Fahrenheit (11 page)

“Sofa,” she looked around the big empty split level floor plan house. It was a single story home, but it was big, too big for just one person. There were only two bedrooms, but both bedrooms were large. There was a den, a spacious Florida room with beautiful rock fixtures that expertly framed the salt water pool. She didn’t care about the pool. She didn’t swim so she didn’t need it, but she couldn’t deny the beauty of the area. It felt more tropical oasis than Florida home extension. She loved it. Maybe one day she would learn how to swim and actually use it. Then again, she hadn’t learned in all these years she didn’t particularly think she was going to do it now.

“You really are too big for me,” she sighed. It wasn’t just keeping the place clean—she could do that, even though it would take more time than her little one bedroom apartment used to take to clean, but she could manage. It was filling the place with enough furniture and art to make it feel like home. She planned to use the guest bathroom as her darkroom. At least she wouldn’t have to keep dragging the enlarger in and out of her master bathroom. She could just set everything up and leave it in the spare bathroom for whenever she was ready to work on some black and white photographs. It wouldn’t exactly be as if she wouldn’t have the time. Her life was about to get back to the same schedule she had before, work, more work, and home. She shrugged. “Such is life, Eve. Such is life.” She took a few measurements of the rooms as she thought about where she might want to put certain pieces of furniture. She couldn’t buy everything she wanted, or needed, for that matter. She was on a budget and she didn’t do plastic. She didn’t even have a credit card. She had declined every offer her bank had given her to get one. She didn’t even bother opening the letters of preapproval. She just chalked them straight in the shredder and moved on. Why use plastic when a fifty dollar purchase would end up costing her twice as much in interest fees?

No, she was using hard earned cash and if she didn’t have enough for something she just wouldn’t buy it until she did. She wanted the bed; that was first and foremost on her list. She wouldn’t mind a sofa or some nice seating chairs for the den, maybe even for the living room, but she would forego the dining room table. She ate standing up in the kitchen anyway so a dining room table wasn’t a necessity. She needed an area rug for her bedroom. She loved tile floors, but they could be cold. She didn’t want to crawl out of bed on some cold winter morning to have her feet hit what felt like blocks of ice. An area rug, one that fit underneath the bed and extended slightly outward, would be perfect.

She showered, using a travel sized bar of Dove soap and her body sponge. She let the hot water beat down on her body. The shower wasn’t anything spectacular. Looking at the care that had gone into designing the home she would have thought the master bathroom would have been a knockout, but it really wasn’t. It was nice; she wouldn’t deny that, but it wasn’t a knockout. There was a floor to ceiling glass block wall that let in the natural light from outdoors. Fortunately glass block had a tendency to obscure the view of others, and since the master bath faced the Florida room she didn’t have to worry much about peeping Toms anyway. In fact, her bathroom had a door that led out to the pool area. She did like that aspect, but she would have loved the bathroom more if the showerhead had been something more than the standard sprayer. She knew she could change it if she wanted to. She would have to make a run to the local Lowe’s to see if she could find a showerhead that provided more coverage for her body, maybe one of those rainfall shower heads with the massaging sprayer option. She would look for that later, right now priorities were getting a bed to sleep on, if nothing else.

She had to give it to Mr. Chris Armstrong; when he designed the interior he had broke away from the standard white walls, but he hadn’t gone as crazy as some of the homes she had seen with the purple walls in one room, green in another, yellow in another and something pink just down the hall. He had done nice soft shades of pale desert sand in the bedroom, and a pale yellow in the master bathroom. The wall colors flowed from room to room and connected in a way that would make adding any furniture color possible. She was leaning toward deep reds. She loved rich reds and burgundy tones, a little mahogany and wine red color was good too. First things first, she needed the bed. If they had one like the set she used to have then she knew exactly where her next stop would be…bedding and a rug for the floor. Now that she thought about it, she needed everything. She needed new cooking tools as all of her pots, pans and dinnerware were now lost to the apartment that was. She had her insurance payout, but she was trying to spend that judiciously, as in not all at one time and not all in one place. She put most of the money in her savings account and left some of the money in her checking account for shopping. There was a lot she needed to replace, and since her car was no longer operational she had to consider replacing that too. Fortunately the car insurance would eventually get around to paying on her claim.

She thought about the task ahead of her, and the expense of undertaking such a task as she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. When her hand hit an empty silver rod she realized something else. “Towels…you need towels.” She mumbled as she stood there, dripping wet all over the sand colored tile floor. She had a little time before she wanted to head south; she would just have to air dry.

After a morning at the furniture store she had found her bedroom set still offered for sale. She wasn’t sure she would find it when she first arrived, but after walking around the massive store she spotted it. The sales clerk, Jordon, a very nice man with deep ebony skin and a bald head, told her the set was slowly inching its way to the discontinued section so she was lucky she didn’t miss it. In a couple months it wouldn’t be available anymore. She ordered the queen size bed, the master chest, not the dresser because she liked the chest with its three quarter mirror that was encased on the door that opened for more storage, and beautiful dresser drawers already complemented the chest so there was no need for a separate dresser. She bought the bench to go at the foot of the bed and a cute eighty dollar vanity table and chair set in a nice cherry wood finish. She even found one oversized sitting chair for the den. It was round and cushiony with creamy beige sued fabrics and dark wood tones. She was going to put that chair near the bay window so, whenever she had time, she could sit and look out at the cul-de-sac. The way her new home sat she could open the blinds without having a direct look inside her neighbor’s house. She liked the layout because it meant she had a little privacy of her own as well. She made a run to the Big Lots down the street where she found a nice dinnerware set, some silverware, glasses and two towel sets. She didn’t care that one set was yellow and the other was red. She needed towels; they didn’t have to be perfectly matched…not right now anyway. Once she settled in and acquired some of the things she needed, then she would worry about buying more of the items that weren’t as important as others.

The furniture store couldn’t deliver her furniture for another two weeks. Jordon had said a month at first, but she batted her eyes and assured him that a month was just too long to wait. He smiled at her and then promised he would see if he could work her into the schedule earlier. Everything she had ordered would be in within a week, except the chair and vanity, he had said, so he scheduled two delivery dates. The earliest she could get was two weeks, but two weeks was better than a month.

She didn’t want to sleep on the floor for two weeks so she stopped and bought the air mattress. It wasn’t until she pulled into her driveway that she noticed the very angry looking man standing on her doorsteps. She took a deep breath as she pushed the button to raise the garage door. As if he had any right to look miffed, she mused. She was the one who should be angry. She told him up front what she could and couldn’t do and he said that he could wait. She told him up front because she liked him and she didn’t want to like him any more than she already did if he wasn’t going to stick around.

She was angry with herself because the moment he said he could wait she let down her defenses and she let him in. Well that was stupid on her part, and she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Some people were meant to be married, some people were meant to be single, and clearly she was going to stay single forever. Never again would she put herself in this position. She was officially swearing off romantic relationships.

“You can’t return a phone call?”

“How did you know where I live?”

“I went by the hotel to see you last night. It was late, but the desk clerk recognized me. He told me you checked out.”

She nodded. Clearly she had checked out. That wasn’t her question. She wanted to know how he found her. She popped the trunk and went around to get some of her bags out. Normally she would let the garage door down before starting to unload, but she didn’t exactly want to be stuck in a closed door garage with Adam right now.

“I have friends in many places,” he stepped in front of her as she tried to move past him.

“Do you mind?” She tried to side step him again as she shifted the bags in her arms. She had loaded up with her bags trying to carry as much as she could—as she always did—she had bags hung on her forearms and she was still trying to carry the comforter set in her arms.

Adam reached out and started unloading things from her hold. She hadn’t expected that. In fact, she hadn’t anticipated much of anything because with her arms that full she wasn’t sure how she planned to unlock the door. The only thing she could say is that she wasn’t thinking because she was in a hurry to get inside, away from him.

“You haven’t changed your address at the DMV yet, but a friend who has a friend who knows your landlord told me the place had finally been rented and your name came up.”

Small town magic, she thought. It wasn’t so small that everybody knew everybody’s business, but it was small enough that circles overlapped, especially with Adam’s job, and her job. “Why are you here?” She put down the bags on the kitchen floor and he did the same.

“You didn’t return my calls.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“I called you.” He glared at her.

She pulled out her phone ready to check the missed call section and prove her point. She was going to give him a piece of her mind until she pressed the menu button on the phone and realized that it didn’t spring to life with a bright blue glow like it usually did. “Oh,” she held down the power button. “I must have turned it off.” The only thing she could think of is that while she was trying to hang up on him she had held the power button down too long and had managed to turn off her phone. Well, that explained why she hadn’t had any calls at all today. Mitch was probably going to be angry if he tried to reach her and hadn’t been able to.

“Sorry, I guess you did call.”

“You hung up on me.”

“There wasn’t anything left to say.”

“The hell there wasn’t.”

She tacked her hands to her hips. “Don’t use that type of language with me.” It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard cursing before; just that most people didn’t use that language when talking to her—especially not while they had that incessantly angry glare thing going on.

“You break up with me and you can’t give me a chance to fight for you.”

“Fight for me? Adam you’ve had every excuse in the book for breaking every date we’ve had since that night. A month; that’s how long it’s been since we’ve actually seen each other romantically. Sure, a phone call once a week, where we talk for what; ten minutes at best? It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. It’s okay. I gave you your way out. Just take it.” Those ten minute phone calls had meant the world to her. She tried to really believe he was too busy to date her like most people dated, but at least they had managed to stop playing phone tag once or twice a week. And for ten minutes, before he had to be back on the job, or she got called out on assignment, they talked about him and his job, and his missing her. She believed him. Ten minutes and he had her suckered in. No, take that back, ten minutes once or twice a week and he had her hooked. Had she been smarter she would have realized that ten minutes wasn’t the stuff serious relationships were made of; he was probably just calling so he didn’t come off as being a jerk. Well, she had given him a way out. He was free and clear without any hard feelings, none that she would admit anyway, so why couldn’t he just take it?

“No, you gave yourself a way out.” He inched closer to her and she stepped back. He kept walking toward her, like he was stalking his prey and he didn’t intend to let it, let her, get away. She moved back more until she couldn’t go any farther. She had expertly backed herself into the island in the center of the kitchen. “You are so afraid somebody is going to come along and upset your plan that the first sign of something happening you make a run for it.”

She started to turn, to walk away and he placed both hands on the island, encasing her, trapping her within his cage. He looked at her, holding her eyes with his and she couldn’t bare the intensity in his gaze, the truth in his words, so she looked away.

“You can’t look at me,” he leaned in close, “because you know I’m right. You’re so afraid that I’m going to be the man to make you drop your panties that you were just waiting for an excuse to walk away.”

“You canceled, not me.”

“I had to work. I told you that. You know what I do. You know how unpredictable things are right now. You know we’ve got fires burning all over Flagler County and you know our resources are low. When I’m called in, whether it’s my day off or not, I go.” His tone was angry, as if she should have understood.