Come to Me Softly (Closer to You #2)(41)
Author: A.L. Jackson

He kept stealing glances at me, searching, reading, as if he were again trying to latch onto my thoughts. But my own thoughts were obscured because I was so unsure of where we were heading myself.

Jared turned right onto a narrow neighborhood street. He flashed me a nervous smile and ran his hand over his short hair. “So . . . uh . . . you don’t have to take this, Aly. It’s a complete disaster and it’s going to take a ton of work to get it in shape.”

Instead of taking me to an apartment complex like I’d anticipated, Jared pulled to the curb and came to a stop in front of a small house.

It was a typical newer tract home, a cookie-cutter frame with tan stucco walls and an arched roof, fronted by a two-car garage. A concrete sidewalk led up to the little overhang that protected the front door.

A For Sale sign had been yanked from the ground and tossed onto the sparse brown lawn. The place was obviously run- down from neglect. It appeared to have been sitting vacant for years.

But it was cute. Homey.

That stirring of excitement inside me whipped into a fury.

“Jared, is this . . .” I glanced toward him, my words trailing off as I looked back to the house.

I was so thrilled by the idea of Jared and me finding our own place, something that just belonged to us, where we could build memories and our future. But I never thought of it as being anything more than a stepping-stone. Maybe a little one- bedroom apartment that one day we could move up from, expand and grow as our lives stabilized.

I was almost scared to voice it . . . to hope for this.

Jared climbed from the car and came around and opened my door. Taking me by the hand, he helped me out, his eyes intense as he steadied me on my unsure feet. Doubt riddled his face, although there was no mistaking the underlying hope. His voice was soft, full of question. “It is if you want it to be.”

I swallowed, peeking over his shoulder at the little house, my imagination running wild, too far and too fast into our future.

“Just don’t say anything yet, okay?” Jared shook his head, shutting down the questions fighting for release on my tongue. “I wasn’t joking when I said it’s a mess.” He glanced behind him, before he turned back to me. “Actually, saying it’s a mess doesn’t come close to doing justice to what’s going on in that house. It’s a f**king disaster, Aly, so be prepared.”

He tugged at my hand and started us up through the unkempt lawn, if it could even be considered a lawn. I stumbled a little over the uneven ground, trying to keep up with Jared’s long, impatient strides. “We need to get inside before it starts to get dark. The electricity is off.”

He dug into his pocket and drew out a key ring that held a single bronze key. At the door, he looked back at me with a fading trace of hesitation before he turned to press the key into the lock. Metal scraped as he slipped it in, and the knob rattled as he twisted it free. He pushed on the door. It creaked from disuse as it swung open to reveal what was hidden within.

Jared released my hand and moved behind me. He placed his hand at the small of my back, his warm breath at my neck as he nudged me to enter ahead of him. “Go on in, baby.”

Tentatively, I stepped inside the torn-up little house.

I stood in the entryway to an open living room that extended off to the right of the front door, facing the street. It wasn’t huge, but it was plenty large enough for a comfortable couch, and a fireplace was tucked up against the right wall. The living room opened to the dining area and kitchen that took up the entire back portion of the room, the dining nook on the left and the kitchen to the right. Between the two was a large sliding glass door that led out to the backyard.

And Jared wasn’t kidding.

The place was trashed.

All the carpet had been ripped up, concrete exposed, and the kitchen had been gutted. The only things left in it were cheap cabinets with half the doors hanging from their hinges and dingy Formica countertops. A few holes had been knocked in the walls and everything had about five months’ worth of dust coating it.

But none of that was what I really saw.

My eyes slipped along the living area, up to the high ceilings and across to the large windows that allowed the late-afternoon sun to filter inside. The house was open and warm and inside it had to be about the cutest little place I’d ever seen.

Jared fidgeted behind me. “Like I said, it’s a total mess. It’s going to take a lot of work to get this place into shape.”

He stepped around me, facing me as he walked backward toward the kitchen. The apprehension he’d been wearing before evaporated, the excitement back in his eyes. “Baby, I don’t know if you can picture it finished, but I think this place has a ton of potential.” He turned and gestured to the run-down kitchen. “Obviously, all of these cupboards have to go. They gutted just about everything anyway, so we’ll just rip all this shit out. I can do all that. It’s what I do at work.” He shook his head, seeming to get lost to the plans, to the ideas in his mind, mostly mumbling to himself. “Don’t think there’s much of anything to salvage here.”

He pointed to the cupboards lining the back of the kitchen wall. “We’ll replace all of these with new . . .” He lowered his hand, held his palm about an inch above the countertops that jutted out from the back wall and blocked the kitchen from the rest of the open room. He ran his hand over the length. “Thinking we tear out this countertop and put in an island with some stools right in the middle?” he said, seeming to test the idea out in his head, to see the way it tasted as it left his mouth.

He looked up to the cupboards attached to the ceiling directly above the countertops he was already tearing out in his mind. “We knock all of this out . . . open the whole thing up . . . make it one big room.”

He finally turned to look at me where I’d edged into the middle of the room. “There’s some granite at my job. It was supposed to be used for one of our rehabs, but it was cut wrong . . . think I can get it to work for the kitchen. It’s really pretty, too, mostly black with some flecks of gold and silver in it. Think you’d like it.”

I nodded, trying to keep up with the flood of ideas pouring from Jared, trying to picture all of this through his eyes, where this passion I’d never witnessed before burned.

“Jared . . .” I blinked in confusion. “How?”

Jared smiled a little, reading my simple question for what it was.

He shrugged. “At lunch today, I was talking with my boss about us wanting to find our own place. Told him I was looking for a good apartment in a nice area, and asked if he knew of any good places to rent. Told me he was looking to get this place off his hands.” Jared looked around. “He picked it up with the intention of flipping it, but the construction jobs have been too busy and it’s just sitting here. He tossed me the key and told me to go check it out . . . said he’d carry the loan for us if we wanted to buy it. And we can get the house at a great price.”