Rose Red: Model 85001 by Sapphirefly
Chapter Six
"All right," Van said, putting Hitomi on the couch in the living room. "Here's the deal."
Hitomi sat poised and ready. If he could be straight with her during this conversation, then all her questions about what her life would be like with him would be answered.
"So, as you know, I run a charter helicopter service and I make good enough money doing it that it seems like a pretty dumb idea to switch it up with another career. Now the thing is, and this has been happening for years, I get customers up here to get a view of the mountains and ice fields from overhead. They want coffee, they want sandwiches, they want donuts, and sometimes they even want a place to stay overnight. You should see how disappointed these people are when the only place I can recommend to them is the café I took you to in town. The other thing is that my house, though a run-down heap, is actually gorgeous. Sometimes people who are driving by stop to take pictures and occasionally I've had people come up to the front door and ask for a tour. But usually, they come half-way up the walk and then turn away because they realize that this place is only pretty from a distance." Van took a breath and looked Hitomi straight in the face. "I bought you to help me turn this place into a tourist spot."
Hitomi gaped. Her eyes unconsciously flipped to a spot on the wall where the wallpaper was torn off and she could see the drywall.
"I know what you're thinking," Van said briskly. "It'll take forever and it'll cost a fortune, but I'm not kidding how much money this could make. If we work hard at this, we'll have enough to pay your debt by the end of the year, which is good, because your bank is demanding payment by then. Remember?"
Hitomi winced and swallowed a hard lump in her throat. She didn't really have a choice. "Where do we start?"
"Well, I want to start with this room. I think we should scrap the whole living room concept and go for something a little closer to a dining room in a restaurant. I think we should get a sofa to go in front of the fireplace. Then we should put one arm chair in that corner and then one in the adjacent corner and then a table in between them. Then another table and chair set that could look into the conservatory. Then I want to put a window seat in that bay window."
Hitomi could see what he was talking about. It could be a very charming room if they changed some things. Well, most things.
"With some work, this place could be the pretty little romantic spot that becomes a couple's favourite place to run away to for the weekend," Van continued.
Hitomi nodded. "Sounds good!"
Van smiled. "Great! Let's start by going through the furniture and deciding what stays and what goes."
The Van and Hitomi's Renovation Project
Take One
"How can this thing be so heavy?" Hitomi gasped, trying to lift the massive tube that used to be the carpet in the living room. It felt like her shoulders were going to snap off.
"Normally, I'd say we should cut it up into manageable pieces and carry those, but I think it should go to a better place. Don't you?"
"Doesn't 'a better place' normally mean the garbage?" Her fingers were slipping around the carpet.
"Don't let it drop! Come on, Hitomi! Toughen up! I really want it in my workshop and we're going to use the workshop a lot during the renos. You'll be happy when it's there and you can kneel on carpet instead of cement."
Hitomi groaned.
Van let his side of the roll droop. "Okay. I'll tell you what. Once we get this out there, you can start ripping down the wallpaper in the living room."
"What?" Hitomi asked. She was a little breathless.
Van started tracing a little pattern on the backside of the carpet. "Well, I saw you eying it and I saw your lip move in kind of a snarl. You think the paper is really ugly, don't you?"
Hitomi was horrified. How could he have read her expression so easily?
"You want to pull it down, don't you?"
Hitomi knew this was bait, but what about it? He owned her. She had to do what he said no matter what, and if he wanted her to let her rip down that hideous garbage? Well, then, who was she to argue with him? She heaved up the carpet and tried again with her second wind.
Take Two
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
"Van!" Hitomi screamed, running past the kitchen and into the corner where the staircase to her tower was.
There he was with a sledge hammer pounding on the wall with complete abandon. He had white dust on his cheeks, and his shoulders of his navy shirt were turning baby blue.
"What are you doing?" Hitomi gasped in surprise.
Van stopped beating the wall and turned around to greet her. "Hi! Isn't this a great idea? We don't need this whole casing to the stairwell. Don't you think it hides the beauty of the staircase? I've always thought it needed to go and now is the perfect time to get rid of it."
"But I thought we were starting with the living room/dining room area? We haven't even finished taking out all of the carpet yet."
"True, but we should start with what inspires us, right? Like I let you work on the wallpaper. And right now, I wanna get rid of this wall." He hit it again and a sheet of drywall came loose.
Hitomi stared at the ceiling doubtfully. "Are you planning on taking out the studs and everything?"
"Probably. Why?"
"Aren't you worried there might be a load-bearer in there? What if you bring down the whole tower?"
Van turned to her and smirked. "I'm not going to take down the load-bearer. Honestly!" He whacked one of the studs and something above them went CREAK!
Hitomi shuddered.
"Well," Van said hesitantly. "Maybe I'll redo the drywall around that one and make a pillar."
"Good," Hitomi said, inching away. "I'll still be able to sleep up there tonight, right?"
Take Six
"This stuff smells awful!" Hitomi whined through her mask.
Van pulled his own mask down. "You said you thought these arm chairs were worth saving if only there were refinished. Well, I told you how to refinish them and the first thing we need to do is get this groadalated paint off."
"But the stripper doesn't even take all the paint off it because there's like ten coats of paint on it. How many frick'n times was this piece of crap painted? They painted it white, orange, brown, and we haven't even found the wood yet. For all we know this chair could be made out of plastic."
"Don't be silly," Van said, completely undaunted. "It's too heavy to be made of plastic."
"Then metal, and then they'll be no pretty wood to uncover. This was a dumb idea."
"No," Van said cheerfully. "It was a good idea, but if you're tired of doing this I could finish it up for today and you could go work in the conservatory."
Hitomi shivered, tightened her mask and got back to work scraping the brown paint off the back of the chair she was working on. She'd rather do this then go into the conservatory. It was freezing in there. Van kept reassuring her that they did have a few warm months in the middle of nowhere and that the conservatory was a nice enough place to sit in for at least half of the year. Hitomi remained unconvinced. But it wasn't just the temperature that sent her scrambling. There were also loads of smelly rotten plants in there that needed to be dug out, so the choice wasn't complex.
Hitomi smiled though. Van let her work on anything she wanted to. It was just as well. There was no T.V., or regular web access, or anything else to do anyway.
Take Eleven
"Purple," Hitomi said, holding a colour wheel up to the living room wall.
"Purple? Really?" Van asked doubtfully. "I know I said that I wanted the place to be romantic, but purple? I don't know if I can live in a house with purple walls. It's too…"
"Girly," Hitomi supplied, choosing another colour. "What about cranberry, then? But that's not very summery and you really wanted this place to be summer spot, right?"
"White?" Van asked.
"Too boring," Hitomi hummed.
"Should we paper it again?"
"Only if you take my advice and do lavender brocade."
Van picked up one of the catalogues Hitomi had been leafing through earlier. He stopped at a page. "Is this the one you were talking about?"
"No." She flipped to another page and pointed. "That one."
"Huh? Well, I like the pattern. I think that wallpaper is a pretty simple way to make this place look done up, but why – for the love of all that's holy – does it have to be purple?"
Hitomi snapped her colour wheel shut and joined him by the catalogue. "Well, if you don't like purple, what do you recommend?"
"Green." Van chose a forest green. "What do you think?"
"I hate it."
"What about one of the black and white ones then?"
"Hmm. They're prettier," Hitomi conceded. "But I already went through the effort of scraping and sanding and staining and picking out new fabric for those miserable crap chairs and if I could have just slapped another coat of white paint on them instead, then—"
"AAA!" Van pretend-screamed. "I get it! Stop. Not white, but not purple."
"Rich colours. Rich!" Hitomi emphasized.
"Red?"
"Argh! Too slutty!"
Van turned the page and both of them stared.
"Light green?"
"This green?"
They agreed in a second.
Take Fourteen
"Hitomi!" Van yelled. He had combed the house three times and he couldn't find her anywhere. He scowled. He knew she was hiding from him. Ever since he showed her his cordless power sander with all the attachments, he hadn't been able to get it away from her. She had been on the hugest sanding binge. She had already sanded four picture frames, two side tables, and believe-it-or-not, all the kitchen cabinets. Well, he'd had it! He could never find it when he wanted it and whenever he did find it, it was only because he followed the soft humming the gadget made.
So, now he stopped and listened for it. He was positive he could hear something. It was up the tower. Slowly, he mounted the steps and went up. Hitomi's door was open, so he stuck his head around the corner. He expected to find her doing some other ludicrous project, but instead the room was empty. The sound was coming from the bathroom.
Van turned to the bathroom and grimaced. He didn't want to approach Hitomi in there. Besides, he never came up here. That was why she left her door open and apparently why she left her bathroom door open too, because it was open a crack.
Then the humming stopped and Van heard Hitomi singing, "And the highway man came riding up to the old inn door."
Van was about to turn away, thinking he had imagined wrongly that she was bathing or something. After all, who would be stupid enough to leave the bathroom door open if they were naked? She was probably in there doing some reno project that he hadn't given her permission to do.
Well, he was going to confront her about it!
He swung open the door and there was Hitomi, standing there in a towel with one foot up on the sink.
Van was gob smacked. Embarrassed to his ears, he was about to turn away, but Hitomi seemed quite collected and asked, "What do you need?"
"Sorry," Van said, still quite red. "I was looking for my … and I heard a noise up here so I thought that you'd squirrelled away my…"
Hitomi turned on her electric razor.
Van felt sick. That was the noise he had heard. He had caught her shaving her legs.
"Yeah, sorry. I'll go now," he said, pulling the door shut when suddenly, he saw his yellow sander on the floor of the bathroom. To be exact, it wasn't on the floor. It was sitting neatly on a folded towel on the floor with a string tied to the handle of the sander and the other end tied to the towel rack. Van stooped to pick it up. "What is this?" he asked, his voice accusing.
"Your sander?" Hitomi supplied, biting her lip.
"Clearly. I mean, why is it tied to the towel rack? It isn't a dog."
"Well, I thought it might get away."
"U-huh."
Intermission
"Has that money from Celena come in yet?" Hitomi asked, knocking on the door to Van's bedroom.
He came out and shut the door behind him. "Yep. She finally transferred it."
"What took her so long? Didn't she know that we spent all our money on stuff for the house and we've been eating cardboard boxes?"
Van rolled up a piece of paper he was holding and whacked Hitomi in the forehead with it.
"Hey!"
"Don't talk about Celena like that. I'm sure it just took her awhile to arrange things with her buyer, or maybe she needed to find a new buyer. I'm sure it was something like that."
Hitomi rolled her eyes. Van's outburst was only the tip of the Celena ice burg. When the power tools were silent he spoke of her endlessly during their work. "You know what's great about Celena…", "Celena makes the best…", or Hitomi's favourite, "Let's call Celena. I'll bet she knows how we can solve this." Hitomi knew Van didn't mean to be tiresome. Actually, he wanted to keep his affection for Celena quiet, but he failed. Part of it was that Van wasn't used to having his every word listened to. He was too used to being alone all the time. The other thing was that having Merle as his in-town love interest was clearly part of his public image, but he never talked about her. He didn't complain about the way Merle got under his skin or act like he missed her. It was obvious to Hitomi that even though Van didn't want to go public with his feelings – Celena was the one in his heart.
Hitomi got that easily enough. Celena was willowy and very very very blonde. Plus, she had this slightly lost look to her that just screamed to any nearby man that she needed protection. It was very natural for Van to respond to her that way.
So how did Van respond to her, Hitomi?
Hitomi rolled one shoulder. She was probably sitting somewhere between subordinate and friend in Van's books. And she was fine with that … for now. She knew the exact moment she wouldn't be fine with it anymore. That would be the moment when he found someone he could really love. A man could own a woman and marry a different woman at the same time.
Well, that time might never come. After all, Celena was owned by Dilandau as well as being married to him. Van didn't have a hope with her.
Take Twenty-one
Van came into the kitchen. "What's that wretched smell?"
Hitomi was jabbing at the sink with a skewering stick and clearly losing her mind to panic. "How am I supposed to know? I didn't do anything. It backed up on its own."
"What are you doing to it?" Van said, looking over her shoulder.
"Well, what else am I supposed to do? The guck won't stop coming out."
"You could try a plunger."
"A what?" Hitomi gasped. The water level in the sink was rising.
"Step aside, little girl. I've got this."
Hitomi jumped back and Van jammed the plunger into the sink, literally saving Hitomi's day. She came up behind him and looked sideways into the sink. It was bubbling and the water was draining.
"Thanks," Hitomi said, grateful he had known what to do.
"What have you been running down the sink anyway?" he asked, but the look on his face was good-natured.
Hitomi smiled and put her hand on his shoulder. "Who are you blaming for what? I just got here. The question should be: what have you been running down the sink?"
"Whatever. Use this the next time it happens," Van said, turning away from her to rinse off the plunger.
It wasn't very much like a knight wiping the blood off his sword, but Hitomi was just as grateful.
Take Twenty-three
"We should get the wrought iron patio set," Hitomi argued.
"But the table is so small," Van argued back.
"Yes, but we could take it out to the gazebo in the summer," Hitomi whispered in his ear.
Van perked up. "Huh," he said, squashing his shivering ear into his shoulder. "I hadn't thought too much about the gazebo. If we're going to do that we should really make up the garden better. How's your green thumb?"
"I don't have three thumbs," Hitomi said darkly.
"Never gardened before?"
"Well, I never hung wallpaper before and I did it. I never refinished furniture before and I did it. That isn't what bothers me. I honestly wouldn't mind doing it, if only it weren't so cold outside. I'm not used to it."
Van seemed to rethink his suggestion. "Actually, forget it. I'll do the yard. I want you to be in charge of the kitchen when we have guests. We'll start by offering muffins and sandwiches and stuff like that. So, you take care of that and I'll take care of the yard."
Hitomi paused. "Does that mean that we can have the iron set?" she asked quietly, pointing to the picture on the screen.
"Sure, Hitomi-Rose. Order it!"
Take Twenty-nine
"This one, and this one, and this one, and two of these."
Van followed Hitomi around the superstore with a shopping cart. This was the first time he had brought her to the city since he had purchased her. It was just a day trip to buy kitchen wares, but she was very excited and having a bit of a heyday.
"Wait. Wait. Wait. What's that?" Van asked, halting her one-person-party.
"Which one?"
"That?" he said lifting out a yellow floppy rubbery thing.
"A muffin tin."
"A muffin tin? How so? It looks like a piece of tent tarp that melted in the sun.
"You're so negative!" Hitomi exclaimed. "Look, you take this little tool and you can reshape the cup. So, you can make muffins in the shape of hearts or stars or suns."
"How about circles?" Van asked dryly.
"It does that too! Isn't it amazing?"
Van yawned. He thought it was too cute that she was so excited over heart shaped muffins, but he's keep that to himself. He'd never seen a woman so easily pleased. If someone showed that contraption to Merle, she would have snorted her coffee up her nose and grouched saying that it was a waste of time. Celena would have smiled patiently and moved on. But Hitomi was so happy and the tin didn't cost very much. Van hoped it worked well for her.
She tossed something that looked like a syringe in the cart and Van scooped it out to see what it was. Another doohickey for baking – for cookies this time.
Van looked into the cart. Everything, from the plates to the mixers was yellow. It rang a bell with him. Something else in their house was yellow.
"Hitomi," Van said, grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her up to his chest so she had to look straight into his eyes. "I just noticed something about your shopping habits and I wanted to ask you a question."
"Shoot," Hitomi said, glancing at his hard curled around her upper-arm.
"Did you buy all your kitchen-wares to look exactly like the power sander?"
Hitomi started to giggle. Then she put a hand to her forehead. "Yeah, I guess I did."
Take Thirty-six
"So, Van," Hitomi said, stretching her legs out over one of his as they sat on the window seat in the living room he had just finished. "Now that we've finished the living room and the kitchen, I was thinking about what you said about guests staying over. What room were you planning on renovating for them?"
"I wasn't planning on renovating anything," Van said, casually resting his hand on her socked foot. "I've been saving the carpet in the nothing room forever. It just needs to be aired out. I suppose that if you desperately want to do something in there, you could take the leftover wallpaper that we used in here and do one of the walls."
"But Van, I've stuck my head in there. Isn't that the most boring room in the house? If you really want this to be a memorable spot, you should redo the tower. If we let our guests stay up there, they will never want to leave."
Van rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I hear what you're saying and don't think that I don't agree with you, but we can't do it now. We're out of money. As it stands, my first trip of the season is next week. It's a couple who told me I should turn this place into a resort that serves coffee and snacks, so I know they'll be here for that. After that, I've got enough ice field tours booked to keep the furnace running during the winter, but we need to earn extra money if we're going to pay off your debt by the end of the year. So, stop thinking about renovations. I know it's liberating to make this old Hell-hole look like new again, but if we don't pay that bill, the only renovation you'll be doing is installing wheelchair ramps."
Hitomi frowned uncomfortably. She didn't know if he was joking about the debt collectors breaking his knees or not.
"I got your bank statement," Van said suddenly. "Do you want to look at it?"
"Wow," Hitomi said cynically. "They sure took their sweet time getting it to us."
"Don't fret it," Van said, taking his phone out of his pocket and pulling up the statement. "It took them awhile to find everything. Some of the records were very old. Apparently, they've already changed systems twice since then."
Hitomi took the phone away from him and scanned through the dates until she found what she was looking for. Then she said, "Okay, this is the day before I lost my memory."
Van peeked over her shoulder and commented, "And the next day someone deposited one-point-three million dollars into your account? Do you know what that was for? Do you mind me asking?"
"No. Besides, it shouldn't bother you. I sold myself. The original contract that I examined the last day I remember was for nine months."
Van whistled. "That's a lot of money for nine months."
Hitomi smiled and looked distant. "You know, at that time, the money meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn't care about the money and I made him raise the amount over and over and over again. I made him double it once and triple it again after that." Hitomi absently withdrew her legs off Van's knees and tucked them under her.
He let go of her and his chin lowered an inch.
"After that, I naturally didn't spend any money at all until the contract was over – nine months later. Then the withdrawal activity looks pretty normal. See? I was paying electricity bills and buying food like I normally did and because I earned so much interest in those nine months, I hardly touched the principle. Now as we get closer to the time that I sold myself to Sleeping Beauty Inc., it looks like I was travelling a lot, and my balance goes down accordingly."
Van leaned in closer.
"Now," Hitomi said, wetting her lower lip. "We get to the day before I had my memory wiped. I withdrew all my money, took my whole overdraft and maxed all my credit cards! Why the heck did I do that? How much does it cost to have your memory wiped?"
Van shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, but I bet it doesn't cost one-point-five million. I thought getting your mind wiped was pretty equivalent in cost to getting a face-lift."
Hitomi sighed. "We'll have to research it."
"Can you think of a logical reason why you got your brain wiped?"
She nodded.
"Did it have anything to do with the guy you sold yourself to?"
She looked down to evade Van's gaze. "It had everything to do with the guy I sold myself to."
Author's Notes: Thanks to everyone who reviewed last time. I got some pretty sweet reviews. I do like reviews that are like, "Keep going!" But I also like longer reviews when people give me a little more of what they thought. I also like it when the same people review and when new people review. So, I opened a forum. It's in my forums under Shivering Wings. Check it out!