Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 84000 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84000 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
“Did I ever tell you how hot you look in luminous yellow?” she asks, placing a hard hat on my head.
“Liar.”
Her eyes flash. “I dare you to steal your hat and vest and bring them home, and you can judge for yourself.”
I growl and grab her ass, pressing a kiss to her lips.
“Hey, you guys!” Avril interrupts us.
Sophia bats my hand away from her ass. “Avril! We didn’t know if you’d be here.”
“Yeah, Worth didn’t say he’d be down.”
“I thought you’d be on campus.”
“I don’t have any classes until three today. One of the lecture theaters had a flood. So I thought I’d come down and do a walk-through.”
“That makes three of us,” I say.
Avril grins and it feels like she’s really pleased to have me here. She doesn’t get pissed when I ask her questions about the site and progress—even though part of me is testing her, making sure she’s on top of everything. She seems to relish it. Like she enjoys my involvement in the project and isn’t trying to shoo me away.
“Where should we start?” she asks.
“How’s the top floor coming along?” Sophia asks. Last time we were here, they’d started on the interior walls and electrical on the top floor, and were working their way down.
“It’s actually pretty cool,” Avril says. “They’re working on the top three floors now.”
That seems fast. I was only here a week ago and they were slightly behind schedule.
“It’s going exactly per the project plan,” Avril says. “Pete is doing an incredible job keeping everyone on track. You were right—I couldn’t have project-managed this place.”
Avril had listened to me when I said she wasn’t qualified to manage a build like this. Luckily for me, Pete agreed to step in and guide Avril through the process while he acts as PM. I have the best of both worlds.
“Hello!” someone calls after us as we head to the only working elevator in the place.
“Is that Poppy?” I ask, just as my sister appears.
“Worth?” She pulls Sophia into a hug. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
She grins like she just won the lottery. “I just handed in my notice.”
Before we had an honest conversation about it, I hadn’t realized Poppy wasn’t enjoying her work at the bank. Or as Avril put it, “Hated the bank with every molecule of her being.”
“You did it,” I say. She’s been threatening to quit for months now.
“I did. It feels great.”
“Okay, good. You can start at my office tomorrow. I’m in Colorado for two nights. Veronica can find you a desk there.”
“And I found you a desk here,” Avril says.
“Here?” we all chorus, looking around at the bare floorboards and listening to the sound of shouts and drilling coming from above our heads.
“You need to be onsite,” Avril says to Poppy.
“I can come to site. I don’t need to work here all the time. The dust alone will drive me crazy.”
“Okay, but I picked us out an office to share.”
Poppy groans. “I didn’t agree to share a room with you. We haven’t done that since we were kids.”
“Are we all going up or not?” I snap. I can only listen to Poppy and Avril bicker for so long.
Sophia’s hand shifts in mine and she finds my pulse point on my wrist. This simple movement calms me. Her touch makes me aware of her—makes me remember what’s important. “I’m going to miss you,” she whispers as we step into the elevator.
I tune out Avril and Poppy and start to think about the journey tomorrow. None of our friend group knows I’m headed out to Colorado. It’s not a secret exactly, we’re just not telling anyone.
“I’m going to miss you too. You could come with me.”
“I have a job,” Sophia says, her tone teasing.
“A job you don’t like.”
“Right. But until I figure out what I’m going to do, it’s a job I’m keeping.”
“If you quit, you’d have time to think about what you want to do.”
“Maybe you’re right. Or maybe I’d just follow you to Colorado and wherever else you’re traveling to, and then I’ll start getting up later and going to the gym at noon, and then five years would have passed by.”
“You could find us somewhere to live.”
“Oh, I did that already,” she says as we exit the elevator. “Your kiss scrambled my brain and I forgot to tell you.”
“You found a place?” We’ve looked at a couple of places in the last month or so.
“Well, only on Zillow, because surfing Zillow’s my side hustle now. It’s on the next street over from ours, just a block away.”
“Sounds good. Can we go have a look at it?” Sophia’s gone back and forth on moving out of the brownstone now that she’s settled in. But even though it was she who first suggested a move, it’s me who’s pushing for it now. I want a fresh start. Marrying Sophia was the beginning of so much, and I want to honor that by living somewhere I bought because I want to live there with my wife—not because it was convenient and big enough for my sisters to move in if the need arose.