Authors: Katie Golding
Swap Out
Copyright © 2014 by Katie Golding
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted without the express consent of the author.
Cover Photos used with license by iStockphoto LP
Cover Design by Katie Golding
Printed and bound in the United States of America
First edition
ISBN: 978-1502959348
Dedicated to my boys,
brave and wonderful that they are.
Creed of the United States Air Force
Special Operations Command
Pararescuemen:
“It is my duty as a Pararescueman to save lives and to aid the injured. I will be prepared at all times to perform my assigned duties quickly and efficiently, placing these duties before personal desires and comforts. These things I do, that others may live.”
Chapters
CHAPTER 7: BIPARTISANS AND BATTLE CRIES
CHAPTER 10: PETALS AND PROMISES
CHAPTER 11: INVASION OF THE PEPPER BRINGER
CHAPTER 12: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE
CHAPTER 13: FUNDAMENTAL FAILURES
CHAPTER 15: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
CHAPTER 16: PULLING PRIORITIES
CHAPTER 17: BITTER-COLD WARMTH
CHAPTER 22: LITTLE BOXES AND TINY PARACHUTES
CHAPTER 24: THE LIGHTNING BOLT
CHAPTER 25: ALL THE KING’S MEN
I am Home Depot’s bitch.
The purveyor of hardware and the wielder of hammers, the hauler of tables and builder of beds.
But mostly, I am a grunt.
A slave to my cell phone, leaping from the warehouse and store front of Pearce Home Designs to whatever address she bids me to go to.
She
being Zoe Pearce, my boss and for all intents and purposes, overseer.
“Luca, go to the Williamsons’ and swap out the EH-4 dining table with the WQ-7, because the stain on the wood is clashing with the hardwood floors.”
“Luca, I need you to pick up the cabinet fixtures I ordered and install them in the Clark’s kitchen, but only after you go to the house on Broad Street we were at yesterday and swap out the bulbs in the chandelier for a lower wattage because the lighting is too harsh.”
“Luca, be at my beck and call and never complain when I ask a thousand thankless tasks of you. And do it all while picking up my Starbucks and make sure you get back here before my Mocha Latte gets cold, or you’re fired, Roark. Again.”
She loves to fire me. Does it at least three times a day. And on the days she doesn’t, I usually quit. But I still show up to work the next morning because the woman has talent. And whatever she paid for her degree in Interior Design was certainly worth it because as far as professional home stagers go, she’s one of the best in the business. I never even knew home staging was a
thing
. But it is. And it’s a lucrative niche market if you’ve got the eye and the goods.
It goes a little something like this: say good ol’ Billy Bob wants to sell his house. Awesome. He moves his shit out to his casa nueva, brings in a realtor. But the realtor can’t sell it because no one wants to buy a home that looks like an abandoned warehouse. Enter Zoe. Realtor contracts her to stage it: i.e. bring in furniture and décor, tweak the hardware and upgrade some light fixtures, basically make it look like your dream home. And voila! House sells. We take the goodies back, and Happy New Homeowner moves in and tries to recreate what we sold them: its potential. But the thing is, unless they’re decking it out in a seven thousand dollar dining room table made out of mango wood, it’s just not quite gonna get there. But that’s not our problem. If anything, that’s why we’re the best and book weeks in advance.
Not to mention most stagers don’t have guys like me on their roster. They rent their furniture from the local Sales and Lease, $300 couches that have been used before and eventually returned when the temporary possessor bounced their $50 per month bill. The Sales and Lease will employ their own grunts to haul aforementioned stained furniture into the empty-and-waiting-to-be-sold house, tracking in dirt and damaging walls and scraping the hardwood floors. But Zoe doesn’t play their games.
Over time she bought and paid off her own inventory, high class pieces belonging in million dollar mansions. And who does she rely on to move it, repair it, maintain it? That would be me. Plus a couple of other dudes I wouldn’t necessarily trust with a shrimp fork, but whatever.
Now, the furniture she’s leaving in a house, waiting to be gawked at? Majority of the time, it comes back fine. It’s not like it’s being used, having dirty little kids jump on it or setting down their glasses of grape juice and leaving rings on the dinette. It’s just a picture, in 3D. But occasionally, stuff happens. Like when Mr. Prospective Home Buyer weighs 450lbs and sits in our $500 dining room chair, and cracks the back of it. Fucker. Because I now get to spend my entire morning taking it apart and trying to salvage it before Zoe loses her shit and I lose my job.
It’s not even like I have a background in this stuff. I was never trained in carpentry or design, I don’t have a degree in engineering or the qualifications to be an electrician or a plumber. But some things you just know how to do. Like how to stop a leak in the bathroom sink, how to swap a ceiling fan for a chandelier, how to restore wood so it doesn’t look like it came out of a hoarder’s storage shed. But lifting and moving furniture, helping to carry a couch or a bed up a flight of stairs? That I was kinda trained for. Pararescue will do that for you.
I spent six years total in the Air Force, two of them just in training. And when I was free of the pipeline, into the chopper and out into the combat zone I went. Skydiving into open fire to locate the guy who had been hit and was taking cover behind a rock in Afghanistan. Find him, patch him up enough to move him, then get him loaded into the bird and back to a base so the real docs could fix him up and do whatever: send him home or send him back out. Then you do it again, and again, and hope today is not the one when
you’re
being brought back on a stretcher. Or shipped home on a cargo plane with a flag draped over your first-class wooden box of a coffin.
But we don’t think about that because we can’t afford to. You don’t know fear. You
can’t
. You go into the worst of the worst, find the person who drew the short straw and put their life before yours. You have to be stronger, faster, endless endurance and no hesitation. The toughest of the tough and the bravest of the brave. You jump, climb, hike, even dive, perpetually flipping a coin with your existence just to save someone else’s.
That others may live.
That’s the motto. That’s the way of life.
It was
my
life. Maroon beret and all.
Until it wasn’t.
In some ways, I will always be in the Special Operations Forces. I still need the rush, adrenaline junkie and all. It’s one of the reasons why I joined when I was eighteen. It’s why when I finished my final salute, I moved to Moab. Because I still jump out of planes, but now I don’t have to worry about bullets puncturing my chute. And I still climb, 5.11 and sometimes 5.12 if I feel like taunting the Grim Reaper and the cracks of Indian Creek come a calling. But the only life I have to worry about getting back home in one piece is mine. And that’s how I like to keep it.
That’s how my boss likes me to keep it. Not that she knows what I do in my spare time because she’d kick my ass. And Zoe may only be a slender little 5’7”, but it’s not the threat of a right hook keeping my mouth shut when I want to put her in her place. It’s the burn in her irises, the tight pucker of her lips that scares the shit out of me. All complete with brown hair and eyes that look like the color of dirt when it mixes with blood, and I
know
that color. She can cut men down with a lash of her tongue and she could vanquish an army with her smile. If you can get her to show one.
Those are usually reserved for clients, the ones who stare at her divine little ass in those stark white knee-length pencil skirts that hug every curve like they were sewn on. Doesn’t help that she lives in stilettos in every design and color, but they all inexplicably have a red sole on the bottom and when she kicks up her foot, it makes you feel like you got a peek at her panties.
And little Miss Professional Barracuda is currently doing just that, leaning over the kitchen counter of a house we’re supposed to be providing a quote on as she scratches at the grout in the tile wall. She huffs and straightens, her heel clicking on the tile floor as she turns towards me.
“Luca,” she says in the voice she’s perfected: the one meaning she’s about to make me do something dumb and humiliating. “Can you clean this?”
I check to make sure the realtor is nowhere nearby, probably in the other room and jabbering away on her cellphone, before I step towards Zoe and check the tile, then glance at her with a smirk.
“Not for fifteen bucks an hour.”
She immediately smacks my shoulder, the corner of her lips pulling up. “Give a man black hair and blue eyes and he thinks he can talk to a woman any way he pleases. Didn’t I already fire you once today?”
“Actually,
no
.”
She scoffs and crosses her arms, an act made all the more impressive in the hoity-toity little black blazer she’s got on. I am totally confused about how she moves around in clothes that fit her so tight.
“Well, we can fix that,” she says, and I roll my eyes.
“Zoe, no one is going to care about the grout in the kitchen when they realize there are maple hardwood floors in the living room.”
Her brow furrows. “The maple was only in the entryway…”
I wink at her, then stroll casually towards the living room with her heels clicking behind me. I pop out my go-to knife, then crouch down once I reach the carpet.
“Step on the floor,” I tell her, and she lightly presses the toe of her navy blue stiletto onto the carpet. The one perfectly matching my ’68 Corvette Stingray. Like
that
doesn’t get my blood pumping. “Feel it?”
“Feel what? Because all I feel is cheap Berber…”
I chuckle and then draw the edge of my knife down the sliver between the wall and where the carpet bucks up against it, then pull up the corner. Smug as a pill popper blowing in a Breathalyzer when she gasps.
“No way…” She crouches down, then checks like her eyes are deceiving her as she draws a fingertip over the hidden hardwood.
“Eighteen an hour, and you’ll get yourself a brand new floor.” I grin and she narrows her eyes at me.
“Not on your life. You’re lucky I don’t pay you minimum wage and call it square for all the crap I have to put up with from you.” She stands and smoothes out her skirt, huffing out a breath when she catches me stealing a long look at her legs. “Do that again and you really
are
fired,” she hisses, then turns away. “Rachel?”
I snicker and lay the carpet back down, putting my knife away, and when the realtor comes out of the master bedroom with a fake smile on her face I head to the dining room to check out the rest of the house. Zoe starts announcing “her discovery” about the floor, and I tune out the rest of the conversation. She’s about to start re-negotiating her fee to include all the work it’s gonna take me to pull up that carpet, and weird as it may seem, I don’t actually want to know what she considers my hourly rate to really be worth. I know what she should be paying me, and so does she. And we both know she’s not doing it. A fact I have no problem reminding her of on a constant basis.
I yawn and stretch my arms, my eyes narrowing on the corner of a crooked baseboard. I chew the inside of my lip as I kneel down to check it out, wondering if I should tell Zoe or just let it go. All houses have their quirks, no matter what you paid to build it. And I don’t really feel the urgent need to rip this up and re-lay it when I don’t have the time considering all the other items Zoe keeps stacking on my To Do list, but this is why I’m here.
She has a good eye for detail and should be quoting these houses alone, but she doesn’t anymore. She always ended up spending the entire time on the phone with me, asking me about the time estimates on rebuilding this and did I know anything about fixing that. So she decided I was going to start coming with her in an effort to save the life of her cell phone. Once I started pointing out the problems she was failing to notice, it was a set arrangement.
“Okay,” she says and sighs behind me, “that’s done and now we can—what are you doing?”
“Checking this baseboard,” I mutter, Zoe immediately coming over to stand beside where I’m crouched down. She yawns, and I peek up at her. It’s barely six o’clock…
“What?”
“Nothing, just…” I trail off, then grin teasingly. “Didn’t you get a long enough nap on the drive over here?”
This house is way the hell out in Castle Valley, because in order for Zoe to keep a steady flow of business we have to push out to the surrounding areas. She also does straight up interior decorating for the big spenders, and managing a few of the vacation rental properties for the seasonal influx; we clean, we restyle, we rent them some furniture until they go back to wherever they came from. I don’t really care about having to travel to some of the more remote areas, except she took it upon herself to snooze during the whole damn ride out here. And she calls me lazy?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about and don’t worry about the baseboard,” she says, then starts rummaging in her purse. “I’ll just keep the lighting low and besides, I don’t have time to deal with your nitpickiness.”
“
My
nitpickiness?” I say, incredulous. “Isn’t that why you cart me along on all these super exciting little outings? Because you—”
“Bye Rachel!” she calls out, and with that she turns on her heel and starts striding towards the front door; my eyes rolling as I get up and follow her, then shut the door behind us.
“Where to next, O’ Fearless Leader?” I taunt as we walk to my parked car, sliding on my sunglasses to shield against the mid-April sun, and she chuckles under her breath.
“Well, since you asked…” she drawls, and I arch an eyebrow at her over the roof of my car. She waves me off before opening the door. “We’re done for the day. By the way, did that house smell funny to you?”
My brow furrows as I slide smoothly into my seat, waiting to start the car until Zoe buckles her seatbelt. “Smelled fine.”
“Huh.” She pulls out a bottle of white tea and ginger lotion from her purse and immediately starts massaging it over her legs, and my nose wrinkles.
“Don’t put that stuff on in my car.”