Free Sweet: (Intermix) (True Believers) by Erin McCarthy

immediately. When I pushed open the front door, the smell of fresh paint overwhelmed me. Amazed, I went into the kitchen, which was ablaze with light and the sound of metal music cranking loud from Riley’s phone. He had painted three of the four walls already. The hard ones. The ones with the cabinets and the one with the back door and the window, the ones that required all that taping, which I had saved for last. Only he hadn’t used tape. He had obviously just freehand painted the edges. It was impressive. The only wall remaining was the completely blank one and he was already tackling it with the roller, gray spreading in front of my eyes as I moved into the room.
    The color looked amazing, but not quite as amazing as him.
    “What are you doing?” I asked, stunned. “You didn’t have to do this. This was my idea. I didn’t really mean you had to do the painting, too. I just wanted some help hanging some art.”
    But he shrugged, the muscles in his arm bulging as he rolled efficiently. “Couldn’t sleep. And I have this thing where I can’t sit on my ass and watch a girl laboring on my behalf. It makes me feel like a dick.”
    Touched beyond anything that was smart or emotionally healthy, I said, “The color looks great, don’t you think?”
    “It doesn’t look like ass,” was his assessment.
    I frowned, and he glanced back at me and grinned. “Fine. It looks nice. But that’s as gushy as I get, princess.”
    Impulsively, I wrapped my arms around his waist from behind and hugged him, my breasts pressing into his back. “Thank you.”
    He stiffened, then said, “Alright, calm down or I’m going to drop this roller.”
    Letting go quickly, because I liked the way my body felt against his too much, I said, “Can I help?”
    “Take the brush and paint that last corner. Just go up and down the seam. You don’t need a lot of paint.”
    “Okay.” I took the brush that was laying in the paint tray, and I dipped and carefully lifted it. It dripped on the floor. “Shit.” I wiped the floor with my finger.
    “Use a hand towel. They’re basically rags anyway.”
    They were. Replacing them was already in my mental budget. I grabbed a dingy towel off the counter and cleaned my finger. Then I bit my lip as I jammed the brush in the corner and dragged it up and down, feeling an absurd amount of pleasure from covering the filthy white.
    “I’m not as helpless as I look,” I told him, because I wanted him to understand I was capable, just, well, sheltered. “I just don’t have a lot of practical life experience.”
    “Now there’s something I never would have guessed.”
    “Ha ha.” I dipped the brush again, being more careful not to overload it and let it drip this time. “I think the only times I’ve had to do anything that could be considered manual labor were when I was being punished.”
    “You get punished a lot?”
    “Of course. It’s impossible to be perfect.” I carefully went up on my tiptoes to reach as far as I could. “And despite the Christian concept that God makes no mistakes in our creation, my father has very specific guidelines for what makes a good person.”
    I pulled a kitchen chair across the floor to stand on. I couldn’t quite reach the corner.
    “You the rebel daughter?”
    “No. I tried really hard to please him, actually. I’m not even sarcastic with him.”
    Riley laughed. “Now that I find hard to believe.”
    “It’s true.” I finished my corner and shifted the chair back out of the way. “But it’s like walking on eggshells, you know?”
    “Trust me, I know that feeling.” Riley was moving closer and closer to me as he brought the roller to meet the corner I had just painted and finish off the wall. “My mother usually ignored us, which were the best days. Other days she cried and needed reassurance, or she was sick from the drugs. The worst days were the ones where she was violent or strung out. It was like holding your breath all the time, waiting for