The Drywall Sermon

A construction site at night is a different animal. Anya Partridge knew this after four years of dating a general contractor, but she still forgot it every time. During the day, the place was noise and dust and men yelling over table saws. At night it just sat there, hollow, like the building was holding its breath and waiting for someone to tell it what it was going to be.

Carpenter Valley Church was worse than most sites. It was stone, over a hundred years old, deconsecrated two springs ago, and now it was going to be the most expensive wedding venue in three counties. Or it would be, once the drywall went up and the wiring got finished and Anya stopped finding things to argue about.

She was thirty-four, and she had built a career on the idea that nothing got past her. Every vendor, every bride, every mother of the bride. She had a spreadsheet for the spreadsheet. People said she could plan a wedding in a war zone. She took it as a compliment.

Levi was thirty-six and built like someone who carried lumber for a living, because he did. They had met when she hired his crew to remodel a barn venue four years ago, back when she was thirty and he was thirty-two and they both pretended the lingering on job site visits was professional. It had not been professional for a long time now. He was the only man she had been with since, and as far as she knew, she was the only woman he had been with since. They had never really said it out loud, but it was true, and they both knew it.

That Thursday they had argued about tile for two hours.

"Pierre says the slate arrives Monday," Levi said, standing at the bottom of the ladder in the gutted sanctuary. "You want it laid before the floors get sanded or after?"

"Before. Obviously before. If they sand after the slate goes down, the dust gets in the grout."

"You sure? Because Bobbi from the restoration society called and said the original floor..."

"Bobbi Hughes can hold opinions about the bell tower. That's her thing. The bell tower is her thing. The entryway floor is mine."

Levi grinned at her. She hated that grin. It meant he was enjoying this.

"Kinda hot when you get territorial," he said.

"Do not start."

"I'm not starting anything. I'm saying it's Thursday, it's nine o'clock, Pierre went home two hours ago, and I've got work lights on a generator and a drop cloth the size of a tennis court."

She looked around the sanctuary. Bare stone walls, no pews, exposed joists overhead where the ceiling used to be. The sealed door to the bell tower at the back, boarded and untouched, the way it had been since they got the keys. Old plaster dust everywhere. The place smelled like rot and stone, faintly, under the drywall dust.

"You're proposing something," she said.

"I'm proposing a game."

"Levi."

"Same game as the lake house. Quietest one wins. Loser has to admit, out loud, that the other one is better at it."

"That's a stupid bet. There's nothing on the line."

"Pride is on the line."

"We're adults with jobs."

"We are. And my foreman thinks I stay late doing load calcs, and your brides think you sleep eight hours a night, and nobody has to know anything." He took a step closer. "Unless you know you'd lose."

Anya put her clipboard down on a paint bucket. This was the part where a smart woman would say goodnight and go home. She was very smart. She was also very competitive, and he knew it, and that was the entire trap.

"One condition," she said. "If I win, you never bring up the slate argument again."

"Deal. If I win, you admit the entry floor should be sanded first."

"Never happening, because I'm not going to lose."

"We'll see."

"Ask me properly," she said. She liked it when he asked. He knew that too.

"Anya. Can I kiss you?"

"You may."

He kissed her the way he did everything, slow and sure, one hand at the small of her back. The work lights buzzed on the generator outside and threw long shadows up the stone walls. Somewhere overhead, a joist creaked, and she told herself it was just the building cooling down. Old buildings made noise. That was all it was.

"Drop cloth," he said against her mouth.

"Blankets are in the truck."

"I know. Stay here."

He came back with the old quilt from behind his seat, the one that lived in the truck, and spread it over the canvas. She kicked off her shoes and pulled her blouse over her head while he watched, and she watched him watch her, and decided that tonight she was going to be a wall. Quiet. Controlled. She was going to win this game and he was going to say it out loud, that she was better at it, and then he would never tease her about the spreadsheet again.

They undressed fast after that. His shirt, her jeans, his belt. The bare bulb on the work light made everything look orange and close.

"Lay down," he said.

"Lay me down."

"Bossy."

"Occupational hazard."

He laid her down on the quilt with a care that did not match the game at all, and that was his first move, actually. The gentleness. She kept her jaw set and her breathing even.

He started at her collarbone. That was unfair. He worked down with his mouth, unhurried, taking his time at her nipples until they were hard and aching, and she stared at the exposed joists overhead and thought about grout lines and delivery schedules and anything at all. One of the work lights flickered. Generator, she told herself. Cheap generator.

His mouth kept going. Down her stomach, slower, and her fingers found the back of his head without her permission.

"That's cheating," she whispered.

"Didn't say no touching. Rules were quietest wins. Touch all you want."

"You're changing the rules mid game, that is so..."

His mouth found her and she stopped talking. He went slow, maddeningly slow, tongue flat and patient, and she clamped her jaw shut and breathed through her nose and counted ceiling joists. Twelve. There were twelve joists. She was on the fourth one when her hips lifted off the quilt on their own.

"There she is," he murmured against her, and she could feel him smiling, and she wanted to hit him.

"Shut up," she breathed. "You talk too much."

"Kinda hard to talk with my mouth full."

He went back to it, and she dug her nails into his shoulder and kept her eyes on the joists, and that was when she heard it. Under the buzz of the generator and the blood in her ears, from the direction of the boarded tower door, something shifted. A scrape. Low, like a boot sole dragging through old plaster dust.

She opened her eyes. The tower door was still boarded. Still shut. But the work light flickered again, longer this time, and in the half second of dark she could have sworn the shadows on the stone wall moved the wrong way.

"Levi," she said.

"Mm?"

"Did you hear that?"

He lifted his head, cheek still against her thigh, listening. The sanctuary was quiet. Just the generator and their breathing and the tick of cooling stone.

"Hear what?"

"I don't know. A scrape. From the tower."

"Bobbi keeps that thing sealed up tighter than a bank vault. Probably a bird got in years ago. Or mice." He kissed the inside of her knee. "You wanna call it a night?"

Anya looked at the tower door, dark and boarded, and then at him, and made the calculation she always made. Ghost noises versus winning the bet. Ghost noises were losing.

"No," she said. "Keep going. We're not done, and you're not done, and I haven't lost yet."

"That's the spirit."

He went back down and she went back to counting joists, and if the tower door leaned a half inch against its boards, neither of them was in a position to see it.

He got her there eventually. Of course he did. She lasted until somewhere around the ninth joist before her breath came out in one long, wrecked gasp that echoed off the stone walls like a gunshot.

Then she burst out laughing. She couldn't help it. She lay there on the quilt, shaking, hands over her face, and Levi propped himself up on one elbow and grinned down at her like he'd won the lottery twice.

"That gasp," he said. "That gasp is going in my memory bank forever. I'm gonna replay it on my deathbed."

"You shut up."

"Quietest one wins. You were not quiet."

"I was quiet for most of it!"

"Most. Not all. Say it."

She laughed harder and gave him a shove. "Fine. You're better at the game. There, happy? You win, you always win, you're insufferable and you win."

"Say it nicer."

"Levi Sutter is better at Quietest One Wins than I am," she recited, trying not to grin. "And I hate losing to you. And I like losing to you. Both of those things are true at the same time and I don't want to examine that."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Go away. Come here. Go away and come here."

He came. He settled beside her on the quilt and she curled into him, still catching her breath, and the laugh was still fading out of her when it happened. The echo came back. Not right away. Late. Her own laugh, her own gasp, bouncing off the stone a half second after it should have died, and then again, thinner, from somewhere higher than any wall should reach.

Anya went still.

"Levi."

"Yeah?"

"Listen."

They listened. The generator hummed. Then, from up in the dark above the sanctuary, from the direction of the boarded tower door, a sound like a heavy wooden door swinging and stopping short, bumping shut against its frame. Once. Soft as a whisper.

"That wasn't a mouse," she said.

Levi sat up. "No. That was not a mouse." He reached for his jeans and got up, crossing the bare stone floor naked as the day he was born, like that was a normal thing a man did in a haunted church, and stood in front of the tower door with his hands on his hips.

The boards were intact. Every nail sat where Pierre had driven them. But when Levi laid his palm flat against the door, the wood was warm. Not sun-warm. Warm like a body had been leaning against it.

"Huh," he said.

"What's huh. I don't like huh. Huh is a bad word, Levi."

"Door's warm. Building's been sealed up, no heat runs up there. Should be cold as a gravestone." He knocked twice on it, casual as knocking on a neighbor's wall. Nothing answered. "Could be heat from the day soaking up. Stone does that."

"Stone also doesn't laugh back at people."

He came back to the quilt, pulled his jeans on, and didn't argue with her, which scared her more than the door did. They got dressed in a hurry after that, mostly in silence, and Levi doused the work lights and locked up and drove her home with his hand on her knee the whole way, which was his way of saying it's fine, we're fine, go to sleep.

They did not go to sleep. Not for a while. And after that first night, the game became a habit.

-----

They did it the next Tuesday in the empty vestry, on a folded moving blanket, quick and quiet while the crew was at lunch, and Anya won that one, or close enough to it. The next Wednesday they went back to the sanctuary after dark, and Thursday again, and by Friday the game had stopped being a game in any real sense. It had turned into a dare with a pulse.

"Tonight you don't get to hold my head," Levi said that Friday, walking her backward toward the quilt. "Hands stay up. Above your head. Pillow, whatever, but up."

"That's not the rule."

"New rule. I make the rules when I win. I won."

"You won once."

"Four times," he said. "Say the rules back to me."

"Hands up. I don't touch. I stay quiet." She was already breathing faster and they hadn't started. "And if I break, I lose."

"And if you break, you lose. And you gotta tell me when you're close, every time. I want to hear you say it."

"That's humiliating."

"That's the game. You in or out?"

"In. Obviously in." She put her hands up over her head, gripping the edge of the quilt, and he pulled a bandana out of his back pocket and wound it around her wrists and tied it to the leg of a sawhorse he'd set up for exactly this, and she looked up at him and her whole face went hot. "You brought a sawhorse to work."

"I plan ahead." He kissed her, long and deep, and pulled back. "You good? Say it."

"I'm good. Don't stop."

He didn't stop. He took her apart by inches that night, and it was rougher than they'd ever been, his hands hard on her hips, and she wanted it, said so, twice, plain as anything, and he gave it to her until the stones rang with her name and she broke the silence so badly that the echo of it kept going after she'd stopped.

Afterward she lay with the bandana loose around one wrist and something wrong in her chest.

It wasn't her heartbeat. Her heartbeat was fine, slow and satisfied. This was under it. A heat, low and spreading, like a hand pressed flat against her sternum from the inside. Not arousal. She knew arousal. This was older and hungrier, like something had been asleep in there for thirty-four years and had cracked one eye open.

"Levi," she said slowly. "Do you feel anything? Right now. Anything weird."