Fixer Upper (A Choni Fanfiction)

Twenty

Don't forget to comment! And Vote! And share! We're in the last few chapters of this book, it'll probably be done this week! I didn't really like the way I was gonna end it before, so I'm rewriting a bunch after having come up with some better plot lines and closers. You still have a few really good sex scenes to go, and another party type thing, another meeting with N*ck, a couple firsts, two more name drops, and a great moment between a ship y'all adore. Don't forget to check out my newest fic, Speak Easy after this! Enjoy ;)

I ended the day early and dismissed everyone by two today before rushing down the street to Tate's, where Chuck already waited, accompanied by Toni, which made me stop in my tracks. I slowly continued my journey towards them until I was sitting across from the two of them, hands folded on the table neatly.

"Afternoon, Toni." I said awkwardly, and she waved at me in an equally awkward manner. "What's up?" I asked Chuck, and he unfolded a file folder, showing me pictures of my scorched office. "What am I looking at?" I asked, swallowing a lump in my throat from seeing the damage I had done.

"Look at the candles." He pointed out, and I looked at my desk to where the candles were when I lit them, and I was confused to see that they were still mostly intact, the wax walls still built high. "If your candles started that fire, they would've had to be completely melted down, but they hadn't done that yet." He said, before turning that picture over and showing me another, of a broken window from the mail room on the sixth floor below mine. "This is the only window in the building that broke." He divulged. "I always thought it didn't make sense that the fire started on the top floor and burnt on floors underneath. Fire usually rises, so anything below the floor the fire started on would be safe, under almost any circumstances." He explained.

"I got called to fix a leaky pipe on the floor below the seventh floor below, and I noticed that the reason it was leaking is because it was broken, and wrenched up, so that the gas would leak from the boiler on the twenty third floor, into a vent that lead straight up to the twenty fourth floor. With that kind of leak, even just dropping a lighter in the next floor over can cause an explosion." Tonight informed, giving time for Chuck to flip to another picture, one of what looked like a scorched, melted lighter. He flipped that to another, which showed strange marks on a seemingly clean wall where it met with a ceiling.

"Someone did just that." He said seriously, "Somebody threw a lit lighter into the room when they thought nobody would be there."

I didn't know what to say.

Somebody conspired against my company, tried to destroy what I spent years trying to perfect. How could someone do something like that to me?

"Do you know who did it?" I asked, and Chuck rose a brow.

"I was hoping we could take a look at that security system of yours."

...

"So this is the lapsed time of the day of the fire." I explained as I clicked 'lapse' on the security settings.

We watched in silence, both Chuck and Toni leaning against the desk on either side of me to watch as well. My eyes strayed when I smelled the scent of motor oil and vanilla, an ever present smell I only traced back to Toni. I caught her looking at me through the corner of my eye, distracted at the fact that it's been a month since I last felt her this close, and smelt her smell on anything but my sheets and my pillow.

That smell faded away a week ago.

Now, it's like I had been weaned off of the drug of that scent, and her giving it back to me is enabling a relapse.

"There, stop!" Called Chuck, knocking me out of my euphoria so that I could pause it.

I zoomed in on the face of the brown haired man, and exchanged looks between my two acomplaces.