She smiled. “Flights are booked for the whole family. We’re spending Christmas in Dublin.”
“The Irish won’t know what hit them,” I said.
“The Irish? We’ll be lucky if we come home in one piece. We’re going to drink our weight in Guinness.”
I chuckled, glancing out back when dog tags jingled. Bruno rolled onto his side as he and Opal sunbathed on the freshly lain concrete patio. “They feel pretty at home here, don’t they?”
Georgina bit her bottom lip as she seemed to get lost in a thought. There was something she wasn’t saying. Before I could pry, she put her hands on my chest. “Should we do what we came to do?” Sensing my hesitation, she added, “We don’t have to do it today. There’s no rush.”
“But we had the cinnamon bun and blow job celebration already.” I helped her off the counter, even though what I really wanted to do was drop to my knees and return this morning’s favor. “It’s been long enough.”
She nodded quietly, then rummaged through her pocketbook until I sighed and said, “What you’re looking for is in your zipper pocket.”
“Oh. Right.” Smiling, she got out a small spiral bound notepad and pen.
Holding her to my side, I kissed the top of her head as we made our way out front.
“Justin will be upset he’s missing this,” she said. “He’s run all the comps in the area and has opinions.”
“Why do you think I planned it for a day I knew he couldn’t make it?” I snickered. Moving hundreds of miles away still hadn’t made the bastard any less nosy. Aside from his daily request for renovation photos, it seemed as if he was crashing on our couch every other weekend.
From behind, I put my hands on Georgina’s shoulders and tried to assess the front of the house with a sense of detachment. When deciding where to list it, it wouldn’t do to see it as a place with history—my history. As my sister’s and my roots, as my mom’s home. I had to see it as a potential buyer would in order to determine the right price, but after seven months of restoring it with Georgina, that was nearly impossible to do. We’d put a lot of ourselves into the property, and our relationship had deepened and strengthened on so many levels right here in this house. “A million,” I said.
She laughed. “We can’t sell it for a million, but we do need to figure out if we’re starting at the high end or hoping to incite a bidding war.”
“What if someone snatches it up right away?”
She looked up and back at me. “That would be great, wouldn’t it?”
“But then what?” I asked. My sister’s husband had e-mailed me a new listing a couple days earlier for a foreclosure a few streets over. It was a bargain, and Aaron kept reiterating what a great team Georgina and I made. He and my sister both thought we should be flipping houses for a living. Somehow, I couldn’t seem to muster the same enthusiasm. Fixing up the house had been a project brought together by a perfect storm—I had the emotional attachment to painstakingly restore it while keeping its charm, and I had good reason to set it free. In the months since I’d sold my New York apartment and had made the leap to living full-time in Boston, I’d made great strides—with Georgina’s help—working through my issues over the house and my mom. It was time to let another family have their turn.
“Did you have a different idea?” Georgina asked.
“No, not really.” I squeezed her shoulders and turned my attention back to the job at hand. “One of the shutters on the right window is coming loose, and the landscaper still hasn’t fixed the hedge.”
She made notes. “We should sic our secret weapon on him.”
“My sister,” I said, nodding gravely. “She’s a beast when it comes to getting contractors in line.”
We walked up the front steps and into the living room. I shut the front door, inspecting the marks on the inside of it. “We have to fix these scratches before the first open house.”
“Mark that under ‘Opal and her separation anxiety,’” Georgina replied.
We’d recently left the dogs at the house alone for the first time while picking up pizza for a long night of cleaning ahead. Opal had done a bit of damage.
Georgina pointed her pen at one corner of the living room. “There are still some spots of blue paint on the hardwood.”
“I tried,” I said. “It won’t come up. Mark that under ‘my frisky girlfriend.’”
Her cheeks reddened, a sexy complement to her chestnut-colored hair and cinnamon-sprinkle freckles. “It wasn’t all me,” she said. “If you hadn’t started the paint fight in the first place—”
“It wouldn’t have ended with what probably looked like Smurf porn?”
She shoved my shoulder. “There you go defiling innocent things again.”
I caught her in my arms. “Like you?”
She shrugged and said in explanation, “I don’t stand a chance against bad boys.”
“Good thing for me. I’m bad at lots of stuff.”
She laughed, wrapped one arm around my neck and smoothed my hair from my face with her other hand. “Sebastian, my love?”
“Georgina, my love?”
She pursed her lips as a mix of pity and sympathy crossed her delicate features. “Are you going to be able to paint over the kids’ height charts?”
My sister and her husband had helped with the house as much as they were able to. They’d brought the kids nearly every weekend, and I’d gotten in the habit of measuring Carmen and José in the laundry room. Although it had always been the plan to paint over the marks before we sold, for some reason I’d envisioned filling the wall with colorful charts, from Libby’s kids to our dogs to our own children. “We have to,” I said. “Can’t exactly list this place as gut renovated minus some random kids’ height charts.”
“Can I say something you might not want to hear?”
I gave her a quizzical look. Something was definitely brewing in that head of hers—something that simultaneously turned down her mouth and made her eyes sparkle. “You could,” I said. “Or we can skip a potential argument and try out those sex positions Justin needs us to test for the next issue.”
“This won’t cause a fight.” She played with the neckline of my t-shirt and took a breath. “I know Aaron is eager to sell, but what if we bought your sister out?”
“For what reason?” I asked. “To keep all the profit on the flip for ourselves? I’m guessing they’re not going to go for that.”
“No, no,” she said. “Come with me.” She took my hand and led me upstairs to the master bedroom we’d completely redone. At the window, we overlooked the backyard where Bruno and Opal had moved to sprawl out in the grass.
“After everything we’ve put into the house, the money would be nice to have,” Georgina said. “But you know what else is nice to have?”
I rubbed my jaw, fairly certain I knew where the conversation was going. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t crossed my mind—I just didn’t know Georgina had been thinking the same. “A yard?” I guessed with extra-Boston-accent since it always made her smile.
“And a laundry room.” Out the window, she scanned the lawn and the addition we’d made to the side of the house to gain square footage and an extra bedroom. “And a place for Justin to sleep that doesn’t fold up when he leaves.”
“Now you’re hurting your case,” I teased. In truth, I was glad Justin visited as frequently as he did. “If we tell him he has his own bedroom, I’m not entirely sure he won’t just move in.”
“He’d be so excited.”
She was excited—I heard it in her voice. I turned to her. “Are you serious about this?”
“I haven’t wanted to bring up staying,” she admitted. “I know how hellbent you are on selling, and maybe it’s the right thing to do. This place holds a lot of bad memories for you.”
I glanced across the room to the spot my mother’s bed had been. Along with a priest, we’d surrounded her as she’d held my hand in one of hers and my sister’s in the other and closed her eyes for the last time. We had since reconfigured the room so it looked nothing like it had then. Even the bathroom had been remodeled. I thought of how Georgina and I had climbed into a tub on the sales floor to make sure it was deep enough for two, then recreated the NC-17 version of that scene a few nights after it’d been installed. I remembered, standing there at the window, lifting Georgina onto my shoulders so she could inspect crown molding. And then the way I’d gone barbarian on her, toting her around the room beating my chest until she’d bumped her head on the ceiling light and fallen giggling into my arms.