Page 19

JILLY

The insulation batts come wrapped in plastic the color of a highlighter, and I hug three of them to my body like a woman carrying an armload of very ugly clouds. Fiberglass itch already crawls up my forearms. I stop at the base of the scaffolding and tip my head back.

Oggan stands twelve feet up, balanced on a plank no wider than a diving board, stapling a batt into the ceiling cavity with one hand. He does it the way other people butter toast.

"I'm coming up," I announce.

He does not look down. "No."

"That's not a democracy word. That's a coward word." I set the batts on the bottom rung and grip the metal frame. It rocks. My stomach does an ugly little flip.

"Jilly."

"I'm the face of this channel." I climb. One rung. Two. The frame sways, and my knuckles go white. "And the face cannot keep hiding behind a filter while the muscle does all the labor. It reads as fake. The algorithm can smell fake."

"The algorithm can smell nothing. It is a machine."

"Says the man who thinks Wi-Fi is a rumor."

A pause up above. Then the slow, resigned scrape of him shifting his weight to make room.

"Come," he says. "Slow. Hand over hand. If you die, I am not carrying your ring lights to the funeral."

By the time my head clears the top platform, my thighs shake and my breath saws in and out. The barndominium spreads below us, all raw studs and sawdust and the sad blue tarp over the hole where the kitchen wants to be. Up here the air holds fresh pine and hot metal. A single work light dangles from a rafter, buzzing.

Up here there is also a wall of green.

Oggan crouches so his skull doesn't scrape the rafters, and even crouched he takes up the entire universe. Sweat sheens across the ridges of his shoulders. He shed his shirt an hour ago, which I have been aggressively ignoring from the ground and can no longer ignore from eighteen inches away. A long scar carves down his ribs like a river on a map. My mouth goes dry as chalk.

"Give me a batt," I say, too fast.

He hands one up. "Staple gun there. You hold the batt flush to the cavity, staple the flange every twelve inches. Kraft paper faces down. Down. Toward the room."

"I know which way is down, Oggan."

"You put the last one up sideways."

"That was a stylistic choice."

The rumble that comes out of him almost qualifies as a laugh. Almost. I file the sound away like a squirrel hoarding a single perfect acorn.

I wedge the batt into the cavity. It sags. I staple. The flange tears free and the whole thing flops down over my face like a wet golden retriever. Fiberglass in my mouth. I sputter and swat at it, and the platform pitches under my sneakers, and my stomach launches straight up into my throat.

Two enormous hands close over mine.

The world stops.

His palms swallow my knuckles completely, rough as bark, and hot, so much hotter than a body has any right to be. He guides my grip up the flange, repositions the staple gun, and his forearm brackets the side of my head like a fallen beam I would happily be crushed beneath. I hold very still. A bead of sweat rolls down the column of his throat. I track it the way a rabbit tracks a hawk.

"Here," he says, close to my ear, and the gravel of it vibrates through my sternum. "Angle the gun. Twenty degrees. Squeeze steady, not a punch. You attack the wood. The wood does not require attacking."

"Everything I know, I learned from a nine-second tutorial," I admit.

"This explains the sideways batt."

I squeeze. The staple bites clean. The batt holds.

"See?" His breath stirs the flyaways at my temple. "The house does not want to be forced. It wants to be understood."