Fixer Upper: A Lesbian Romance Page 2

  Hannah took out her phone and checked the balance of her bank account. She had exactly one hundred and forty-three dollars and no hope of replenishment any time soon. The plane ticket, the Uber car, and five days’ worth of Airbnb accommodations had completely wiped out her savings and it wasn’t like she could get a job in Camden because she had no transportation to get there. The bus route surely didn’t include the old county road – not when Aunt Nora and the neighbor across the street were the only possible passengers.

  Hannah did need to find a way into Camden, though, and today at that. Eventually she would need to eat, and use the toilet, and it would be nice to clean the years of dust and mouse droppings out of the house. Even though Hannah was sure her Uber driver would be thrilled to get a repeat customer, it seemed terribly extravagant to call him back. She needed every cent she had just to subsist until she knew what her next move would be.

  She decided to cross her fingers and hope her luck held as she went through the kitchen and into the back yard. There was an old barn back there, much worse for the wear, and when Hannah was a kid that was where her Great Uncle Carl parked his Chrysler LeBaron. It was old even back then so she didn’t expect to find that particular car, but there was at least half a chance that whatever Aunt Nora was driving before she went to the nursing home would be parked in the barn.

  No such luck.

  When she pulled the heavy barn doors open, Hannah was greeted by nothing more than a powerful, musty smell, a few rusty garden tools, and a bike with two flat tires.

  “Oh well,” she said, trying not to be too disappointed. “I guess my luck had to run out some time, right Aunt Nora?”

  Hannah couldn’t remember how far it was to Camden from Aunt Nora’s house, but it was at least a five-minute drive. That must mean it was close to ten miles, which would be a very long walk, made even longer when she was weighed down with grocery bags.

  She went over to the bike, which looked like something out of the seventies with its banana seat and high handle bars. Hannah hadn’t ridden a bike in years and the last time she put air in a set of bike tires was… never? She’d always been perfectly content to let someone else handle stuff like that before, and now she was wishing she’d done it at least once.

  Don’t break a nail, princess, she could hear Rebecca saying. That was one of her favorite refrains, and it more or less meant, ‘just stay on the couch eating bon-bons and leave the work to the capable people.’

  Was it mean? Yes.

  Was it kind of true? Considering the fact that Hannah had been out of work for two whole years, it most likely was.

  Hannah brought the bike into the yard where the air was more breathable, having to drag it along because of how rusty and stiff the chain had become from years of disuse, but other than the tires and the chain, it seemed to be in decent condition. Hannah went back into the barn, digging around on a shelf full of old tools for a bike pump, and she found a can of WD-40 in the process. She brought both things into the yard, and after a minute or two of puzzling out how to get the bike’s front tire back on the wheel where it had slipped off in its deflated state, she filled up the tires. Next, she sprayed a generous amount of WD-40 on the chain until it was dripping with grease, figuring that as she pedaled, it would work its way in.

  Then she stood back, knocking the dirt from her hands, and felt pretty darn full of herself in that moment.

  “Look at that, Rebecca,” she said out loud. “I didn’t even break a sweat.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Avery got up from the porch swing after a while and went inside, throwing her empty beer bottle in the recycle bin with a little more force than was necessary. She heard the glass crack as it hit the bottom of the bin, and then she went over to the door where her keys were hanging on their customary hook.

  She didn’t recognize the pretty brunette who just let herself into Nora’s place – she definitely wasn’t one of the grandkids – and Avery couldn’t figure out what business the girl had here. Probably hired by Nora’s ungrateful family to sell the house and suck every last cent out of the poor woman, even after her death.

  Avery thought this would be a fine time to drive into town and get her grocery shopping out of the way for the week. She couldn’t stand to stick around and watch Nora’s place become some generic house with a For Sale sign in the yard. Avery grabbed her keys and headed out to her truck. There was no sign of the girl and the house looked just as abandoned as always – for now, at least. It was strange that the girl didn’t come in her own car, but Avery had long since learned that there was no sense in looking for logic where Nora’s family was involved. Self-interest and greed never failed to win the day with them.

  She made the short drive into Camden and went to the small grocery store on the edge of town. It was a mom-and-pop place that mostly stocked the staples and no frills, and Avery had been going there for years - ever since she bought her house in the early days of Camden’s boom period. Now there was a Kroger in town with much better selection and fresher produce, plus one of the biggest Wal-Marts Avery had ever seen, and a drug store chain on almost every corner.

  Avery knew because she’d built a lot of them, and that was why she liked giving her money to Hansen’s Market – in a way, it was like atoning for her sins. But Avery needed to work and there were plenty of construction jobs to go around in a town like Camden, which was in the middle of an evolutionary leap from rural to suburban.

  She parked in the gravel lot – Hansen’s was doing its best to hold onto that small-town vibe while the buildings that went up just down the street were growing higher and higher. Then she went in and grabbed a cart. Avery never needed a shopping list – she packed the same turkey sandwich and bottle of Gatorade in her lunch every day of the week, and ninety percent of her dinners came in a box that could be microwaved in less than five minutes. It was quick and didn’t require any fuss, even if it was a bit flavorless sometimes. She didn’t have time to cook a meal for one when she’d rather be focusing on her work. The construction jobs in Camden weren’t going to be booming forever, so she might as well take all the work she could while the getting was good.

  She’d just finished pondering the meager selection of frozen waffles, throwing a box of Eggos toward her cart as always, when someone came around the corner and smashed right into Avery.

  The box flew off its trajectory, skidding across the floor, and Avery couldn’t help smirking at the comical way the girl rebounded, stumbling backward as her hair fell over her face. Then Avery realized who she’d gotten into a collision with and the smile dropped off her lips.

  It was the girl from Nora’s place, and now she was in Avery’s grocery store.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, picking up the waffles. “I was in my head and I guess I wasn’t looking where I was-”

  As she handed the box to Avery their eyes met and her words trailed off. She was a lot prettier up close than she’d been from across the street – the word ‘shrewish’ had come to mind when Avery was watching her earlier, but that turned out to be a very unfair assessment. She had hazel eyes and that long, dark hair was thick, flowing over her shoulders and just grazing over large, perfectly formed breasts. Avery had to keep from biting her lip, or allowing her eyes to linger.

  And then there were the girl’s pouty, candy pink lips that separated just slightly as she took Avery in, perhaps recognizing her from the porch?

  Avery tossed the Eggos into her cart and watched as color rose into the girl’s cheeks and she finished her sentence anticlimactically. “-going.”

  Avery wasn’t feeling much more inclined to give the girl a break as she had been earlier when she was watching her from across the street, but she couldn’t help but smirk internally at the way the girl said that word. If there was one thing Avery knew it was smitten women, and that was the tone of someone who lost her train of thought while her eyes swept over Avery’s features and liked what she saw. Avery could appreciate that, even if she cou
ldn’t get behind the probable reason behind the girl’s presence at Nora’s place.

  “It’s fine,” she said curtly, reaching for her cart. She didn’t need to get tangled up in the affairs of Aunt Nora’s evil offspring. She intended to finish her shopping and get the hell out of there, away from temptation. There were half a dozen things she’d love to say to anyone who would associate with Nora’s evil offspring, and she just wasn’t in the mood to make a scene in the middle of Hansen’s.

  She was halfway around the corner, angling toward the bread aisle, when the girl called, “Hey, didn’t I see you earlier?”

  Great, Avery thought, pushing her cart to one side and turning around. It looked like they really were going to do this right now.

  “Yeah,” she said, making sure that her voice was as unfriendly as possible to avoid confusion about where her allegiances laid. This girl should feel lucky that Avery was talking to her at all, after the entire family chose to snub her when it came to the funeral arrangements. Avery didn’t even know Nora passed until a day after they buried her. Avery couldn’t help doing a little sleuthing, though. “How’d you know Nora?”

  “Sh-she was my aunt,” the girl stuttered, and it was pretty clear Avery’s snappishness was getting to her. “Well, great aunt. I guess I inherited the house.”

  “You guess?” Avery asked, furrowing her brow.

  “I haven’t been to Camden since I was a kid,” the girl explained in her timid way – that by itself was enough to get under Avery’s skin, but it did help to know she wasn’t one of the grandkids. “I had no idea Nora left the house to me. My cousins think maybe it was a clerical error.”

  “It wasn’t,” Avery snapped.

  “Well, either way, it looks like I’m going to be staying there for at least a few days,” the girl said, gesturing to the basket slung over her arm. It was filled with fresh veggies and raw ingredients – the kind of stuff you actually had to turn on the stove to eat and basically the opposite of Avery’s cart. Then the girl shot Avery a smile, those plump lips serving as a distraction from Avery’s ire, and she said, “I’m Hannah Grayson.”

  “Avery Blake,” Avery said back grudgingly. She really had no reason to be mean to this girl – from what she said it sounded like she’d been thrown into a snake pit where the will was concerned – but everyone Avery met from Nora’s family was so awful that she figured Hannah Grayson must be guilty by association.

  “So you were close with my aunt?” Hannah asked when it was clear that Avery wasn’t volunteering anything else.

  Avery glanced at her cart, wondering how long it would take before the Eggos started to get soggy from the summer heat, and said curtly, “We were neighbors. I helped her out a few times.”

  “Well, I’m sure she appreciated it,” Hannah said. “My aunt was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known.”

  “She was a great lady,” Avery said, and then because she couldn’t stand the thought of memorializing Nora in the middle of the grocery store with a girl she barely knew, she grabbed her cart again. “I gotta get on with my shopping. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  She didn’t wait for Hannah’s response this time. She whipped around the aisle and in the process she damn near mowed down a couple of kids in front of the Little Debbie’s display. If Hannah was Nora’s great niece and she liked her enough to will the house to her, then why the hell hadn’t Avery ever seen her before?

  CHAPTER 3

  Hannah did her best to avoid Avery through the rest of the store after their run-in at the end of the frozen foods aisle. First she caught her glaring from her porch when Hannah arrived at Aunt Nora’s, and now she was short with her and asking nosy questions she had no right to ask. Avery seemed like the kind of person who was permanently bristly and ill-tempered, and Hannah had about enough of that for one lifetime between her cousins at the funeral and Rebecca in New York.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely fair. Rebecca could be really sweet when she wanted to be – it was just that those moments were rare and she didn’t seem to want to be nice very often. Hannah always made allowances for her, though, because it wasn’t easy carrying the financial burden of supporting them both in an expensive city like New York. If Rebecca came home from work grumpy most days, it was only because there was so much pressure on her, and it had been Hannah’s job to let all that aggression roll off her back. She was just letting off steam.

  Avery, though… Hannah didn’t know what her problem was.

  She did her best to shake it off and finish her grocery shopping. When she looked at the prices in the produce aisle, she thought she’d died and heaven was a farmer’s market – it was all so fresh and she didn’t think it was possible to buy a big, juicy beefsteak tomatoes for less than a dollar in New York since the eighties. It made sense – she’d ridden Nora’s old bike past five miles of soybean fields to get to the store so it was obviously a lot shorter distance from farm to table here than in the city, but she’d still needed quite a bit of restraint to keep from buying one of everything she found in the produce section.

  She couldn’t afford that kind of extravagance – if she only bought the absolute essentials, she’d still be lucky to leave with double digits in her bank account, and she still desperately needed to buy cleaning supplies and paper goods if she was going to make Aunt Nora’s house inhabitable. She didn’t even have clean sheets to sleep on tonight.

  Hannah found the aisles she needed, keeping a lookout for her new neighbor, but she didn’t see Avery again. That was good because she hadn’t come six hundred miles and lost both an aunt and a girlfriend just to hide from a grump in a grocery store. She grabbed a bottle of laundry detergent and a pack of toilet paper, then headed for the cash registers. The damage wasn’t quite as bad as she feared – a trip like this in New York would have cost her at least a hundred dollars – but Hannah got out of the store about fifty dollars lighter than she went in.

  All in all, it was a successful trip and she was just beginning to think she could get used to small-town living when she walked outside and saw her mode of transportation propped up against the building.

  “Aww, corn nuts,” Hannah muttered. She had a couple plastic shopping bags in each hand, the toilet paper under one arm and the detergent in the other hand, and absolutely no idea how to manage all of that on a rusty old bike that barely wanted to shift gears despite all the oil she’d sprayed into the chain.

  Hannah set the detergent down while she pulled the bike away from the wall. She could maybe put all of the bags on one arm – they’d be heavy, but the ride into town only took twenty minutes and she thought it was achievable. It was the toilet paper and detergent that presented the bigger problem – one was large, the other heavy, and Nora’s bike didn’t have so much as a basket to help her out.

  You couldn’t find your ass with both hands tied behind your back. Rebecca’s voice suddenly floated through Hannah’s head, accompanied by the cackle she always let out after such an insult to let Hannah know it was nothing more than a joke and she shouldn’t be so sensitive all the time. It was an old idiom that Rebecca was rather fond of whenever Hannah mucked something up and she had to swoop in and fix things.

  Hannah sighed and set the rest of her groceries down in the gravel, wondering if she’d have to return some stuff, or she could walk home, but that would take a long time and she would probably have to leave the bike here. She didn’t know what kind of town Camden had become in her absence, but a bike without a lock on it was an invitation to thieves no matter where in the world you lived and she hated the idea of losing Aunt Nora’s bike. Besides, she might need it again.

  Just admit defeat, Rebecca was saying in her head. I knew you wouldn’t last ten minutes without me.

  She could always call the Uber guy again, but that would be another ten dollars gone once she tipped him, and it was a hot day. She had cheese in her grocery bags, getting meltier by the minute while she stood around trying to decide what to do.

&nbs
p; Hannah decided to give it one last try before she admitted defeat and Ubered her back to Aunt Nora’s house. She managed to balance the toilet paper on the handlebars, squeezing the corner of the plastic packaging between her fingers to keep it in place, and she hung all the plastic shopping bags from the handles, trying to balance the weight as much as she could. Then she hooked the detergent bottle under her thumb and started pedaling.

  It wasn’t the smoothest ride – the handlebars kept wanting to jog to the left, toward the detergent – and Hannah made it almost out to the road before the toilet paper slipped from her fingers and toppled over the handlebars.

  “Nooo,” Hannah said between gritted teeth. There was no way she could sustain this amount of effort for half an hour.

  She was just about to get off the bike and collect the toilet paper when a big blue pickup truck pulled up beside her and Avery leaned out the window. “Need some help?”

  No no no no, Hannah thought. If it had been anyone but the grouch across the street she would have been in the truck faster than she could say murdered hitchhiker, but of course it had to be Avery. Still, Hannah wasn’t in a position to be choosy. Reluctantly, she asked, “You don’t mind?”

  “It’s not like it’ll be an inconvenience,” Avery said, and it was almost as if she was trying to be nice but her body wouldn’t let her. She still sounded terribly inconvenienced, but she got out and helped Hannah load her groceries into the truck bed.

  The bike went last, and Hannah caught herself staring at Avery’s biceps as she lifted it effortlessly into the truck. Her shirt sleeves crept slightly up her arms and revealed the surprising definition of Avery’s lean muscles, and then Hannah looked away, embarrassed. She’d never been one to melt over muscles before, but there was just something about how capably Avery handled that bike that was attractive.