North & West

Twenty

“The paint is supposed to go on the wood, not me.” I pointed out to West, shoving his paintbrush away when he started nearing me with it again.

He shrugged. “I don't know, I think it suits you just fine.” He pointed his paintbrush back out at me, lunging toward me as if we were children playing with fake swords.

I laughed, rolling my eyes as I stepped away from him. “Come on, I want to finish this.” I took the paintbrush back to the doghouse and began painting it again, trying to keep the strokes as even as I could.

West sighed before coming beside me and painting the other side, glancing at me from the corner of his eye every so often as if he thought I wouldn't notice it that way.

My father had been mowing the lawn and he'd accidentally ran into Phil's doghouse and it had fell apart, which hadn't really surprised me considering it was just a few pieces of scrap wood that he and I had used to make a temporary doghouse for him. Phil always liked to be outside so keeping him in my room throughout the night had proved to be rather impossible; for such a little dog, he was wiry as all hell and more energetic than me on even my best days.

West had somehow timed his arrival perfectly around the time that my father destroyed Phil's sloppily put together house, and he'd seen the wooden pieces lying in the yard. It was funny, really, how he'd come to the door and gave me a kiss on the cheek, followed by an, “It looks like you could use some help with that wood in your yard.”

And then he'd said he would help me make another, better, one for Phil – he really had taken a sudden liking it Phil, and I was rather glad Phil couldn't talk considering all the secrets that I'd shared with him – and I didn't turn his offer down since clearly the first one I'd tried to make hadn't lasted so well.

It had looked rather shaky and as if, with a single strong blow of wind, it would topple over and crumble into pieces, much like me at times.

It had been West's idea to build the doghouse at his house in his yard, and then just drive it back over to my house. When I had asked him why not just save us the work and make it in my yard, he had joked that he didn't want my father to mow it over again.

But I had a feeling that he just wanted me to spend a bit of time at his house.

“You know, we make a good team.”

“Something like that.”

He paused, bending himself up so that he was standing and rubbing his lower back as if he were old and it was hurting him, which brought a little smile to my face. “The success rate for anything done by teamwork is fifty percent higher than that of a project done alone.”

I paused too, looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Is it really?”

He grinned, shaking his head and leaning back down to continue his painting. “Nah, I just made it up. It sounded pretty real, though, eh?”

I elbowed him, gesturing down to the half painted doghouse. “How about you just paint? No more fake statistics.” I said, trying to make my voice sound stern but I only managed to make myself sound like I was holding in laughter – the smile stuck on my face certainly didn't do anything to emphasize my sentence, in fact, it contradicted it entirely.

“Fine, be that way.” He replied, not even trying to sound angry as he went back to painting, a bit of the paint from the brush splashing onto his hand because he was a rather sloppy painter, obviously not used to practicing such patience.

It had become increasingly hard for me to say anything remotely mean or even offensive to West, a fact that sort of unnerved me due to the fact that I was simply blunt and I said things without thinking about that – it was really as clean cut as that, but not with West apparently.