A Proper Seal
Content note: explicit, consensual sex between adults (she’s 42, he’s in his mid-forties). 18+ only.
The kitchen faucet had been dripping for eleven days, and Dana had counted every one of them.
Not the drips. She had given up on those somewhere around the second night, lying awake in a house that had felt too big and too quiet ever since the divorce papers went through. She counted days. Eleven days of promising herself she’d watch a video and fix it herself. Eleven days of that small, patient plink against the stainless steel, like the house clearing its throat to remind her it was still there.
On the twelfth day she found the card pinned to the corkboard at the hardware store: cream cardstock, a hand-drawn wrench, and five words in confident block letters. NO JOB TOO BIG. HOUSE CALLS. Underneath, a phone number.
He knocked at ten the next morning, exactly when he’d said he would, which already put him ahead of every man she had dated since turning forty.
“Morning,” he said. He was somewhere in his mid-forties, broad through the shoulders, with silver threading his temples and the short beard along his jaw. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his forearms were tanned and corded the way forearms only get from years of actually using them. He lifted a battered red toolbox an inch, like a greeting. “I hear you’ve got a drip.”
“I’ve got a drip,” Dana agreed, and then heard herself, and felt the heat climb her throat.
The corners of his eyes creased. He was gentleman enough not to say a word. “Then let’s go take a look.”
She showed him the kitchen and then didn’t quite know what to do with herself, so she leaned against the island with her coffee and watched him work. He was unhurried in a way she found almost hypnotic. He shut off the water under the sink, laid a towel down, and took the handle apart piece by piece, setting each part in a neat row on the counter like he was laying out silverware for company.
“How long’s it been doing this?” he asked.
“Eleven days.”
He glanced up at her. His eyes were a warm, steady brown. “Eleven days is a long time to put up with something that isn’t working right.”
Dana laughed before she could stop herself, a short, surprised sound. “You have no idea.”
He let that sit a moment, not pushing, just letting her know he’d heard it. Then he held up a small black ring between his thumb and forefinger. “Here’s your culprit. Washer’s worn clean through. Nothing wrong with the faucet. It just needs a proper seal.” He fitted the new one in place with a care that seemed almost tender. “Somebody to take a little time with it.”
Ten minutes later he turned the water back on, ran the tap, shut it off, and the two of them stood there listening.
Silence. Real silence, for the first time in almost two weeks.
“Oh,” Dana said softly, and was embarrassed to find her eyes stinging. It was such a small thing. It shouldn’t have meant anything at all.
He didn’t comment on that either. He just wiped his hands on a rag and nodded toward her refrigerator, where a sheet of yellow legal paper hung under a magnet shaped like a lemon. “That your honey-do list?”
“It’s my I’ll-do-it-myself-eventually list,” she said. “My ex never touched it.”
“May I?”
She should have said no. Instead she shrugged, and he stepped closer and read it the way he’d done everything else, slowly and completely. Back door hinge squeaks. Gutter over the porch. Closet shelf in the guest room. He made a small approving sound at each one, like he was already planning his afternoon.
Then he reached the bottom of the list, and she remembered, all at once, what she had written there at one in the morning after a long, honest look at her own reflection.
Remember what it feels like to be touched.
“Oh God,” Dana said, and reached for the paper. “That’s not… that was a joke, I didn’t mean for anyone to…”
He didn’t take it down. He didn’t laugh, either. He just turned to look at her, and the quiet in the kitchen changed shape.
“That one’s not usually in my line of work,” he said. His voice had dropped, warm and low. “But I’m good with my hands, and I don’t like leaving a job half done.” He paused. “Only if you want me to, Dana. Say the word and I’ll pack up my toolbox, and we’ll both pretend I never read it.”
Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her fingertips. She thought of eleven days. She thought of two years.
“I want you to,” she said.
“Say it plain for me.” He took one step closer, close enough that she could smell sawdust and soap and something warmer underneath. “I want to be sure I’m hearing you right.”
“I want you to touch me.” Her voice shook, and then it didn’t. “Please.”
He lifted his hand and cupped her jaw, his palm rough and warm, his thumb brushing once across her cheekbone. He waited, giving her one last chance to step back. She leaned in instead, and he kissed her.
It was not a timid kiss. It was slow and sure and thorough, the kiss of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use every minute of it. Dana made a sound against his mouth she had not heard herself make in years, and her hands found the front of his shirt and fisted there.
“Still good?” he murmured against her lips.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He laughed, low, and then his hands were at her waist and he lifted her onto the counter as easily as if she weighed nothing at all. She gasped, half delighted and half scandalized, and wrapped her legs around his hips to pull him in. He unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time, kissing each new inch of skin as it appeared: her collarbone, the swell of her breast, the soft dip of her stomach. When he unclasped her bra and took her nipple into his mouth, she arched off the counter, grabbed the back of his head, and held him there.
“Tell me what you like,” he said, his breath hot against her. “I want to learn.”
So she told him. It felt shockingly good just to say it out loud. Slower. There. Harder. Yes, like that. He listened to every word like a set of instructions he meant to follow to the letter.
When he sank to his knees on her kitchen floor, he looked up at her with a gleam in his eye. “Second time today I’ve been down here,” he said. “Lucky me.”
She was still laughing when he slid her skirt up her thighs and drew her panties down her legs, and then she wasn’t laughing at all. He kissed the inside of her knee, then higher, then higher, until his mouth found her, and Dana braced both palms on the cool granite and let her head fall back against the cabinet.
He was patient. God, he was patient. He learned her with his tongue the way he had learned the faucet, carefully and attentively, adjusting to every hitch in her breath, every shift of her hips. When she started to tremble he slid two fingers inside her and curled them, slow and steady, and kept his mouth exactly where it was. The climax built from somewhere deep and long forgotten and broke over her in long, rolling waves, and she cried out to the empty, sunlit house and did not care one bit who heard.
He stayed with her through every aftershock, kissing her thigh, murmuring something she couldn’t make out and didn’t need to.
When she could breathe again, she slid off the counter on shaking legs and took his hand. “Bedroom,” she said. “Now. If you want to.”
“Lead the way, sweetheart.”
In her bedroom, in the slanted gold light through the blinds, she finally got to undress him. She took her time with it. Shirt first, then the belt, then the rest, until he stood in front of her and she could look her fill at the solid, lived-in strength of him. He let her look. He seemed to like it.
There was a box of condoms in her nightstand that she had bought six months ago in a fit of optimism and never opened. He rolled one on while she watched, then lay back on her bed and held out his hand. “Your house,” he said. “Your pace.”
She climbed over him and took him inside her slowly, inch by inch, both of them groaning when she finally settled all the way down. For a long moment neither of them moved. Then she began to rock against him, and his big hands spread across her hips, not steering, just holding on, letting her find the rhythm that felt best. When she found it, he met her there and kept meeting her there, steady as a heartbeat.
“Look at you,” he breathed. “Lord, look at you.”
She came a second time with his thumb circling her clit and his eyes locked on hers, and the sight of her coming apart is what finally undid him. He pulled her down against his chest and thrust up into her with a deep, rough groan, and held her there while they both shook.
Afterward she lay with her cheek on his chest, listening to his heart slow. The house was quiet. Not the hollow, ringing quiet she had grown used to, but a full, warm, contented one.
“Well,” he said eventually, his fingers drawing lazy lines down her spine. “I always finish the job.”
Dana laughed into his skin. “I’m going to need you to come back and look at that back door hinge.”
“Thursday?”
“Thursday.”
“Dana.” He tilted her chin up so she’d look at him. “There’s nothing wrong with that back door. I checked it on my way in.”
“I know,” she said, and kissed him.
When he finally left that afternoon, she took the yellow list down off the refrigerator, found a pen, and drew one long, satisfied line through the very last item.
Then, underneath it, she wrote a new one.
Thursday.
— Fix It Daddy