Millie and Albert have taken over the stairwell, using small brushes and paint cans to tackle the stairs. They’ve created a pattern: blue, green, orange, pink, yellow, purple, red, repeat. I don’t tell Levi, but I see a smattering of glitter mixed in with the wet paint on every step.
Levi and I take the hallway, as well as the bathroom and closet that line the hall. First, we coat the walls and ceiling in a simple, light yellow; then we paint the doors—one blue and one green. When we’re happy with this, we lock ourselves into the bathroom with four buckets. (All pastels: blue, orange, yellow, and an extra bucket of white.) Readjusting my tank top, I push aside the funny feeling I still have from earlier, when I saw Levi’s expression change. It feels alarmingly close to guilt, but I can’t go there right now. So I stand closer to him for comfort.
“I say the bathroom should match the kitchen—white with polka-dots,” I put in, raising my voice so he can hear me over the music blasting just outside the room.
Levi hums in disagreement. “But that’s, like…weird.”
“Levi.”
“I don’t associate eating with going to the bathroom, okay?”
“Well, neither do I, but it fits. We have cabinets and a sink in here, and the same tile on the counter, and it just matches, okay?”
He hums again and goes back to painting his section of the wall. He gets most of the tall spots, but I brought a stool with me so I can reach higher if necessary. We paint back to back in comfortable silence, our shoulder blades touching every time we turn for more paint or step back to look at our respective walls. At one point he (absently) grabs my hand and squeezes it, making my heart thump at an erratic pace. (Because that’s all it takes.)
After a while, when the white is almost finished, Levi stops painting and lifts a finger. “Idea! What if we paint the cabinets like the kitchen and the walls we keep simple with stripes?”
“Hmm.” I let my brush drip over the edge of the can before taking it to a new place on the wall. “If we’re going to do stripes, I request diagonal stripes.”
“Deal.”
“Deal,” I repeat, whipping around. Before he can react, I smear white paint from his nose to his ear, across his right cheek.
He sputters, blinking hard like he’s afraid he’ll get it his eyes. “Beeeeee.” He raises a hand to touch the paint; his finger comes away white. “You’re asking for it.”
“What am I asking for?” I bat my eyelashes at him.
Instead of retaliating with his own brush as I’d expected, he grabs me, hands tight on my waist, fingers digging into my skin where my tank top has ridden up from so much bending and reaching. When he kisses me, it’s not what I expect: It’s slow and agonizing, with Levi taking thorough, gentle care of my mouth, until I’m mad that he won’t give me what I want. I let out a frustrated groan, fingers pulling on his hair, and reverse our roles. I’m in charge now, and I’m going to kiss him as fast and hard as—
It’s my turn to sputter, as my face instantly smashes into all the wet paint dripping off his nose and cheek.
Levi laughs. “Looks good on you.”
“Ohmygosh. You’re such a jerk.” I swipe at him with my brush, and he dodges, but the bathroom is so small that he lands against his freshly painted wall. His arm is covered, down to the tips of his fingers and onto his pants.
“Benette,” he hisses, grabbing for me with his wet hand. I screech as his arms snake around me, getting white all over my tank. “We gave them the talk about goofing off, and look at us!”
“We don’t count,” I whisper into his ear. “We are the boss.”
This makes him laugh, which of course makes me lose my cool and I’m laughing, too. I stand on the stool, but it only boosts me about six inches, so I’m still shorter. I grab his collar anyway and pull him toward me, sighing as our lips meet, my thumbs brushing the skin by his ears, all my other fingers curving into the hair at the nape of his neck. He wraps one arm around me to pull my waist toward his, both hands running along my spine, elbows keeping me close.
For a split second, I get an image of what we must look like, all painted and messy, locked around each other. And happy—so happy. I don’t even try to resist the urge to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he says, lips rubbing over mine as he speaks.
“We’re silly,” I say.
“You’re right. We’re very silly.” Levi kisses my nose. “Now get back to work.”
With everyone working, we finish every room downstairs tonight, our hands blistering from the paintbrushes, our legs sore from doing squats all day. (Who knew bending down to get more paint on your brush could be such hard work?)
We eat pizza late in the evening when everyone is sweaty and exhausted. Elle turns on some kind of techno music to try to get everyone’s spirits up, but most of us just want to be lazy and sit on the couch we dragged in from the garage.
That is, until Levi takes my hand and pulls me out of the room when no one’s looking.
“What are we doing?” I whisper.
“Hiding,” he says, heading toward the stairs. They’ve been dry for an hour, but we still tiptoe up them, trying to be silent. (“Dammit, Albert,” Levi whispers tragically. “He got glitter on the stairs.”) Levi leads me across the second floor to the end of the hall, where he pulls the hatch in the ceiling.
“The attic?” I whisper.
He yanks down the ladder. “Uh-huh. It’s, like, an old-fashioned attic with a window and everything.”
Shrugging, I take the rungs one at a time and Levi follows. Up here, it’s exactly like I imagined old-fashioned attics would be. There’s a window seat along one wall just below the window, and old boxes stacked in the corner. There’s even an old rocking chair (creepy), and the ceiling above my head is vaulted Victorian style.
Levi pulls everything up behind him and claps his hands free of dust. “Last time I was up here, it was dark and creepy, and I was alone,” he says, looking around.
I dust off the window seat, blowing along the edge, and sit down. It creaks immediately. I jump up, bubbling with nervous laughter. “I can see how that would be kind of freaky.” I lean over the window seat and peer out into the backyard. The property is a little over a half acre, and the backyard slopes with the hill behind it.
“You like it?”
Something behind me makes a loud thumping noise, startling me. I glance over to see that Levi has dropped a box, and is waving his hands in the air against the dust. “Spiders,” he coughs. “Hey, Bunny, check this out with me.”
Something in my heart snaps. Maybe it’s from earlier. Or maybe it’s been there for a long, long time. “Really, Levi? Bunny?”
He spreads his hands. “I can’t help it.”
I roll my eyes upward. “You should definitely stop. Your guesses get more and more ridiculous.”
“Why can’t you just tell me? What’s stopping you?” he asks, the words tumbling out of his mouth so fast that I know, instantly, that he’s been wanting to ask this for a while. And it’s bothering him. It’s bothering him so much that suddenly he looks irritated, and I wonder how long he’s been feeling this way, and if he’s been hiding it or if I just missed it.