Turn 21 of 233

Celebrate with the crew and ask Walt what's next for the crew after this house. Then go home, eat again and spend the evening with my body. Pass out on the floor. When I wake up, I notice I am developing a tan. I love it

Tuki passes beers around and Lena takes one, twists the cap off against the tailgate, and drinks deep. The crew sits in the lengthening shadow of the house they just built — two stories of framed lumber and sheeted plywood, square and solid, standing in the dirt lot like something that was always meant to be there. Marco is arguing with Frank about whether the Mariners can hold the wild card if their closer keeps blowing saves, and Lena eats a handful of chips from the bag Daryl passes her and lets the argument wash over her. Her body aches in every muscle — shoulders, forearms, the deep thick tissue of her thighs — and the ache is the kind that means something real exists now that didn't this morning. She farts, long and low and unselfconscious, and Ray shakes his head but the corner of his mouth is up.

Walt leans against the truck with his arms crossed, his barrel chest bare and sunburned across the top, his tape measure clipped to his belt like a badge. Lena finishes her beer and walks over, her bare feet crunching on the gravel, her belly leading the way.

"What's next after this one?" she asks, and Walt looks at her with that steady appraising expression she's come to recognize as the closest he gets to warmth.

"East side. Two more residentials, then a commercial retrofit downtown if the bid goes through." He pauses, rubs the back of his neck.

"You'll be on all of it. I'm not retraining somebody else."

It's the closest thing to a compliment Walt has given her twice. Lena grins — wide, easy, the kind of grin that pushes into her cheeks and stays.

"Good. Because I'm not going anywhere."

"I know you're not," Walt says, and something in the way he says it makes her chest tight, a warmth that has nothing to do with the beer or the sun.

The crew stays for another hour, the light going gold and then amber, the shadow of the house stretching across the lot. Marco tells a story about his uncle's boat that involves a seagull and a tackle box and makes Tuki laugh so hard he spills his beer. Frank sits on a stack of lumber and says nothing and is content. Daryl and Ray share a bag of sunflower seeds and the silence between them is the most comfortable silence Lena has ever witnessed between two people. Eventually Walt stands, stretches, says "Thursday, seven sharp," and the crew scatters to trucks and cars and the gravel lot empties and Lena is alone with the house.

She walks home in the last light, barefoot on the cooling pavement, her tank top over her shoulder, the sweat drying on her skin. She stops at the grocery store and buys two rotisserie chickens, a bag of macaroni and cheese, a pint of potato salad, a six-pack of beer, and a chocolate bar the size of a paperback book. She eats the mac and cheese standing at the stove, scooping it directly from the pot with a wooden spoon, the cheese pulling in long strings. She eats the potato salad with her fingers, the mayonnaise cold and sharp. She strips one chicken to the bone and starts on the second and her belly swells tight and round, pushing against the counter edge, and she doesn't stop. She drinks two beers and eats the chocolate bar in four enormous bites and belches so deep and long it echoes off the kitchen tile.

She drops to the living room floor and her body moves — push-ups, squats, lunges, the cast-iron deadlifts, plank holds until her core trembles and sweat runs into her eyes. The fullness of her belly makes every movement heavier, the weight shifting inside her, and the burn is sharp and immediate and perfect. She pushes past the shaking, past the point where her arms want to quit, and does three more, five more, ten more, because her body wants to go and she isn't the one who says stop anymore. She finishes drenched, her belly heaving, her muscles twitching with exhaustion, and the arousal comes before the thought — warm and immediate, rising from the same place the work and the food and the sweat come from. Her hands move slow across the landscape of her body — the full curve of her belly, the heaviness of her breasts, the solid muscle beneath the softness of her thighs, the coarse hair below her navel damp with sweat — and she comes with her back arched and her belly lifted and the floor hard beneath her. She doesn't move to the bed. She lies on the hardwood with her arms spread and her eyes closed and the evening air from the open window warm on her skin and she passes out there, naked, filthy, enormous, and content.

She wakes to gray early light and the hardwood pressing into her hip and shoulder, and the first thing she notices is the color of her own arm. It's golden. Not the pale indoor tan she used to get from walking to her car — a real tan, deep and even, the skin across her shoulders and forearms and the tops of her breasts warmed to a rich brown-gold that contrasts with the lighter skin beneath, where her belly and the undersides of her arms have stayed pale. She sits up and looks down at herself in the dim morning light and the tan lines are visible — a map of where the sun has touched her for two weeks of barefoot, shirtless work, the darkened skin marking the open sky and the pale skin marking the shadows of her own body. She runs her hand across her shoulder and the skin is warm and slightly tight, the kind of tan that comes from hours of honest sun, not a booth or a bottle. She stands and walks to the bathroom mirror and the tan is everywhere the sun could reach — her face, her neck, the slope of her shoulders, the full upper curve of her breasts, her forearms, her shins, the tops of her bare feet, now a deep golden brown darkened further by the dirt ground into the calluses. She is golden and enormous and filthy and she loves it. The feeling rises from somewhere deep and sure and entirely her own.