Chapter 104 Pancakes.

Chapter 104: 104 Pancakes.

I didn’t call the sheriff. Not yet. I had another appointment to deal with first.

Wilkinson showed up at eight in the morning driving a truck that looked like it had survived two divorces and a war.

He was a big guy, mid-fifties, with hands like catcher’s mitts.

I’d hired him weeks ago for the silo renovation on a nighttime-only schedule, but he needed daylight for the structural assessment, so I’d agreed to one daytime visit with conditions.

The conditions were as follows: Juniper stays in her room because you just can’t explain twenty-plus feet of big tiddy snake waifu to a contractor.

Elsa and Ayra stay upstairs and keep quiet, but just in case they lose control of themselves, they have to wear hats and clothes that hide their weirder features.

And Clementine helps me outside because she’s the only one who can pass as a weirdly pale and sexy human if she covers her ears with a beanie and wears work boots over the hooves.

The boots were a tight fit but she’d been practicing walking in them all week, and from ten feet away you’d never guess the woman in the long denim skirt and beanie was anything other than a tough-looking chick with great posture.

"You ready for this?" I asked her on the porch as Wilkinson’s truck rumbled up the drive.

She tugged the beanie down over her ears and shot me a look. "My uncle worked construction and used to bring me on site. I know what a joist is. Do you?"

I did, in fact, know what a joist was. "Let’s go meet the man."

Wilkinson shook my hand and sized up Clementine over my shoulder. "Girlfriend?"

"Fiancee," Clementine said before I could answer. The word came out hard, like she was daring someone to argue with it.

In fact, she shot me some devious side-eye and flared her nostrils in warning. Message received.

Wilkinson looked at me for confirmation anyway. I nodded. He shrugged. "She gonna help or watch?"

"Help." Clementine stepped forward and crossed her arms. "I’m stronger than I look."

"Everybody says that." He handed her a toolbox. She took it one-handed and held it at her side like it weighed nothing, which it basically didn’t with her STR sitting at 16.

Wilkinson looked at the toolbox, then at her arm, then at me. He shrugged again. "Alrighty then."

We got to work. The silo’s problems were worse than the initial estimate.

Wilkinson poked around the foundation for twenty minutes and the news got grimmer with every poke.

He found deep cracks in the concrete base, for one thing.

The upper platform where I’d planned Juniper’s workshop was structurally sound but getting to it safely required reinforcing everything below.

"You’re looking at three, maybe four more visits," Wilkinson said. He wrote something in a little notebook. "Plus materials. I’ll need to bring a welder next time."

More visits with more people meant more risk. I nodded and told him that was fine. Money wasn’t an issue.

I didn’t say that second part out loud because that would be fucking stupid.

Clementine turned out to be genuinely good at this. She held beams steady while Wilkinson measured, handed him tools before he asked for them, and had opinions about bracket placement that made the old contractor raise an eyebrow.

"Welded, not bolted," she said when he asked her preference on the support joints. "Bolts loosen over time. My aunt’s restaurant had a problem with the kitchen shelving, and she switched to welded brackets in ’09. Never had an issue after that."

Wilkinson looked at her for a long second. "I like her," he told me.

"Yeah, well, she’s mine," I said, slapping her butt playfully. Clementine kicked my shin under a crossbeam where Wilkinson couldn’t see it. I barely felt it, for the record.

We hauled lumber, cleared debris, and shored up the worst of the foundation cracks with temporary bracing.

Clementine and I worked well together, so well in fact that Wilkinson was starting to feel like a third wheel.

She’d brace a beam and I’d nail it. I’d hold a measuring tape and she’d mark the cuts.

At one point I caught the contractor watching us and humming "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid.

My penis also noticed that Clementine in work mode was a specific kind of attractive.

The denim skirt sat on her hips and made concentration difficult with her deeply sexy curves, and every time she bent over to grab something from the toolbox, the view from behind was the kind of thing that makes a man want to convert to Presbyterianism and commit to Korean cuisine for the rest of his life.

I still focused on the lumber, mostly.

Inside, the house was doing less well. I could feel Elsa through the bond all morning, a slow burn of jealousy and boredom that intensified every time she heard Clementine laugh outside.

Around ten o’clock the jealousy spiked hard enough that I nearly dropped a two-by-four, which told me something was happening in there.

I found out during Wilkinson’s lunch break what had gone down.

Elsa had tried to sneak downstairs to supervise the renovation from a strategic vantage point, by which she meant the kitchen window.

Juniper had blocked the hallway with a solid wall of coiled snake body, and the standoff that occurred was apparently something to behold.

"She threatened to incinerate my tail!" Juniper reported from her doorway. "I reminded her that exposing our household to a civilian contractor would be the reason we lost our home. She called me a serpentine tyrant and a traitor to the crown and retreated."

"I am a princess!" Elsa’s voice came from the bedroom. "Tyrants are beneath my station. I am a benevolent monarch unjustly imprisoned by a conspiracy of reptiles and canines. All I desired was to see my true love."

Ayra’s head popped up behind Juniper. "I tried to help by offering to let her brush my hair! She threw the brush at me! It was... fine."

I went in and sat on the bed next to Elsa.

She had her arms crossed and her chin up in a disastrous pout, but the bond was giving me the real picture: she was lonely, jealous, and bored out of her mind.

Hearing me work with Clementine all morning had made every insecurity she had light up at once.

I squeezed her knee. "I know today sucks. Thank you for staying inside. You know why it’s important, right?"

Her chin wobbled. "Yes. It is wretched. And you are forgiven for your absence. Now rub my feet. That is the price of my compliance."

I rubbed her feet for five minutes, and the noises she made were as pornographic as always. "Ohhh! Ahhh... Oh my. By the Silver Bark Tree, that—nyah!"

At one point she let out a moan that made Grey 2: Foot Fetish Inception threaten to blow my cover in front of Ayra and Juniper, both of whom were still in the room and pretending very hard not to hear.

When I stopped, Elsa looked about sixty percent better and the bond had settled from screaming to a dull grumble.

"Later tonight it’s you and me," I promised her. "Whatever you want. Just nothing in my butt."

The chin came back up. "I want to be told I’m beautiful a hundred times while you make love to me in front of the dog while I spray her in the face with water."

"That’s... Okay, that latter part we’ll have to renegotiate later."

I went back outside before Wilkinson got suspicious about the long bathroom break I’d claimed.

The afternoon was more of the same. Wilkinson worked, Clementine and I helped, and the silo slowly started looking less like a condemned grain elevator and more like the early stages of an actual living space.

Wilkinson left around four with a handshake and a promise to come back next week with welding equipment.

He told Clementine she was "good help, better than most guys I’ve worked with," and she took the compliment by flipping him off and saying "Gross." He laughed, deciding graciously that she was being playful.

After his truck disappeared down the road, Clementine and I sat on the steps in front of the house and ate sandwiches I’d thrown together that morning.

She pulled her beanie off and let her horse ears spring free, sighing loudly like a great burden had suddenly been lifted. They rotated in the cool air cutely.

"Okay, I have a question," she said between bites. "And don’t bullshit me because I can feel when you’re dodging."

I chewed and waited.

"You’ve been tense as fuck for like three days now. The cavalier bond picks it up every night when the others are asleep, and it’s been keeping me up. So spill."

I almost deflected with a jaunty witticism. Old habit. But the look she gave me was the one that came right before a hoof to the shin, and I’d pushed my luck enough for one day.

"Juniper ran the portal data," I said. "Things are escalating, so I’m not sure we can stay here forever. And we may need to look into getting some allies."

Clementine stopped chewing. She looked at the half-renovated silo, then at the house, then at the field where we fought every night. She swallowed her bite and set the sandwich down.

"So we might be pouring money into a silo we won’t even be here to use."

"Maybe." I picked at the crust of my sandwich. "To be fair I’ve got a lot of money. But nothing is certain yet."

"And you’ve been sitting on this for three days?"

"Juniper told me yesterday. I’ve been sitting on it for one day." I held up a finger. "If you’ve been picking up other nerves, it might just be because Elsa asked if she could eat my ass a couple nights ago and since she has a habit of initiating things herself, I’ve been a bit on edge."

Clementine’s face twisted as she took that in, then she shook her head and refocused on the main issue.

"Still too long, fuckface. You shouldn’t keep anything from me from now on." She picked her sandwich back up and tore off a bite. "So what’s the plan?"

I looked at the field. "I don’t have one yet."

"Then we need one." She chewed, swallowed, and pointed what was left of her sandwich at me. "I’m not dying before I’m a mother because you didn’t have a game plan, Grey. Figure it out. And don’t feel like you need to do it alone."

She was right. Single-guy thinking had been working fine for me up until the point where it absolutely hadn’t.

The girls poured out of the house once Wilkinson was gone.

Elsa immediately claimed my arm like she’d been starving for it, placing dozens of kisses on my shoulder to more or less enhance the point.

Ayra wanted to know every detail about the renovation.

Juniper asked quiet questions about the timeline, and the way she phrased them told me she was doing the same math Clementine had done on the tailgate: wondering whether any of this would matter if we had to leave.

I didn’t bring up the escalation data with the full group.

One more day of sitting on it wouldn’t hurt, and Elsa had earned her pancake night.