Page 15 of The Handyman

My eyes go to Katy. She's not looking at Coop anymore. She's looking at me.

She grabs my sleeve. The fabric bunches in her fingers. She pulls—and I turn toward her because she could pull me anywhere and I'd go—and she goes up on her toes and kisses me.

I hear Coop in the background. Muttering. “You cannot be serious, Katy.” He continues under his breath with something I cannot hear. Don’t care to hear. Then I register footsteps moving toward the door. The door opening. The door closing. Banging shut.

I don't look away. My hand comes up to the side of her face—my thumb on her cheekbone, my fingers in her hair—and I deepen our kiss. She makes a sound against my mouth, and my other arm wraps around her waist and pulls her against me.

Coop is gone, and nothing in this foyer matters except the woman in my arms who just called me her boyfriend.

Everyone and everything else can go to hell.

6

KATY

The sound of keys hitting the foyer table echoes through the house, followed by heavy footsteps and the distinctive thud of Dad's travel bag dropping onto marble. My stomach does a little flip—not the nervous kind, the excited kind. He's home three days early.

"Katy?” He hollers. “Where's my girl?"

His voice carries from the front hallway, and I can already picture him standing there in his wrinkled travel clothes, probably checking his watch and wondering why the house feels too quiet. Dad hates quiet houses. Always has. Loves to fill them with the sound of his own voice.

I pad barefoot from the kitchen toward his voice, and there he is—stocky frame, watch catching the light, wedding ring glinting as he runs a hand through his hair. It’s more salt than pepper now, but still as luxuriant as in my baby photos.

He smells like airports and his cologne when I wrap my arms around him, and for a second, I'm twelve again, waiting for him to come home from business trips with stories and terrible airport souvenirs.

"Hey, stranger." I pull back to look at him. "You're early. Where's Mom?"

"She's at your aunt Susan's until Sunday. I got tired of hotel rooms." His hands land on my shoulders, and his eyes do that quick scan fathers do—checking to make sure their daughters are still intact. "Why are you still here? Aren't you supposed to be holidaying in the Bahamas by now? The flights were probably rescheduled for after the storm, right?"

He must see something on my face. The tired-dad-coming-home look disappears, replaced by the sharp attention I've watched him turn on difficult tenants and contractors my whole life. Dad is eerily good at reading people.

"There was no girls' trip, Dad."

"What do you mean there was no girls' trip? Honey, what the…"

I sigh and cross my arms. The story sits heavy in my chest, but this is my dad.

"The girls set me up. Grace, Jenny, Tiff—none of them were coming. The only person at the airport was Coop. It was just going to be him and me. He asked them to lie to me."

Dad's forehead furrows, and he scrubs a hand across his face. "Sheesh! Oh honey, I didn't like that boy from the get-go. You knew that, right? He was always too desperate to impress me."

Before he asks if I'm okay—which I know is coming—I decide to shift the conversation in a direction that will either make him feel better or give him an entirely different reason to have a cardiac event.

"Yeah.” I sigh. “And, in more positive news, umm, I also have a new boyfriend."

Dad does a double take. If I sprouted wings or grew horns, he probably would react the same way. "You have a boyfriend? Since when?"

A truck pulls into the driveway. Wheels splash through a puddle of groundwater, and a brake squeal cuts through his questions. The engine is loud and familiar. My stomach tightens, and my feet do that complicated dance of excitement and nerves. Dad hears it too. We both turn toward the sound.

I know exactly what's about to happen, but Dad has no clue.

"You're about to meet him. But promise me you won't overreact."

Dad chuckles and waves me off. He knows his favorite handyman is about to walk through that door. He doesn’t know that I’m about to announce him as my new boyfriend.

"Sweetheart, you've got a good head on your shoulders. I trust your judgment. Now, who is this?"

He stops mid-sentence as his eyes go to the doorway. His mind is racing ahead of me.