By the time I’d grabbed my spare clothes and some soap to load into my messenger bag, it occured to me I hadn’t remembered to buy a towel at the XP store. Little things like this kept biting me in the ass and I resigned myself to drying off with a clean shirt yet again. When I made it back up to the bathhouse I could hear the water running on the other side of the privacy screen, just barely audible over the sound of the falls themself. I leaned my back on the screen and hollered over the sound of the water.

“I made it, Debbie. You nekkid in there?”

I heard a voice call back, “This is Helen and it’s none of your damn business, Jack, you lecherous bastard.” I felt my face flush and I was about to stammer an apology when I heard Debbie’s distinct laughter from the other side.

“Damnit, Debbie, that’s not funny.” The sound of the shower cut off and her voice came back closer this time. “It was too. You’re turn to get naked, Jack. I’m out of the shower.”

She stepped out around the privacy screen wrapped in a towel and holding her clothes in one hand. I felt my eyes locked onto the impressive amount of cleavage the towel was having a hard time covering and I cleared my throat. “I actually never got around to buying a towel, if you don’t mind me borrowing yours?”

“Not a chance.” she said as she moved past me, but she swatted my butt as I walked into the bathhouse. I sat my clean clothes on the bench provided and took off my boots, messenger bag, and knife, but walked into the shower fully clothed. Without modern machinery soaping down while wearing them seemed like the most efficient way to clean my clothes, and I gave them a quick rinse and some spot washing before I took them off and started trying to clean myself. I was just lathering up as I saw something drop over the opposite wall of the privacy screen and Debbie’s voice called out to me.

“You can have the towel now, Jack. I’m dressed and waiting for you to get finished.”

“Okay, give me a minute.”

“If you scrub it more than twice you’ll go blind, Jack.”

“Hell, when there’s this much to scrub it takes a while. Hold your horses, Debbie.” I rushed through the rest of the shower, then dried myself on the slightly damp towel. It was thick terryclothe like the kind of thing you got in a really good hotel and I realized Debbie had been telling the truth when she said she’d bought a bunch of comfort items. I sat on the bench and was getting dressed when she called out over the screen again.

“You don’t have to do your makeup, Jack. We’re just going to work on a greenhouse.”

I came around the screen with my stuff bundled under my arm. “Here’s the thing, Debbie. If you keep riding me like that without at least. . .” I cut off what I was saying when I saw Jeri standing next to Debbie stifling a laugh. Before I could think of a more appropriate way to finish the sentence Jeri tapped a non-existent watch on her wrist.

“Thirty minutes are up, Debbie. If you could remind the help to book more time in the spa if he’s gonna take forever next time, I’d appreciate it.”

“Day laborers. Sometimes you have to settle for what you can get.”

I gave them both a one finger salute and started laying my wet clothes out to dry on the rocks. I’d come back for them in the morning. It would be more efficient to come up with some kind of clothesline, but everybody had just been laying their stuff here on the rocks where all the dirt had been swept away in the first couple of days. Debbie came over and collected me, still chuckling and I followed her back to the keep to pick up her red wagon. She pulled it out towards the woodline and stopped to cock an eyebrow at me.

“You know, Jack. I’m not 100% on exactly where I want this greenhouse to go. I know I want to be well away from the cliff face so I get more sun exposure, and close to the water seems like kind of a good idea. Other than that I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

“Well as much as nobody seems to like my wall idea, I’ve got it planned to follow pretty much where our old trap line ran. My place and the tree house should be inside the walls, and so will John’s farm even though I’ll have to jog it out a little. If you’ll pick some place inside that line I think it’d be a good idea. We may never need the wall but if we do, anybody that built stuff outside it is gonna regret it.”

“John told me I ought to maximize Southern exposure, although I’m not sure if we’re actually in the northern hemisphere here or if it will do any good. It can’t hurt to try. I’d like some relatively level ground without a ton of trees I’ll have to clear either. That sound like anyplace in the area you’re describing?”

I thought about it for a second and then went ahead and made the offer. “Actually the reverse side of the hill I built my place on ought to be about perfect. You could tie into the water tank we put in the other day and get your plumbing together easier.”

“You trying to trick me into being your neighbor?”

“Hey, there ain’t nothing wrong with having a sexy neighbor you can go to borrow a cup of sugar.” I wiggled my eyebrows at her before lowering the boom. “I’m willing to be that sexy neighbor if you really want me to.”

She smacked me on the shoulder and called me an ass again, but her tone was playful as she started off towards my hill. I grinned and followed her. It was a pain moving the wagon through the brush, but we’d gone back and forth to my place so many times a natural trail was starting to develop. I took out my antler sword and hacked a few limbs as we went, helping the process along. At some point if we beat this trail in far enough I might have to worry about graveling it to keep down the mud, but for now I’d settle for a relatively straight clear path to walk.

When we got to the south side of the hill Debbie parked her wagon and walked around a little, trying to get a feel for the place. I sprawled out on the grass and waited for her to make up her mind. After a couple of minutes she came over and put a shoe in my ribs lightly.

“Get up, lazy. We’ve got work to do.” I rolled over and climbed to my feet, watching as she pointed out what she wanted. “Plumbing lines from your tank ought to run straight down to about there so this will be the back wall of the greenhouse. I want it to be a rectangle running from over here to line up with that tree over there on the other side. I’ve got rolls of transparent plastic sheeting to make the walls/windows but we’ll need to come out with some kind of thermal sink to retain heat and maybe a venting system if it builds up too much.”

“You thinking post and frame construction or conventional studs or what?”

“Uh, I’m thinking a building with plastic walls, Jack. I just said that.”

I frowned at her shaking my head. “That’s not what I meant. What kind of structure you want us to build to attach the sheets to.”

She grinned up at me, like she was oddly pleased with the question. “You see, I’m a big picture kind of person, Jack. That’s why I hired a general contractor to deal with the piddly little details. Now get cracking and build me a building.”

I sighed and moved forward to start clearing the few trees in the way while I thought. A flat plastic roof wasn’t a good idea. Water would pool until the weight overcame the tensile strength of the plastic and then the whole thing would come down. That meant coming up with a set of trusses to put a decent pitch to the roof which could be a big pain in the ass. I asked Debbie again if she had any preferences and when she didn’t decided to go with something that would look kind of like a quonset hut. I explained what we were looking for to Debbie, and each of us took a chainsaw in search of likely candidates.

The goal was to find a living tree with a diameter not much more than three or four inches that was as tall as possible. We both came back with something topping twenty feet so I figured to use twenty feet as a baseline for when we looked for the others. I did some rough math and figured using two of them to make a half circle ought to give us a building 25 feet wideish and a ceiling peak about half that. She wanted a little more height than that, at least sixteen feet, so I sent her out to get more of the long thin green trunks while I started sinking some 7 foot posts in around both the long edges of the building. I was burying the ends of two of the posts about 3 inches apart from one another 2 and a half feet or so into the ground. She’d brought back enough of the skinny trees to finish the project before I’d planted all my posts, so she grabbed a shovel and pitched in.

It was nice having someone to talk to while I worked, and I enjoyed the process a hell of a lot more than the work on the wall this morning. Eventually we had the foundation finished and I dragged the first of the longer limbs into place and started lashing the tops together with rawhide to make a single forty foot pole.

“I’ve got to admit I’m a little lost right now, Jack. How is this going to turn into a quonset hut?”

“Oh ye of little faith. Help me drill these out and I’ll show you.” We put a hole straight through the posts in a straight line, and another in both ends of the long poles. We lifted the end of one pole up into place and drove a peg through the lined up holes, locking the rafter into place. Debbie and I walked out past the edge of the building to grab the other end with the hole in it and started forcing it towards the posts opposite the anchored one. As we got closer the green wood started to bend. The whole structure came up off the ground and arced up into the air like I’d planned, but you could hear the creaking as we got close and I knew it was a hell of a strain on the rawhide lashings and wood glue I’d used to hold the tops together. We finally managed to manhandle the end into place between the posts and I locked arms around the whole thing to hold it while Debbie grabbed the other peg and hurried to pound it into place and take the strain off me. When we finished I proudly pointed to the arced rafter above us.

“Voila. You’re just holding up plastic so it doesn’t have to support a whole lot more than its own weight. The shape means it sheds water and won’t catch much load from the wind except down here at the sides. Get some rope, tie them all to one another then run a line from each end to the ground on the short sides of the building. The tension ought to be enough to keep everything straight and square when you wrap it with the plastic”

“That’s pretty cool, Jack. I got to admit it looks better than what I was picturing when you described it. Only 12 more of them and we’ll have this building framed.”

I sighed when she put it that way, but we got back to work. She seemed to want to take advantage of my greater upper body strength. Or at least that’s what I told myself when she sent me to dig a trench to lay the pipe we hadn’t even made yet while she focused on lashing the tops together on the rest of the bindings. I finished the trench about the same time she was done with hers, and she followed me over the hill to the jig I’d set up for making pipe. We were old hands at hollowing out logs now and before too long she was gluing the end into the water tank while I started covering the pipe with dirt. The far end came out of the hill and went into the side of her building at shoulder height. She wanted enough room to run additional lines at a downward angle anyplace in the greenhouse. I ended up just sticking a y shaped branch into the dirt to hold the end of the pipe, because she hadn’t decided how to lay out her interior plumbing yet.

We started raising the rest of the arches. While each individually seemed like an unending struggle to get the far end locked into place, all together they went up within a couple of hours. This kind of construction was definitely faster than any of the other options. It still had been a full day's work and the light was starting to fade as Debbie took me by the hand and started leading me back over the hill to my place.

She smiled and said, “Tonight I get to walk you home.”

“Naw, safety in numbers. We just saw one of those spined hogs in the trail yesterday. The two of us should go back to the keep and then I’ll come back here.”

“That still leaves one of us walking the trail alone. Are you saying you’re better able to handle the danger than I am?”

It’s kind of what I had been thinking but I shook my head instead. “Nope, I just thought it made a good excuse to stretch things out, spend more time with you.”

She reached up and put her hand to the back of my neck and we kissed then. This wasn’t the chaste goodnight kiss of the night before and when we finally broke I was breathing hard. She trailed her hand down my jawline and throat before placing it flat on my chest and took a step back. I let go of her waist and let her retreat, but she kept her hand firm on my chest and stayed close by me. I smiled down at her and indicated my cabin with a tilt of my head.

“You could always just stay the night.”

She drummed her fingers on my chest before finally letting her hand drop and stopping all physical contact between us. “That sounds. . . really good, Jack. I’ve got first watch tonight though. Maybe some other time?”

“Definitely. Good night, Debbie.”

We kissed goodbye a final time before she left, and while it wasn’t the heated clench of just a few moments ago, it was full of passion and promises of what was to come. I watched as she walked out of the clearing and stood silently for a count to sixty before I followed her into the woods. Part of me felt a bit like a stalker following her back without her knowledge, but it was getting dark out and I didn’t want anything to happen to her. I stayed in earshot until she was almost back to the keep before turning around and heading back down to my place. It was an uneventful trip except for the lone crabadillo who made the mistake of clicking close enough to the trail for me to find him. I brought the corpse back with me to my place, every little bit of leather was useful.