The year had begun in a cold hush, with misted breath and puddles at the curb, spring creeping in with damp footsteps and whispering winds. But come June, all softness vanished. A blistering heat wave slammed down over the city like a curtain drawn tight, thick and inescapable. The sun blazed high and merciless, an unrelenting tyrant in the sky. Lawns turned brittle and gold, the trees sagged under their own leaves, and the air itself felt molten—close and heavy, like the prelude to a storm that never arrived.

The radio crackled its forecasts with grim fascination. “Hottest summer in a century,” the weatherman said again, his voice cheerful and distant, as if he were not among the melting. The asphalt shimmered. Dogs panted in the shade. Even the nights offered no reprieve, still sweltering with the sun’s leftover breath.

John Price—man of iron, lover of summer, whose patience with heat had never faltered before—finally declared it enough.

One morning, before even the birds dared to sing, John rolled out of bed with the determined air of a man on a mission. He grunted something about “bloody hell, I’m sweating in me sleep,” and kissed your forehead with lips still warm from dreams. Then he was up, already halfway out the door with a cold cup of coffee in hand and an old blueprint of an idea stirring behind those sharp, sun-crinkled eyes.

You didn’t question him. You knew better.

By midday, the sounds of construction hummed from the backyard—a wheelbarrow clinking against stone, the rasp of a shovel against dry earth, the rhythmic splash of a garden hose trying to soften the cracked ground. You watched from the shade of the kitchen window, lazily sipping iced tea that had long since melted to water.

There he was.

John, under the full blaze of the midday sun, shirtless and tanned from years of foreign suns, now claimed by his own backyard like a man at war with the heat. He wore nothing but a battered pair of old army shorts, faded and threadbare at the edges, slung low on his hips. His skin glistened with sweat, muscles working with slow, deliberate grace as he shoveled dirt into a growing hole—a man building his own salvation one scoop at a time.

His arms flexed beneath the sun, veins raised, shoulders browned and slick. His hair stuck to his forehead in damp curls, and he wiped at it with the back of his wrist like it had personally wronged him. There was a smudge of dirt on his jaw. A cut on his forearm. He looked like the heat itself had sculpted him from sandstone and breath.

You couldn’t help the smile tugging at your lips as you leaned against the doorframe, glass now empty and forgotten in your hand.

“Don’t suppose you’re building that for me, are you?” you called out, voice teasing, light as the breeze you both wished would blow.

John straightened, squinting at you from under furrowed brows, sweat dripping from his temple. “It’s either this, or I start sleepin’ in the freezer,” he said, breathless but grinning, “and I don’t fancy curling up next to the frozen peas.”

You laughed. “Could’ve just bought a fan, y’know.”

He stabbed the shovel into the ground and leaned on it, eyes roaming over you like the heat had nothing to do with the way his gaze burned. “Where’s the fun in that, love?”

“Fun? You’re digging a hole like a bloody badger.”

John tilted his head, a smirk cutting through the flush on his face. “A badger that’s gonna have a pool by next week.”

“Oh, so it is for me?”

He didn’t answer right away—just let his gaze linger on you a moment too long before wiping his hands on his shorts, crossing the yard with a slow, languid swagger.

“No, sweetheart,” he said, his voice low, teasing, thick like honey in the heat. “But I might let you skinny dip in it. If you’re good.”