Big Flipping Deal Ch. 04

And for that second, she kissed me back. Her lips moved surely and softly against mine - parting, clasping, coupling, warm and embracing, reassuring, needful, speaking truth and trust in the language of an unambiguous caress. Becoming, briefly, everything I ever wanted.

Then the astonishment of it cleared my head. Reflexively, I let go and dropped back and watched her eyes snap back open and her lips slowly close.

"Oh my gosh, Lindsey, I'm sorry - I don't know - Jesus, I didn't mean -"

Something between relief and amusement and wistfulness settled over her features until it decided to be a faint smile.

"I guess he hit you even harder than I thought," she said. Then she held up one hand, thumb across the palm and fingers spread. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Cleveland," I answered. But instead of laughing, she lowered her eyebrows, so I rushed to say, "Four! Four fingers."

Her face relaxed. "Can you sit up?"

"I think so. Ow! Shit!" Levering myself up from the ground sent another shot of pain through my head, which I reflexively grabbed with one hand, only to find the touch hurt even more. "Fuck!"

"We should get you to a hospital. That was a serious fucking punch."

I opened my mouth to argue with her, then realized how wobbly I still felt. And what are you going to do if you don't go to the hospital? Get back to work? Obviously not. Go back home and leave her working by herself? Even worse.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, we probably should. Your dad can fucking hit."

The concern on her face blanked into something else. Then she just said, "I know."

And then she helped me up and out to her car.

* * *

The Parkland ER can take forever on a good day and longer on a bad one, but it was close, and they say it's the place to go for trauma, and my head felt pretty traumatized by that punch.

So Lindsey and I spent the rest of our Saturday there.

The wait to see the triage nurse actually wasn't too bad. But after he'd asked me his questions and checked my vitals and basic responses, we had to head back to the main waiting room and prove that they'd named it right. Being made to wait in the ER is probably more good news than bad news - you don't really want to be in any condition that makes the triage nurse think he should leapfrog you over all the other people who got there first.

And in my case, other than the insane amount of pain my head gave me, I was just as happy to wait.

It meant more time with Lindsey paying close, concerned attention to me, apologizing for what a rat bastard her father was, and eventually telling me a little more about what it had been like for her, growing up, figuring herself out ... and then trying to get her family to accept it.

"I had to wait until I was done with college," she said, the grim necessity clear in her face. "I knew if I wasn't already out on my own, I'd get thrown out the second I told them. I didn't want my little brother to see that. As it was, Dad banned me from the house, and Carly - that's my step-mother - apparently took to reading the appropriate chapters from Leviticus to Matty every chance she got. Not that there was any reason for her to - Matt was as square-jawed and straight as you can get. But Carly made it her personal crusade to keep him from following in my footsteps to homo-hell."

"Did he buy into it?" Just from the tone of her voice, I could tell her brother was important to her. The idea of him being turned against her made my head throb that much more.

Lindsey shook her head and took a minute to swallow some unpleasant reaction.

"He got diagnosed with brain cancer six months after I came out."

"Oh shit. I'm sorry -"

"Yeah, he was sixteen when they found it, and he only lasted another year after that. If I'd known, I'd have kept my mouth shut until he was gone. It would have saved him some stress and I would've gotten to see him more often."

Not only did she have to deal with her brother dying, but apparently her mad-cow stepmother insisted that the whole thing was a punishment from God for "Leonard's" perversion. By the time the ER let me into the back where they had a bed for me, the pain in my head felt like nothing next to what Lindsey must have gone through for the next several years. Cousins, Aunts, Uncles ... her whole family took the same line as her dad and stepmom.

"Except Neena," she said. "She was my mom's sister, and she always said Matty and I took after her side of the family. But ... I confused the hell out of her, and she was more sweet than strong. She'd been raised Southern Baptist, never really had any reason to question any of what she'd been taught. So it was a struggle for her, standing up to the rest of them when they got going about Leonard the Sinner."

At some point in her story, the doctor came in and did an assessment - a bunch of "follow my finger" tests, shining a light in my eyes, more questions. A tall, slender black woman, she had a certain precision that I found comforting even though she didn't do or say anything particularly personable.

"You're probably fine," the doctor said when she'd finished examining me. "I don't see any issues. But the fact that you don't remember the punch - that's what we call a change in neurological status. So I want to do a CT scan just to be sure."

The 'CT' apparently stood for 'Ceaseless Tedium' ... another protracted wait for the tech to come and fetch me, thirty minutes inside a whirring, grinding plastic donut, then more waiting back in the room for the results to come in and tell me I was fine. Oh, and more waiting for the discharge clerk to process all my paperwork.

In the meantime, I told Lindsey a little more about Aunt Elise, and then we moved on to less depressing stuff - how I'd bounced around to three different cities since college, how she'd built her reputation and client base here in the metroplex. Eventually the Parkland bureaucracy let me go, Lindsey drove me home, and with the motor still running while we sat in my driveway, she told me how much she appreciated me standing up to her dad.

"It was really brave," she said, looking me in the eye with her solemn blue gaze. "And it made me feel ... less alone. No, less like a victim. He's been treating me like that my whole life, and even now that I can stand up to him, it still - I don't know. But it was brave. I'm sorry it got you hit."

I shrugged, then winced because it made my head hurt more. "Ouch. Probably more stupid than brave. But I don't let people talk to my friends that way."

Her eyebrows wavered downward, then up, and her mouth gave an uncertain twitch that changed into a soft smile. "Thanks, Nick."

"Also, it totally gave me an excuse to kiss you without having to worry about whether it made me gay."

She laughed. "Well, you're a good kisser. But next time, find a better excuse, okay?"

"Sure," I said, opening my door and getting out. "Maybe getting hit by a car or shark-attacked. Are we back to work tomorrow?"

"Do you think your head will be up to it?"

To be honest, I had no idea. But I didn't want to lie around the house tomorrow and not see her.

"I think so."

"All right, then come on over whenever you're up to it. I'll show up around 9:00 and get started on my own."

"Cool."

Putting the car in gear, she gave a just-fingers wave and turned to reverse out of my drive. I watched her go, waved myself, and received a full-hand wave before she sped off.

Then I went inside, trying to decide whether the pain in my head had been tuned out more powerfully by "you're a good kisser" ... or by "next time."

* * *

Lindsey was at Mrs. P's working already when I showed up at nine the next morning. My head still ached like a sonofabitch from that punch her dad smacked me with, and it hadn't been helped any by the sound of the alarm clock waking me up. But for whatever stupid-ass reason, I'd set the buzzer the night before. Oh, I remember why - it was so I could make sure I was dressed if she showed up with coffee and donuts like the week before. No such luck, though, which left me trudging over to Mrs. P's at nine feeling like I had a rusty see-saw stabbed through my head.

Even better, I heard what Lindsey was working on before I got there: the sound of her borrowed power-saw shrilled through the Sunday-morning air to let my skull know it needed to up its pain game.

She had the garage door raised and two sawhorses supporting one of the sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood that had come in a delivery earlier that week. I didn't worry too much about the sound of the power tools upsetting the neighbors - most of them were churchgoing types and would already have left for Sunday services. But I could see she was already on the second of the two countertops, so I wondered just when she'd arrived and gotten started.

As I made my way up the driveway past her car, one end of the plywood clattered loose, the saw whined to a stop, and Lindsey looked up at me, raising her safety goggles. With her blond hair pulled back and the goggles up, she looked very industrious - despite the attractive way she filled out her blue t-shirt and white denim shorts.

"Hey, Nick. How's your head this morning?"

"It's good," I said. Then, not wanting to be a liar, I added, "Well, it's better than it was most of yesterday. When did you get here?"

"Early," she said. "I woke up at four and couldn't get back to sleep. Insomnia. I gave up tossing and turning around six and headed over here to take care of the last of that linoleum adhesive."

"Did you get it all?" I didn't know if I wanted the answer to be yes or no. We'd struggled with the stuff Saturday morning, using a vinegar solution to soak it and heat guns on the globs that stayed stubborn after that. The prospect of more bending and scraping sounded terrible to my head - although I also didn't like the idea of her having to finish the chore by herself.

"Clean as a whistle," she said. Thankfully, the gratitude and relief from my skull swamped any guilt about Lindsey doing all the work. "I gave the concrete a last mop-up a while ago and came out here to get the counters started while it dries. You want to give me a hand?"

"Sure," I said. "Looks like you're almost done, though."

"With these, yeah." She gestured at the half-done countertop and the finished one propped against the garage wall nearby, then nodded in the direction of two heavy grey flats along the other wall. "But I've still got the cement backer boards to do.

"Right. What are those again?" I pointed at the aching left side of my face and said, "Maybe you told me already, but I got hit on the head with a coconut and I barely remember my own name."

"Hilarious," she said. Then she patted the countertop base in front of her. "The backer board holds the tile. We fasten it to the plywood base and then fix the tiles to it."

"But only after we've put the plywood on top of the cabinets, right?"

"There you go - it's coming back to you. Have you figured your name out yet?"

"Give me a little longer."

We took until lunchtime measuring, cutting and installing the layers of the countertop, making a template of the sink, then using it to cut the holes after the plywood base was on the cabinets. More Thai food came for lunch. I told Lindsey she'd done a really good job getting the concrete subfloor clean of linoleum glue.

The afternoon was all tiling, which Lindsey said she'd watched plenty of before and helped out with on a couple of prior jobs. We laid everything out for position, then applied the mortar to the backer board, then put the tiles down using vinyl spacers to make sure they lined up straight. By the end of it, we were speckled with mortar, but the tiles looked pretty good. All they needed was a little grout, which would be tomorrow's job.

As we packed things up, Lindsey asked again how my head was doing.

"Lots better," I said truthfully. I hadn't thought about it hurting for a couple of hours at that point ... although the moment she mentioned it, I realized a dull ache was still asserting squatter's rights where I'd been hit.

"Good," she said. Then she pointed to her own yellowing shiner. "Too bad my dad didn't come over a few days earlier, though. We could have been a matched set."

* * *

Monday was grout and learning how to install the laminate wood flooring. Tuesday was finishing off the kitchen floor. Wednesday we installed the new sink, which went surprisingly quickly. The next thing on our schedule was painting, though, and Lindsey wrinkled her nose at the idea of starting that night.

"Well, let's put it off till tomorrow, then," I said. Then I said what I'd been trying to work up the courage to say for several days: "We could take the rest of tonight off and go bowling."

It came out about as laid-back as I might have hoped, and Lindsey said:

"Sure. Why not?"

So we went bowling. She kicked my ass even though we stopped at my house to get my ball and shoes and she made do with the bowling alley's loaners. Bowling's not a high-conversation sport when there are only two of you - somebody's up on the lane bowling while the other person watches from the seats, and then vice versa through all ten frames of the game. But you get to high-five if there's a strike or someone picks up a tough split.

And I got to watch Lindsey bowl.

She had incredible form - and I don't mean her figure, I mean the measured way she controlled every step, swung the ball, and ended her approach with a perfect release, one toned leg bent to support her weight, the other angled out behind her, and her throwing arm following through to point at the ceiling after she released the ball. Frame after frame, she turned into this perfect sculpture every time she threw the ball.

None of which meant I was ignoring her figure ... the legs pale and clean, the waist narrow, the hips flaring. A couple of times I thought I caught glimpses of a bit more fullness at the crotch of her shorts than should have been there. It gave me that dry-mouth of taboo and made me growl at myself to focus on her bowling.

We took a break after two games for beers and traded stories about our high-school league days: my pal with the 160 average who through a complete freak of luck came within two balls of a perfect game; her teammate with bulging biceps who never broke 180 because his only interest was throwing the ball as fast and as hard as he could, accuracy be damned.

After a couple more games, we'd both had enough, and she drove me home.

"This was nice, Nick," she said - maybe with a little surprise in her voice? "We should do it again sometime."

"Yeah, that would be great," I replied.

I think I kept my face clean of the itch I felt to lean over and kiss her before getting out of the car.