His reaction is enough to make April laugh, and he completely dispels any possible tension before it has a chance to build.
Thank god.
I turn back to my daughter and lean in close. “Why don’t you run out and grab your suitcase from the car while I clean up the juice, okay? I’ll give you first dibs on the bedrooms when you get back inside.”
“Wow, really? You promise?”
“Cross my heart.” I smile as she runs from the room, then turn to Grant with an appreciative sigh. “And that, my friend, is just a small taste of April.”
He shrugs it off. “It’s just a little juice. No harm, no foul.”
“And you handled it like a pro, by the way. I appreciate that you didn’t lose your temper in front of her. I was afraid that whole situation was going to go the other way at first.”
“What kind of jerk loses their temper over some spilled juice? Kids are messy, right? I get it. It’s okay.”
He’s saying all the right things, but there’s still a little voice in the back of my head that says it’s all too good to be true. That he’s going to change his mind and decide this is all way too much and he doesn’t want any part of it. I just want to give him the opportunity to back out now, before it gets complicated.
“It’s not just the juice, though,” I say tentatively, reaching for a nearby roll of paper towels to start cleaning up the mess. “It’ll be something new at dinner, then five more crazy things tomorrow. It never ends, and I just want to make sure you’re prepared for that level of chaos, because it’s okay if you’re not prepared. There are days when I still feel like I’m not ready for it, so I’ll completely understand if you tell me right now that you don’t want any part of my crazy life.”
He joins me on the floor with some cleaning spray and a few more paper towels. “I’m not worried about a little disruption to my life. Sometimes we need a hurricane to come along and shake things up.”
Again, he keeps saying all the right things, but time will tell how serious he is about shaking things up. It’s not a question of whether it’ll happen; it’s when. Then we’ll have to assess the damage.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?” he asks as we finish cleaning. “Here.” He walks over to a drawer and pulls out a marker. The permanent kind. “See this? Watch.”
He takes the lid off and draws a black line right down the middle of his crisp, clean, blindingly-white kitchen wall, then calmly puts the lid back on and tosses the marker back into the drawer.
I feel like my eyes are going to pop out of my head. “Why did you do that? You’ll have to repaint that whole wall to get it to match.”
He shrugs. “Then I’ll repaint the whole wall. See? It’s not the end of the world. Nobody got angry. There’s nothing—nothing—in this house that’s so important or untouchable that it can’t be fixed or replaced with a phone call and a check. I know there will be messes, but we’ll clean them up and move on.”
As if to perfectly illustrate his point, he takes the used paper towels from me and tosses them into the garbage can. The spill is gone. Forgotten.
And now we can move on.
“Thank you,” is the only thing I can say. “You probably don’t realize the huge weight you’ve just taken off my shoulders.”
“Good. I’m glad I didn’t have to mark on all the walls to do it.” Finally, a small but real grin spreads across his handsome face. “But I would have.”
Chapter 6
Grant
I finish my last set of deadlifts at exactly nine-thirty, the same time as always. This house came with a small home gym, but I expanded it so it takes up the entire basement. It’s one of the few spaces in the house that actually feels lived in, and it’s by far where I feel the most comfortable.
I’m in here five nights a week during the season for two hours of lifting, conditioning, and mobility work. No off-weeks. No exceptions.
My routine is the one thing I can always count on to stay constant, no matter what else is going on in my life. From losing my parents to gaining two new roommates, I know that tomorrow I’ll be doing my normal morning skate, then team practice, PT, my evening workout, then some time to relax and decompress in the sauna. Lights out by eleven. Just like yesterday and the day before. Just like tonight.
Except tonight, as I towel off the sweat and head upstairs, I have to remind myself that I’m not the only one here. I’m sharing my space with two other people. People who are probably trying to figure out their own routines in a house that’s totally different from their last place.
And since I invited them to stay here for as long as they want or need, I also have to remind myself to be flexible. My own routine doesn’t have to stop, of course. It doesn’t even have to suffer just because I’m making space for Heather and April.
But it might need to be slightly tweaked every once in a while, and that’s okay.
It is.
Even if I have to keep repeating it to myself until I’m fully convinced.
