

It was my favourite part of my job. Of course all jobs went through the specifically designed CAD programme, but for me, this was where each job started.

It was about two hours later that Cooper stood up and stretched. He walked off towards the kitchen and came back with the jar of peanut butter and a spoon. “What?” he asked, when I looked at him. “It was my jar of flattery.”

He then proceeded to eat it by the spoonful, and one time I looked up at him, he was concentrating hard at the computer screen with the spoon still in his mouth. It was…cute.

Soon after that, my stomach let me know when it was lunchtime, and sure enough when I checked the time, it’d almost been four hours. I stood up and walked into the kitchen, grabbed two bottled waters and a spoon and went back to the table. I put the two waters down, leaned my ass against the edge of the table near Cooper and picked up the jar of peanut butter.

“How are you going with your wager?” I asked, as I scooped out a spoonful from the jar.

He sighed. “Well, I’m done, but I know it won’t be as good as yours.”

I stuck the spoon in my mouth and as soon as I tasted the peanut paste, I couldn’t help but groan. “This is good.”

Cooper looked up at me, seemingly transfixed by the spoon in my mouth. “Told you,” he said a little gruffly. He shook his head, and looked quickly back to his laptop, turning it around to face me. “Not that we really even need to check, because I’m sure yours will put mine to shame.”

I looked at the screen. “You’ve done a really good job,” I told him. “The façade looks good, the elevations are clean. It looks good.”

“Mmm,” he said, not convinced.

“You’ve got the coding correct,” I reassured him. “And considering it’s a new programme to you, don’t dismiss that. You’ve done a good job.”

“Righto,” he mumbled. “Let’s have a look at yours.” He stood up and walked around to my side of the table, and he picked up my grid pad and I watched him. He was quiet for a long moment, so I walked around and stood beside him. “Jesus,” he whispered. “It’s…this is amazing.” I smiled at him and he shook his head. “The shading, the perspective, the lines…” he trailed off. “Wow. It’s um, it’s…”

“It’s lunchtime and you’re paying,” I told him, taking the pad and throwing it onto the table. Cooper grinned at me for a beat too long, walked to my front door and held it open for me.