Better Than Home: A Better Than Good Novella (Better Than Stories Book 6) by Lane Hayes

Author:Lane Hayes [Hayes, Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-17T18:30:00+00:00

5

We bought a house.

I wished I could report that it was a seamless experience, but it was more like jumping a series of hurdles over an almost two-month period. We had to sell our condo and apply for a loan. The condo was the easy part. It sold within two weeks and the new owners, a super-fabulous gay couple in their forties with a Westie named Michelangelo, agreed to rent it back to us for a month, which meant we didn’t have to move twice.

We closed in early August and moved in the following weekend.

That was when things got tricky, ’cause in its current condition, the house wasn’t anywhere near Aaron’s standard of habitable. Or mine. However, we didn’t want to waste any money that could go toward basic renovations, so we sucked it up and lived in the middle of a remodel war zone for weeks.

We stored most of our furniture in the garage and hired a team of professionals to do things outside of our DIY capabilities, like refinish the hardwood floors and retile the bathrooms and kitchen. We couldn’t afford a full kitchen redo, but we decided living in a time warp for a few years wasn’t for us, so we refaced cabinets and bought new appliances too.

We were bleeding money, which sucked. It forced us to tighten our budget and reexamine the list of things we could do ourselves. I sanded the deck with my father-in-law, agreed to help Aaron paint and weed the garden…and plant roses and whatever else he threw into our cart at the local garden store. Soil, fertilizer, tools, a hose, seedlings, railroad ties, and flowers.

Did I mention we were bleeding money?

We bribed our friends with beer and pizza to pull weeds once we realized the scope of the manual labor involved. It would have taken us weeks to wrestle dead shrubs from the ground, and we still had to paint the interior of the house. There was no way to do it all without asking for help or going broke.

Between the guys Jack brought from his garage and the rest of our basketball crew and their partners and spouses, we had the garden cleared over Labor Day weekend. Jay and Peter felt guilty they couldn’t join us, so they had lunch delivered instead.

We sat with a dozen or so friends on the newly sanded deck, admiring the newly-visible flower bed as we chowed pizza and sipped iced teas and beers. They joked about commuting for weekend basketball games and offered ideas on planting vegetables and an herb garden.

Curt pointed at a square patch of dirt beyond the tall copse of trees. “That’s where the eggplants should go. Eggplants galore.”

“This man is a dirty pervert.” Jack nipped his boyfriend’s ear. “Don’t go changin’, baby.”

“Speaking of babies, I think I need to get home and rest,” Chelsea announced, pushing herself laboriously to stand from one of the chairs we’d dragged outside for her.

Aaron set his hand gently over her belly. “Shouldn’t this baby be here now?”

“Yes.

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