The One That Got Away (Revisited)

Okay, so this is what I keep not saying out loud to anybody, because if I say it out loud it becomes real. Trev Devlin bet me, to my face, last week on his own porch, that I couldn't get through one visit to his house without trying to seduce him. And I said yes. Fifty bucks and bragging rights, and my stupid pride wouldn't let me walk away.

I'm twenty-five, I'm an adult, I pay my own rent, I sell home security systems door to door for a living, which means I can talk my way into almost anything. That is the entire problem, actually. Trev knows it. We've been trying to out-talk each other since sophomore year of high school, and he knows exactly what my pride costs me. He said it right there on the porch, leaning on the railing with that dumb little grin, "You'll crack before I do, Cam. Twenty bucks says you can't last one full visit."

"Make it fifty," I shot back, because apparently I hate money.

Here's what nobody tells you about bets like this: to win, I have to stay completely unbothered. Calm, cool, boring even. But if I lose, I lose by throwing myself at the one guy I've been half furious at since sophomore year and, since roughly last summer, half in love with. So either way it goes, I'm in trouble. Winning means proving I'm not the kid who backed down from him at every turn. Losing means... well. Losing means losing. You get it.

And the worst part? I think he wants me to lose. I think he set the whole thing up so I'd have a legitimate excuse. That man is sneaky in a way I almost respect.

Anyway. Tuesday evening in July, muggy enough that my shirt was sticking to my back by the time I walked the twenty feet from my porch to his. His bungalow is still half-gutted, plastic sheeting in the windows, a rented dumpster in the driveway that's been there longer than he has. I knocked on the front door, which was just leaning there, not even hung right, and hollered "Hello?" into the dusty dark.

"C'min, it's open!" came from somewhere deep in the house.

I pushed the door and it scraped across the floor, because of course it does. And there he was, coming around the corner from the kitchen doorway, and I need you to understand something. The man was shirtless. Shirtless, in sweat-low shorts, with drywall dust all over him, white powder from his collar down across one shoulder and smeared along his forearm like he'd been carrying sheets of it on his shoulder. His hair had dust in it too. And somehow that made it worse. Sweat, dust, forearms, the whole package, and he knew it, because his grin started before he even said a word.

"Well, well," he said, wiping his hands on a rag that was already more gray than whatever color it started as. "It's the sales lady. What's the pitch today, Cam? Alarm systems? Or are you finally selling what everybody on this street already assumes you're selling?"

"Oh my God, you wish," I said, and thank goodness my voice came out steady, because my brain did not feel steady. "The pitch is I'm here to collect fifty dollars, actually. From a man who's about to lose a bet."

"Whoa, hold on. The bet's not up yet. You've been in my house for, what, eleven seconds?"

"Counting already? Nervous?"

"Thrilled," he said. "Genuinely. This is the best entertainment I've had all month, and I've been talking to a plumber about a sewer line for three days, so the bar is low."

He turned and headed back toward the kitchen, and I followed him, and yes, I looked, and no, I'm not proud, but I'm honest. Drywall dust does something to a man's back. I don't know the science of it. Somebody should study it.

His kitchen is the one room that's actually coming together. New counters, old cabinets he's apparently sanding by hand, a fridge plugged into an extension cord that runs across the floor like a tripwire waiting for its victim. There was a box fan in the window pushing hot air around in circles, and a radio on the counter playing some station that's all static and classic rock.

"Beer?" he asked, already reaching into the fridge.

"Uh." Careful, Camilla. Free drinks are how they get you. "Yeah, sure, why not."

He pulled out two bottles, and here's where the universe decided to embarrass me personally. He handed mine over and our fingers touched. He was still shirtless, dust and all. Just touched. Knuckles against knuckles for maybe half a second, his hand still cold from the fridge, and my pulse did this absolutely traitorous little jump that I felt all the way up in my ears. Did he notice? He must have noticed, right? He didn't say anything, which is almost worse, because now I'm sitting here wondering if he's saving it.

"Cheers to your imminent defeat," I said, clinking my bottle against his, because if I talk fast enough maybe my face won't do the thing my face wants to do.

"To the fifty bucks," he said, and drank.

We ended up leaning against opposite counters, which felt very western-movie of us, and I made myself focus on the one topic that is guaranteed to be safe: the house. Renovations. Drywall. The sewer line from hell. Boring stuff. Safe stuff.

"So how's the project going?" I asked, nodding at a wall that had about nine different colors of pencil lines on it. "And be honest, how many of these walls are you going to rip out and redo, because from next door it looks like you've rebuilt the same hallway four times."

"That speculation is load bearing and I resent it," he said. "The hallway was wrong, okay? The last guy framed it two inches off and it bugged me every time I walked through it."

"Two inches? You redid a hallway over two inches?"

"Two and a quarter, actually, which is worse." He pointed his bottle at me. "You'd get it if you'd ever built anything. Which you haven't. Your porch steps lean, by the way. I've been meaning to mention that."

"My steps have character."

"Your steps are a lawsuit waiting for a plaintiff." He was smiling into his beer when he said it. "Anyway. Kitchen's mostly done. Bathrooms are the next war front. The upstairs one has, I'm pretty sure, the original 1954 plumbing, and I think the pipes are held together by spite."

"Spite is a strong adhesive, to be fair."

"Strongest I know."

And that right there is the problem with talking to Trev. It's easy. It has always been easy, even when we were kids throwing insults across a classroom, and easy turns into comfortable turns into me forgetting I'm supposed to be running out a clock. I caught myself laughing at one of his dumb jokes, a real laugh, an ugly snort-laugh, and I had to take a long drink of beer to cover it.

He watched me do it. He had that look. Not smug, exactly. More like a guy watching a pot he's pretty sure is about to boil.

"So what's your timeline on this place?" I asked, steering hard. "Because you told Mrs. Noble two months and that was three weeks ago and you've got a dumpster and half a roof."

"You've been asking my neighbors about me?"

"I've been asking your neighbors about the dumpster. It's an eyesore. It's a community issue."

"Uh huh." He set his bottle down on the counter and looked at me, and I don't love how seen I felt in that moment. "Realistically? Done by Thanksgiving, if the inspections don't kill me. Want the tour? It's short, there's like two finished rooms."

I should have said no. Let it be noted somewhere, in some little notebook of Camilla's Bad Decisions: she should have said no. A tour means moving through his space, means doorways and following behind him and all kinds of contact-adjacent opportunities. The bet was one visit without cracking. Every extra room is more chances for him to be right about me.

But also, the stairs he'd rebuilt were genuinely nice. I saw them from the porch. I'm only human.

"Fine, but if this tour ends with a sales pitch of your own, I'm reporting you to somebody," I said.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, all innocence, pushing off the counter. "I'm a licensed contractor. I pitch nothing. I build things and I wait."

"Wait for what?"

He looked back at me over his shoulder on the way to the hall, all that drywall dust catching the light from the window, and said, "Wouldn't you like to know."

Yes. Yes I would. That's the entire problem, Trev.

He showed me the kitchen again first, which was dumb, because we'd just been standing in it. He gestured at it all grand, like a museum docent. "Behold. Cabinets."

"Fascinating. What's next, a wall?"

"Actually, yes!" He led me down the hall to the living room, where the floors were this old oak that he'd sanded but not finished yet, all pale and velvety-looking under the box fan. He rapped a knuckle on the wall. "Taking this out eventually. Opens the whole room up."

"It's a nice room," I admitted. It was. Big windows