Fixer Upper: A Lesbian Romance Read online

  Not that it mattered – Avery seemed like a cold fish and Hannah wasn’t looking for anything in Camden except a place to crash.

  She climbed into the truck with more difficulty than she wanted to admit – the cab was high and she had to really haul herself into it – and then Avery slid onto the bench seat beside her. The engine roared to life and Hannah ventured, “Thanks for the ride. You’d think I would know a thing or two about not buying more than you can carry since it’s the same problem living in New York, but I guess I’ve gotten pretty used to delivery service and Uber drivers.”

  “Wouldn’t know about either of those,” Avery said as she pulled onto the county road. “I’ve always had to get my groceries the old-fashioned way.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said. “Right.”

  She looked down at her feet, feeling stupid for saying such a pretentious thing and stupid for getting herself into yet another situation in which she needed someone to bail her out. It had been one thing when it was Rebecca, but now she was showing her helplessness to complete strangers, and unfriendly ones at that.

  There were a half-dozen tools laying on the floor at her feet, screwdrivers and hammers and wrenches and a few other things Hannah couldn’t identify clanking together as the truck rumbled down the road. She thought again about horror stories involving hitchhikers, and thought that every horror film she’d ever seen with an unfortunate hitchhiker in it had begun on a road that looked just like the one they were on now. Of course, most serial killers were charming, so that ruled Avery out.

  “If you stick around long enough I’m sure Camden will start offering all the amenities of the Big Apple,” Avery said after a minute, and Hannah glanced over at her in surprise. That sounded suspiciously like small talk, and she hadn’t expected it.

  “It does seem quite a bit more developed than I remembered it when I was a kid,” Hannah said tentatively.

  She looked at Avery while she waited for a response, wondering if her body language might provide further hints into the impenetrable psyche of Avery Blake. Her voice was always gruff no matter what she was saying, and Hannah had no idea if she’d done something to offend her or if that was just how Avery talked.

  “They’re building it up,” she said, glancing over at Hannah. She had piercingly dark eyes, and the way she was looking at Hannah made something tingly stir within her. She had to look away.

  “It was basically just an ice cream shop and a one-screen movie theater when I was a kid,” Hannah said, embarrassed at the effect Avery was having on her. One look and she’d turned to jelly, and she couldn’t keep her eyes from going to Avery’s hands. They were callused, a worker’s hands, and Hannah found herself wondering how strong they were as they gripped the steering wheel.

  “Population’s risen from around five thousand to over fifty thousand in the last twenty years,” Avery supplied, as if she was reading it off a promotional brochure for Camden. “We’ve added over a hundred new buildings just within the last five years.”

  “Impressive,” Hannah said. “Meanwhile I can’t even move a pack of toilet paper five miles without help.”

  She said it with a laugh, but it was pretty pathetic. What was she going to do the next time she needed groceries and Avery wasn’t waiting around in the parking lot, no doubt laughing at her pitiful attempt at biking?

  “I thought you were doing alright,” Avery said, and Hannah was surprised that she wanted to throw her a bone, especially such an obviously unwarranted one. “You should have put the detergent in one of the bags and then ripped a little hole in the toilet paper packaging to make it easier to hold onto. You were about ninety percent of the way there on your own, though.”

  “Well, that sounds obvious now that you say it,” Hannah said with a small laugh, but she couldn’t help feeling at least a little bit encouraged by the compliment.

  CHAPTER 4

  Avery did her best to keep her eyes on the road as she drove. Every time she looked over at Hannah, she could see that same sparkle in her eyes that she noticed in the grocery store. It was a look of building desire, and Avery couldn’t stand being looked at that way without acting on the urge – it stirred something up inside her and made her go a little feral, and she’d taken many a woman to bed for looks less lascivious than what Hannah was shooting at her now.

  But this was Nora’s niece, not some girl she picked up in a bar, and it wouldn’t be right so Avery tried to ignore it, keeping her eyes straight ahead and both hands on the steering wheel.

  She was cute, though.

  “So,” Avery asked after a few seconds of silence, “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  It was a bit more direct than could be considered polite, but even though Hannah seemed like a nice girl, Avery wasn’t convinced yet that she wasn’t an enemy.

  “Umm,” Hannah said, taken a little aback and casting her eyes down at the floorboards, “well, there was no toilet paper at Aunt Nora’s-”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Avery said, rolling her eyes and glancing at Hannah again. She sure hoped that was a joke and this girl wasn’t really that clueless, although she had tried to carry thirty pounds of groceries on her handlebars. Avery decided to clarify her question to remove any doubt. “What are your plans for Nora’s house?”

  “I can’t say as I have any,” Hannah said.

  “You’re not here to put it on the market?”

  “It’s not my house to sell,” Hannah said. “Like I told you earlier, my cousins are the rightful owners–”

  “No they’re not,” Avery cut in, anger rising suddenly in her throat. She knew that she shouldn’t display the level of vitriol she felt for Nora’s family, especially not to someone who might turn out to be just as bad as the rest of them. Hannah certainly seemed sympathetic to handing over the house to them, but that was exactly why Avery couldn’t keep quiet about it. “If Nora gave you the house in her will, rest assured it was not a mistake.”

  “How are you so sure?” Hannah asked, her eyes going wide with alarm at Avery’s outburst. “What do you know about it?”

  “Look, I don’t know you from Adam, but I knew Nora and I knew her rotten kids,” Avery said, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. “Nora was a careful woman – she didn’t make mistakes and she would never give her house to the wrong person. I’m sure she chose you for a reason, so you can’t go against her wishes and hand the place over to those assholes.”

  Hannah was scowling at her now, and Avery couldn’t blame her. That was the same look she would have if someone insulted her family, but it needed saying. It must have taken quite a bit of effort for Nora to change her will after Minnie died, and it would be a tragedy if her wishes were disregarded simply because Hannah was too nice to accept it.

  Still, it was easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar, so Avery dialed it back a bit.

  “I’m sorry I called your cousins assholes,” she said, and it took everything in her not to mutter under her breath, even though they are. Hannah stayed quiet, so Avery added, “So you’re just planning to stay there a short time?”

  “Yeah,” Hannah said. “A couple of days, maybe a week. I can see you don’t like them, but my cousins are the rightful owners of that house. My Great Uncle Carl bought it when he and Aunt Nora first got married and my cousins practically grew up there. They have so many memories in that house – I do too – and besides, it’s a big house on a lot of land. It must be worth something. Who am I to say I have a right to it just because Aunt Nora wrote my name down in the will? She was old, so maybe she got confused. I haven’t even visited her since I was a kid.”

  “Maybe you were a good kid,” Avery suggested. “Maybe she remembered you.”

  “And that warrants inheriting a house?” Hannah asked. “It should go to her grandchildren, and when they figure out how to take care of the legal stuff I’ll hand it over happily. In the mean time, I guess you’re stuck with me for a neighbor because I have nowhere else to go.”

&n
bsp; “Why not?”

  Another impolitely blunt question, but Avery could see the dots of their two houses coming up on the horizon and she only had a couple more minutes to fish for whatever information she could get out of Hannah. There wasn’t enough time for manners.

  “Umm,” Hannah said, becoming tentative again and clasping her hands in her lap. “It’s a long story. I just got out of a relationship. It was kind of... unexpected.”

  Avery nodded as if she agreed, like it was something she understood, but really that was just another reason why she didn’t have any interest in anything but pretty girls with pouty lips and short attention spans. If anything, it sent a quick shiver up her spine to think about what it must be like to end a relationship and find yourself with nowhere to go. That was why Avery owned her home, made her own money, and had gotten used to relying on no one but herself a long time ago.

  “So you got kicked out of your house?” She asked, trying not to let too much of the horror she felt creep into her voice.

  “Well, she didn’t really kick me out,” Hannah said. “I don’t think she would be rolling out th welcome mat if I showed up on her doorstep though.”

  “It’s her place?” Avery asked. She was always quick to look for solutions to problems, and sometimes people told her she needed to stop being analytical and just listen, but there was always a solution available and Avery thought it was better to solve problems than just talk about them. “Does she own it? Is your name on the lease?”

  “I would really rather talk about something else,” Hannah said. There was that timidity in her voice again, and it was starting to grate on Avery’s nerves. Hannah was looking down at the floorboards again, studying the tools that were clustered around her feet. “For instance, what do you do with all of these?”

  “I’m a carpenter,” Avery said. “Those are from a job I was working on yesterday.”

  She really should have cleaned them up last night. Most of the time Avery was very careful with her tools, a place for everything and everything in its place, but these ones were rusty old tools that she bought when she first moved to Camden and lately they were really showing their age. She had much nicer tools now, and she had been meaning to get rid of these ones for a while now. But a hammer still did its job whether the claw was rusty or not.

  “That’s interesting,” Hannah said. “So when you said we added a hundred buildings, you really meant it literally.”

  “It’s not like I built them all with my bare hands, but I’ve worked on a few of them,” Avery said bluntly. She was beginning to regret speaking so freely earlier – she wasn’t used to sharing things about herself. Even her coworkers didn’t know much about how she spent her free time, and that was by design.

  “How did you get into construction?” Hannah asked.

  The houses were getting a lot closer and for that, Avery was grateful. She figured it was only fair to let Hannah ask a personal question after she had done so much prying into Hannah’s family history and the circumstances behind her inheritance of Nora’s house, but that didn’t mean Avery had to like it.

  “My turn,” Avery said. “I’m going to use the talk about something else card. What do you do for a living?”

  “Well,” Hannah said, “until two years ago, I was a reporter on the New York Stock Exchange. I lost my job when the economy took a downturn. The irony was not lost on me, but it turns out that robots are surprisingly good at reporting the news when it’s mostly just numbers.”

  “And since then?”

  “House girlfriend?” Hannah said, and it was clear the amount of effort she was putting in to keep her voice light. “Although Rebecca always used to call me her lap dog, as in the type that wears a diamond encrusted collar and never actually leaves the apartment.”

  “That sounds harsh,” Avery said.

  “Yeah,” Hannah said with a shrug, shifting slightly in her seat. “How does that talk about something else card work, anyway? Does it revert back to me now that you’ve used it?”

  “I suppose that’s fair,” Avery said as she pulled into Nora’s driveway. “It looks like you’re saved from that question by the grace of short travel times, anyway. Home sweet home.”

  “At least for now,” Hannah said.

  She got out of the truck and went around back to gather her groceries, waiting for Avery to come lower the tailgate. Avery did, lifting the bike down and rolling it over to the bottom of the porch steps while Hannah separated her groceries from Avery’s. She leaned the bike against the railing where it would be out of the way until Hannah was ready to deal with it, then went back and hopped up onto the truck bed to retrieve the laundry detergent. It had rolled all the way to the front where Hannah couldn’t reach it.

  “Here you go,” she said as she hopped down and Hannah held out one hand, the rest of the bags looped onto her forearm and the package of toilet paper hooked under her other arm. “You want help inside? I can carry some of that.”

  “No,” Hannah said, taking the detergent. “You’ve been more than enough help and I really appreciate it.”

  That was fine. Avery probably would not have wanted a stranger in her house if the tables had been turned, and by the googly eyes that Hannah have been giving her off and on since they met inside Hansen’s, Avery couldn’t promise that she’d act honorably if she went inside Nora’s house. It was bad enough that she was thinking what she was about Nora’s great niece - she couldn’t actually act on it.

  “Any time,” she found herself saying.

  Any time? Since when was she in the business of chauffeuring clueless New Yorkers around Camden, even if they did have the prettiest eyes she’d seen in a long time? Avery tried to offset the statement by crossing her arms in front of her chest and giving Hannah a somewhat stern look.

  “Thanks,” Hannah said. “Well, I better get inside and unpack these bags. I’ve got eggs and cheese melting here.”

  “Yeah,” Avery said as gruffly as possible.

  Hannah headed for the porch, so Avery hopped back into her truck, watching for just a moment as Hannah struggled with all the bags to get her keys out of her pocket. It was like a slapstick routine and she really should have just taken Avery’s offer to help her inside.

  She threw the truck in reverse, but she couldn’t leave quite yet.

  If Hannah really was only here for a couple of days, Avery might not get another chance to talk to her. She had quite a few jobs lined up over the next few weeks and she would barely be at home. She couldn’t just leave without appealing to Hannah one more time on Nora’s behalf. She owed it to her favorite neighbor.

  “Hey,” she called as Hannah gave up the struggle and set all of the bags down on the porch so she could access her keys. Hannah looked up and Avery leaned out the window to say, “Please don’t hand the house over to your cousins without at least trying to figure out why Nora left it to you instead of them. I know you weren’t close with her, but her family was really not kind to her and I promise she didn’t leave that house to you on accident.”

  “What did they do to her?” Hannah asked, coming down off the porch so they didn’t have to shout their conversation, and Avery couldn’t quite read Hannah yet – whether she was taking this warning seriously or not – but Avery at least had to say her peace about the matter.

  “Do you know about Minnie?”

  “She was Aunt Nora’s best friend, wasn’t she?” Hannah asked.

  “Sure, that’s what they used to call it back in the forties,” Avery said. “They kept their feelings for each other a secret for most of their lives because they had families to raise and because it just wasn’t safe back then. But when your uncle died, Minnie moved in here and I think that was when Nora was happiest. Your cousins could never wrap their tiny minds around that, and they did everything in their power to separate them. They even put Nora in a different nursing home than Minnie to keep them apart.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Angela and Ronnie,” Hannah said,
surprise and confusion shadowing her face.

  “Nobody wants to believe their family is a bunch of selfish bigots,” Avery said, knowing that if calling them assholes earlier had crossed a line, then she was marching right across it now. But Nora had spoken the truth in her will, and Avery knew she’d be turning in her grave if her grandkids got their hands on the house in the end. This might be her only chance to show Hannah the light. “Just think about it, and think about how well you really know them.”

  CHAPTER 5

  When she got home, Hannah had been ravenous. She didn’t eat all day and that succulent produce she bought was calling her name. She scrounged in the kitchen until she found a cutting board and a knife, then she made the most indulgent salad out of fresh lettuce and strawberries and about everything else from in the produce aisle. It was a hard task to stop herself from wiping out her entire haul of groceries in a single meal, her excursion on the bike and subsequent run-in with Avery proving quite appetizing, but she knew this food had to last until she figured out how to replenish her bank account. With absolutely no ideas about that, she didn’t know how long it would be before she could afford another trip into town and she would have to practice frugality in the meantime.

  After her late lunch, Hannah spent the afternoon scrubbing the upstairs toilet and shower and uncovering some of the furniture in the living room. While she worked, she thought about the things Avery said about her cousins. She was right about one thing – Hannah hadn’t seen them since she was twelve, and she didn’t really know them anymore.

  Her last memory of them had been the summer before she started middle school, just before she moved across the country for her dad’s new job. Angela and Ronnie were older than Hannah, and with each passing summer the age gap became more obvious. Hannah wanted to catch frogs in the pond behind Aunt Nora’s property and her cousins wanted to throw eggs at cars as they drove past the house. Hannah wanted to go into town for ice cream and the two of them much preferred to steal beers out of the fridge and drink them behind the barn. The last summer she spent at Aunt Nora’s, Ronnie gave Hannah a swirly in the downstairs toilet because he was practicing for the school year and Angela coerced her into stealing a tube of lipstick from the drug store in Camden.