Heart Thaw by Liz Reinhardt Read Free Book Online Page A

I jog up five more steps, then reach into the box and pull out orange, red, white, more white bulbs.
    “Shit.” I sit hard on one of the steps. The circular cut-outs in the metal bite through my jeans.
    “You’re on a quest for green Christmas bulbs?” Trent guesses, his voice secret-clubhouse-quiet.
    I climb up the last few steps and lean on the little balcony-like top platform, close enough to him that I can see the spokes of gray in his eyes. We’re so close and so impossibly far away.
    “How did you know?”
    “I’m the oracle of electrical. Green Christmas bulbs are like the Holy Grail around here. Bring that ladder over, and I’ll get you some.”
    He blinks so slowly, he looks three seconds away from a nap.
    “Are you pissed about last night?”
    Now that he’s trapped up there, I realize I can ask anything I want and wait out his answer. It’s a power that makes me strangely giddy.
    “Forget last night.” He flips the words out like stones skipped over a lake. “Anyway, that was personal, and in no way impacts my current performance as a Home Depot sales associate. So pull that ladder over here and let me wow you with my bulb-procuring skills.”
    His smile is a showman’s, and my heart aches for the real thing.
    Not that I deserve it.
    I skip down the steps and the whole ladder rattles and sways under my feet. When I grip both bars to push it, Trent calls down, “There’s a release lever by your right foot. Step on it.”
    The bottom step pops up and the wheels roll with quiet obedience. I maneuver it right in front of Trent and press on the bottom step to lock the ladder into place.
    Trent’s long body slides out of the overhead and shimmies onto the platform. He half-jumps, half-steps down, hands in the pockets of his grimy, paint-stained jeans, orange ladder swaying and dancing with every hop. I can’t take my eyes off the long line of his body, the wide stretch of his shoulders.
    I know how that body feels pressed against mine, even though I shouldn’t. The memory of being twined with him, naked on the floor of his torn-apart kitchen, nothing but the heat of our bodies to keep us warm, floods my brain and makes my breath catch.
    He tips his head to look down at me and his overlong black hair falls forward around the five o’clock shadow of his jaw. I feel like prey being stalked by a particularly beautiful predator. He stands a few inches away from me, but the stiff set of his body makes it feel like he’s a few feet away.
    “Follow me, please, miss.” It should be a joke, his formality, but maybe it’s not. He has good reason to keep me at arms’ length.
    He gestures with his chin to the back of the aisle, and I walk past switch plates, dimmer switches, electrical boxes, breaker boxes, and fuses. It’s all dark, twisted, bare wires and over-bright primary-colored wire coating, intense blue plastic against fluorescent orange shelving, misshapen cardboard boxes cut haphazardly and set up to display plastic, sickly cream socket covers.
    The ugliness is palpable. I can taste the cheap plastic tinge in the air, and the colors are whipped into submission, forced to work the way they need to without any chance of expression.
    My memory flashes back to last night at the trestle, where Trent made intense clashes of color and subject harmonize. If this environment makes me blanch, I can only imagine how Trent feels surrounded by it all day.
    It explains the Steinbeck in the overhead.
    “Barbie.” Trent’s voice is a smile.
    A real one this time.
    I peek around his arm and register a tiny shock over the fact that ‘Barbie’ isn’t a twenty-year-old with big boobs and long hair. She’s fifty, at least, with piles of freshly dyed jet black hair twisted in a complicated updo and blue plastic glasses with beaded croakies.
    When she turns and sees Trent, her eyes bat like she’s a seventh grader gliding by her crush at the lockers. “I didn’t even know you were here today, honey.”
    He