Tangles and Tension

I got to the house at nine on a Tuesday, and the driveway was already half full of trucks. I had been hired to photograph the renovation for Jeremy's portfolio, which sounds professional, and it was, except for the fact that Jeremy is my boyfriend and has been for three years. We met when he was working on a gallery renovation and I came in to shoot the finished space. Now he builds kitchens and bathrooms and I document them, and somewhere in between we fell into bed and never really climbed back out.

I am forty-two, by the way, and he is forty-four, and we have both spent enough years working to know what a job site smells like. Cut lumber, fresh paint, drywall dust. It hit me when I opened the car door, and I stood there a second longer than I needed to.

The house is a mid-century place out in the suburbs, all low rooflines and big windows, and right now it is gutted. The kitchen is down to studs and plywood floors. The bathroom is worse. Dust sheets over everything that stayed, plastic over the doorways, sawhorses in the hall.

Jeremy was in the kitchen when I came in, in his work pants and a t-shirt worn thin at the shoulders, standing at the counter framing he was building out. He had sawdust in his hair. Not a little. A whole coating of it, pale against the dark, caught in the curls at the top of his head.

So there is a thing you should know about me. I have a hair thing. I have had it as long as I can remember, and Jeremy found out about it early, back when we were still doing the awkward first-months conversation about what we each like. He keeps his hair on the longer side because of it, which he claims is for himself, and which neither of us believes.

"Hey," he said, when he saw me. He set down his square and wiped his hands on his pants. "You're early."

"I'm on time. You're just used to subcontractors."

He laughed and came over and kissed me, quick, the way you do when there are people around and sawdust on your face. His beard had dust in it too. I wanted to put my fingers in his hair right then, standing there in the middle of the gutted kitchen with the morning light coming through the plastic on the windows. I did not. I had a job to do.

I set up my tripod near the window wall, where the light was going to be best around ten. The kitchen floor was plywood with paper over part of it, and every step kicked up grit. I framed a wide shot of the new island position, the bare studs behind it, the old window with the yard beyond. It was a good frame. Then Jeremy walked through it.

He walked through it because the sink supply line needed adjusting, and the sink is in the frame, and that is just how it goes on a job site. He knelt down under the window with a wrench and a flashlight and started working on the valve. And I stood there behind my camera, not photographing anything, looking at the back of his head.

His hair curls at the nape. That is the specific thing that gets me, the curl right where the hairline ends, where it goes soft against the neck. He had pushed his sleeves up and his t-shirt had ridden up a little at the back, and there was a line of sawdust along his belt, and I stood there like an idiot with a camera in my hands thinking about the back of one man's neck.

I took some shots to be professional about it. Island, studs, window. Then I moved the tripod closer and took shots of the valve work, because the detail shots sell the portfolio, and he talked me through what he was doing while I photographed it, and I heard about half of it.

When he stood up, I did not step back the way a person with a job to do steps back.

"Question about the light," I said, which was maybe thirty percent true. "Afternoon comes through that window, right? Hard or soft?"

"Soft, there's a big maple out there." He squinted out the window. "It'll be nice and even by two."

I had come around the counter by then. I was close enough to see the sawdust sitting in his hair, individual grains of it, and my hand was doing something without asking my brain first. I got one finger into the curls at his nape and then the rest of the hand followed, and the sawdust was fine and dry and his hair was warm underneath it from working all morning.

He stopped moving. Then he let out a breath, one long slow breath out through his nose, the sound of a man who knows exactly what is happening and has decided to allow it.

"Care," he said. Not a warning. More like checking that I meant it.

"Do you mind?" I asked, because that is how we do this. Three years in, we still ask, mostly in short forms. He said he did not mind. He said it by turning his head into my hand, which in our language is a full sentence.

I got both hands in there. The sawdust shifted and settled, and some of it came off on my fingers, and the curls wrapped around them the way they always do, tighter at the back, looser on top. He had his eyes closed. He was still holding the wrench. The flashlight was on the floor between his boots, still lit, pointing at nothing.

I am aware this is not a normal thing to do to a man in the middle of his workday. I am aware that I was being paid to photograph a kitchen. My hands did not care. His hair under a layer of sawdust is possibly my single favorite texture in the world, and I do not have to justify that to anyone.

"You're going to mess up the valve work," he said, but he did not move away, and his voice had gone low and rough in the way I know.

"The valve work can wait four seconds."

It did not get four seconds. There were boots on the front steps and then a voice from the plastic-sheeted doorway, a young guy in a plumbing company shirt, holding a coil of tubing and a clipboard.

"Hey, sorry, is this the house with the second floor rough-in? I'm looking for the master bath, the foreman sent me over from the truck."

Jeremy straightened up like a spring. I got my hands out of his hair and one step back, and picked my camera up off the tripod like I had been adjusting settings, which is a thing I have done enough times that I have gotten smooth at it.

The kid gave us directions back and forth for a minute. Jeremy pointed him down the hall and told him which door, and warned him about the open floor cutout by the stair. The kid thanked him and clomped off, and the house settled back into its noise, the compressor outside and the radio somebody had left on in another room.

Jeremy looked at me over his shoulder. There was sawdust gone from his hair where my hands had been, a clean streak through the dust, and he knew it and I knew it.

"Two o'clock," he said. "When the light gets good."

I said that sounded fine. My fingers were still tingling from the texture of him, dry grit over warm curls, and I set my camera back on the tripod and tried to remember what I had been framing before he walked through it.

I did get some work done. That part should be said, because the rest of the day does not make it look true. I shot the window wall from three angles, I shot the paper on the floor, I shot the stack of cabinets still wrapped in plastic leaning against one wall. Somewhere in there Jeremy went out to his truck, and I heard the doors and then the compressor and then nothing, and I framed an empty doorway for a while and thought about hair instead of composition, which is not what a professional does, but there it is.

He came back with a tile sample. A square of something matte and gray-green, held between two fingers like a coaster. He held it up in the window light and turned it, checking the surface, and I took it from him because that is my job, to hold things and shoot them, and because it got the tile close to me and him close to the tile.

The light through the maple did something to the color. I got one shot of the sample on the plywood with the window behind it, and then I set the camera down on a sawhorse without looking at it, and I got my hand into his hair again before he had even put the second sample down. Both hands this time, up from the nape, and I pulled and he came, and my mouth found his and it was hard and fast, sawdust and coffee, his free hand landing flat on the plywood wall to keep us both upright.

"I meant to ask," I said against his mouth, which is technically asking, three years of shorthand and all. "Yes or no?"

"Yes," he said. "Obviously yes!" And then he kissed me back the same way, and the tile sample clacked onto the plywood somewhere near our feet, and for maybe half a minute there was no renovation in that house at all.

Then he broke it off. He put two fingers on my jaw and pulled back an inch, breathing through his mouth. "Truck's outside," he said. "Countertop delivery. Guy's been sitting in the driveway for five minutes, I could see him in the mirror on the way up the walk." He said it like it hurt him, which I appreciated. "I've got to go sign for it or he'll leave it on the curb and we're carrying slabs ourselves."

"Go," I said. "Go." My fingers were still in his hair when I said it, and he had to pull his head back slowly, easing out of my grip a strand at a time, and I let the ends run through my fingers on the way out because I am only human. He grinned at me, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and went. Through the plastic I watched him walk down to the driveway with his clipboard energy on, all business, and the delivery driver got out of his truck and they stood by the tailgate talking about slabs.

So. Work. I picked the camera back up and told myself firmly that the bathroom was next on the