Here we go again, Donna thought angrily, shaking her head. She felt miserable and it served her right. There was no happily ever after, no making up for past mistakes, no going back to the way things were. She had been too naïve, too stupid and this was the result. Tears were crawling into her eyes as she pulled harder on the rusty screw that just downright refused to move.
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you”, Donna hissed through gritted teeth, pulling harder.
The tap bubbled an annoying happy tune in reply, mocking all her efforts to close off the water-supply to the sink.
“Oh come on! Move!”, Donna yelled in frustration at the sinister sink. She had fixed it yesterday morning so there should be no running water now. She should have known something was not right when the first movement of the wrench closed off the stream of water yesterday. Just too good to be true.
“Maybe you should move a bit, just yelling at it will not work, you know”, a voice said somewhere behind her.
“What? Like telling the screw how emotionally unstable its refusal to open makes me? How happy I’d be if it just loosened its grip a little? Oh come on, it’s a screw not a person”, Donna growled.
“That’s not really what I meant, but since you started that line of thought I am going to pick up on that colourful metaphor by saying: Buildings are like… people. A house is not just stone and wood. In a way it’s a living being.”
“So you are basically trying to break to me that this living being hates me. Now that is very helpful, Sam.”
Donna kept mumbling from her very unfortunate and – at least in her eyes – very unattractive position under the sink. Sam grinned and leaned back a bit to get a better view. Even though she was not looking at him, Donna sensed where his line of sight – and thought – was going and growled.
“I am serious!”, Sam said.
“Oh yeah, as serious as a man can be when he is looking at a woman’s bum.”
“A nice view adds to the creative thinking process.”
“Then you should start looking out of the window, love, because in a while you need to be very creative in order to find a way to escape my rage.”
Sam laughed and for the first time since he had entered the room she was glad he was not able to look into her face for she felt a smile spreading over it. And that was not very helpful when she really wanted to be angry at him for bursting into the room like that. Part of her knew how stupid that was, he was her husband for Zeus’s sake! But still. This side of her – not in the literay sense of course – the Donna who was really struggling to keep going in order to keep things from falling apart – was a side she was not used to show so openly. When he had entered the room tears had run down her face. Tears of pure exhaustion. Those tears were gone now and so was the tiny patch of anger she had tried to grow out of her embarassment.
“What I meant was”… Sam continued “You have to treat this house like a person, a bit like a doctor seeing a patient. That was what my old professor at university had always told us.”
“So the solution to our more than urgent water-problem here is simply to diagnose a bad case of diarriah and flush some pruns and chocolate down the toilet??” Donna asked, finally giving up both the wrench and the screw. Carefully she crawled defeated back into the room, turned towards Sam and sat on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees. She looked at him expectantly.
His grin spread wider as he pushed himself back from the cabinett and got down to his knees until his eyes were on the same level as hers. He was close, very close and Donna had to force herself to breathe and not to shiver.
“The solution is really to move aside and let me give it a try.” Sam said gently.
“You?”
“What I was trying to say is, that our old professor took a rather… passionate approach towards architecture. He said we should not only be able to bring a building to life, but to be able to care for it in the years to come. We were quite impressed with all the colourful ideas he put into our heads… until we realised that what he really meant was for us to become plummers and plasters, builders and carpenters…”
“So you were serious about that roof? I thought you were just showing off” Donna said, the grin on her face spreading. Sam, still leaning in closer, looked at her and whispered “very serious… and a bit showing off”, before capturing her lips.
After a while Donna realised two things at once: a) even in a blissful state of mind, breathing should really not be abandoned entirely and b) the water in the sink was still running and now happily flowing over the edge of the sink and into her shirt. Donna solved both problems at once by pushing Sam onto the bathroom floor with a noise that was somewhere between a growl and a girly squee.
“You realise…” remarked Sam smirking while pulling her up his lean body “that the water is still running?”
“Hmmm”, Donna replied gently rubbing her nose against his. “New strategy… house wants attention… if house does not get attention house will eventually get bored…”
“Interesting theory”, Sam mumbled somewhere behind her left ear. Donna closed her eyes. Life was great.
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