The Hardware Store Man

I drove into Linnet, California, to paint a whale over a hardware store's hand-painted sign.

The man behind the counter wouldn't sell me primer.

RORY

I'm thirty. I've painted walls in eleven states, and I've never stayed in one town long enough to watch the paint cure. Linnet is paying me twenty-four thousand dollars to cover the north side of Koski Hardware & Marine in gray whales and poppies by June thirteenth. I need the job. My grandmother is in a bed up the hill, asking to see the sign.

Then the sun gets under the fog, and for about twelve minutes the wall isn't blank. KOSKI HARDWARE. NAILS · ROPE · PAINT · GLASS. EST. 1958. Somebody's grandfather lettered it by hand, without a single mistake I can find, and it isn't in the design.

The somebody is Koski. Forty-five. Salt-and-pepper beard, reading glasses he resents, a scar across one palm. He leased the Bureau the wall and didn't read the lease, and now the rotten boards are his job, so he's on a ladder at six in the morning, sixty feet from mine, keeping the date I set.

I have ten weeks. He has a sign. I came to paint over his grandfather. By Friday I was on the sign's side, and he still wouldn't sell me primer.

MATTI

Sell a man the part he needs, not the part he asks for. My grandfather chalked that on the board behind the counter, and I have sold by it for twenty-two years.

The painter asked for forty gallons of primer. He needed scrapers. He was thirty. He lived in a van with shelves that had lips on them so nothing would fall off when he left. He drew my father's S with the wobble left in.

The last time this town watched me lose somebody, it brought eleven casseroles. I do not intend to give it a reason to cook again.

So we made a deal. Nobody knows. It ends when the scaffold comes down.

He leaves June thirteenth. I can count.

Inside: Age gap: he's forty-five, he's thirty · Small town on the Northern California coast · The man who never left and the man who never stays · Same wall, same six a.m., ten weeks · Grumpy hardware man, sunshine muralist · Secret relationship until the scaffold comes down · Found family: the Liars' Bench · A grovel said to his face · Steamy, open-door, fully consensual · Guaranteed happily ever after

An MM Age Gap Small Town Romance. Linnet Harbor, Book One. Every book follows a new couple in the same harbor town. Both men are thirty or older. Steamy, open-door, and fully consensual. 18+.