Page 46 of Worth the Fight

“No, ma’am, I’d never do that.” I wink, using the cloth to dry my arms and face. “Dean is washing up. I invited him to lunch.”

Her eyes light up at that. “Oh, good! I’ll have Theo grab another chair for us. Theo!” she calls out, and I hear him respond from the office that’s situated outside the kitchen. “Grab a spare chair from the basement, will you, sweetie?”

“Anything I can help with?” I look around the kitchen, at the scattered pots and pans that line the counter. I’ll be helping with clean-up duty, for sure.

“You can grab one of the chickens and bring it to the table, please.”

I nod, carefully sliding the platter of chicken legs and thighs off the counter and onto my palm. I move into the dining room, setting it in the center of the table just as Harper and Grayson arrive. She’s tugging on Grayson’s arm, and there’s a faint blush on his cheeks.

“What’s going on here?” I prod, and Harper looks up at me with stars dancing in her eyes.

“Can I tell him?” she asks, and Grayson nods.

“Tell him what?” Theo chimes in, coming up behind me with a spare chair.

One by one, my family members file into the room, each moving around to their respective seats. Dean stands in the doorway, hands tucked into his pockets, and I turn to him, nodding as I pull out the chair where he can sit.

“Grayson is getting married!” Harper squeals, jumping up and down while tugging on Grayson’s arm.

My mom gasps, and Theo starts clapping. Pops stands, about to hug Grayson, I’m sure, when Grayson puts up his hands to halt everyone's excitement. “I’m not getting married—not yet. But I did bring our great-grandma’s ring to the jeweler to have it fixed up and sized for Holly’s finger. Harper is just getting a little ahead of herself.”

A little of the excitement dies, but not by much. We all know that Holly is going to say yes, and she’ll soon be an official member of our family.

“Damn, Gray.” I move forward, reaching out to slap him on the back. “That’s awesome. Congrats, man. She’ll say yes, for sure.”

“I don’t know,” Theo teases, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “I’m still on the market.”

Harper rolls her eyes at him. “Yeah, you are, but asking Holly to marry you would mean settling down with one woman forever, and you’re too much of a dingbat to understand that.”

She playfully scrunches her nose at him, and he brings up his middle finger, faking an itch to his eye that only a few of us can see.

“Enough about me,” Grayson says. “Let’s talk about Lukas and why I overheard him calling someone ‘baby’ on the phone and asking if he could come see them.”

The room falls mostly silent as all eyes fall on me. Asshole.

“Oh?” my mom prods, her hand nervously tugging at the braid that hangs over her shoulder. They all know that I’ve been sort of talking to Mags. They know I was leaving her voicemails and that she had answered, but we were still in rocky territory. I got home late last night, having missed family dinner since I went straight to Candi’s to pick up my little princess.

Pops’s chair creaks as he adjusts, his elbow resting on the backrest.

I pull out my own seat next to him, reaching forward to grab my water glass. “Oh, that?” I pause, taking a slow sip. I make a show of setting the glass back down, spinning it just-so on the coaster. “Oh, that was just Magnolia. I saw her yesterday. She says hi to everyone, by the way.”

My mom gasps once again, a hand flying to her heart.

Theo raises his hands to clap them above his head. “Well, shit. It only took, what? Six months of you hounding her to have her give you the time of day? I’m proud of you, little brother.”

“Are you back together?” my mom asks tentatively. My family has always loved Mags, as they should. We have been friends for so long that they have watched her grow up just as they’ve watched the rest of us kids grow. When I was deployed, and things were rough, I knew Mags and my mom would call each other, probably needing to lean on one another for support. When our relationship ended, my mom also lost her relationship with Mags, and I hadn’t really thought about what that must have felt like for her. For either of them.

“We’re not together, no, but we’re … we’re working on it.” I quickly give them the story about Nana’s sneaky maneuver that landed us both at the rehab center at the same time, then the few hours afterward we spent with Ivy and Candi, and the rough conversations, leaving out the hell of a kiss at the airport.

Harper practically screams, covering her mouth with both hands to stifle the sound. “Oh. My. God. I don’t think I could be any happier. Grayson and Holly are getting married, and Lukas and Mags are back together. I couldn’t be happier if I was the one in love.”

“Yeah, when is that going to happen?” Theo asks, winking at her.

“The same time you stop dating your bar sluts,” she fires back, and my dad groans, coming into the room for the tail end of her sentence.

“This doesn’t sound like proper dinner table conversation.”

“You missed it, Dad,” Grayson says. “Lukas and Mags are back together.”