Chapter 8 #2
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, soaking in the feeling of his steady presence behind me, ridiculously glad that he’s here and he gets it.
That these memories are precious to him too.
“Okay,” I say, feeling steadier, turning around to face Tyler, Maya, and Sarah and reverting back into fix-it mode.
“Well, obviously the pipe burst in here, fire hosed my entire bedroom, and then leaked downstairs. What the fuck do we do about it?”
Maya nods, surveying the room. “Well, first of all, you need somewhere to stay while you deal with this, so why don’t you grab whatever you can, and you can stay with me. I have to get to school soon, but you know where the extra key and everything else is, so just go over whenever.”
“No way,” Tyler says, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “I happen to know you only have one spare room, so it makes sense for Soph to stay with me. She already has stuff at my house anyway.”
I turn to him with narrowed eyes, mostly to make a point. “Since when do you speak for me? I’m standing right here, and maybe I want to bunk with Sarah.”
He just grins at me, and goddamn my traitorous heart that can’t keep from reacting to him, even in the middle of an emergency.
“Sal, I know you better than you know yourself. You need a sleep mask, a room that’s crypt-like quiet, and blackout curtains so thick not a single beam of light can get through.
That diva-level sleep behavior doesn’t lend itself to sharing a room, and it definitely doesn’t jive with the frilly curtains Maya has covering her guest room windows. ”
“How do you know what curtains I have on my guest room windows?” Maya asks.
Tyler smirks at her. “Have you forgotten two New Year’s Eves ago when Oliver and I got wasted on that atomic punch you made and crashed in your spare room? I woke up to the sun practically searing my corneas. Your guest room is romantic as fuck, but those curtains are not practical, My.”
Maya cackles out a laugh. “I forgot about that. And my guest room is delightful, thank you for noticing.” She turns to Sarah. “I guess it’s you and me, Sar. Roomies?”
Sarah grins. “You bet. You sure you’re okay with Tyler?” she asks me.
I shrug, ignoring the little thrill I get at the idea of sharing a house with Tyler for a while because right now, standing practically ankle deep in water in what used to be my bedroom, is not the time to be thrilled about anything.
“I mean, he annoys the shit out of me a lot of the time, and he’s super weird about me leaving my dirty clothes on the floor, but he does keep my Dr Pepper cold, and he makes a mean grilled cheese, so I guess I can deal. ”
Tyler chuckles, bumping my shoulder with his. “I’m not weird about your clothes on the floor. You think it’s weird when I pick your clothes up and wash them. But if we’re going to be living together, you’ll have to get used to it because I take laundry as seriously as I take grilled cheese.”
“Fine, but no washing my underwear,” I say, pointing at him, attempting to shove away the mental images the phrase living together conjures up. Images of Tyler and me that have no business invading my brain ever, but especially not now. “Like I said, it’s weird, Tyler. Super freaking weird.”
He sticks his tongue out at me like a five-year-old, and I don’t know what it says about me that even while standing in the ruins of my living space, that move still has heat arrowing through me as if he took that tongue and put it…elsewhere. I’m not proud. “No promises.”
“Okay not that this isn’t entertaining,” Sarah says.
“And by the way, Ty, if you want to come over and wash anything that belongs to me, please feel free because laundry is the fucking worst, but what are we going to do about…” She trails off and waves her hands around as if to say all of this.
“I might know how to shut off a water main, but I definitely don’t know what you need to do when your house suddenly looks like the beach at high tide. ”
“Don’t worry about that, besties,” Maya says with a grin. “When Sarah told me what happened, I called in reinforcements.”
“What kind of reinforcements?” I ask, immediately suspicious, because Maya can be a little wild and extremely unpredictable, so her version of reinforcements could mean anything from a local handyman to her tracking down the contractor from that home makeover show to revamp our entire house in a single day.
“Oh, shit, what a mess.”
I spin at the sound of my dad’s voice and see him leaning up against the doorframe in all his former tech CEO glory, surveying the disaster.
The years have been kind to Gabe Sullivan.
With his jeans and hoodie, black framed glasses, and messy brown hair just starting to go the tiniest bit gray at the temples, he still looks like the billionaire captain of industry who invented the Redwood phone, the only smart phone that’s been worth owning for more than three decades.
The man who built the foundation I now run, with the mission of offering people, women in particular, the same love of STEM that underpins his entire career.
The dad who taught me to code and sang showtunes with me and sat in the front row of every one of my performances and took me shopping for my first bra at eleven when my mom was out of town and I came home spitting mad because a boy made fun of me for the way my nipples were poking through my T-shirt.
My very favorite guy in the world.
Well, maybe my second favorite guy, I think, casting a sideways glance at Tyler.
Gorgeous asshole. I just can’t get away from him.
“You called my dad?” I ask Maya.
“Sure did!” she sings. “I figured he could do some of his captain of industry shit to handle this in a snap. I’ve gotta run, but call me if you need me!
Sar, head over whenever. I’ll see you after school!
” With hugs for all of us, she sails out of the room, and two seconds later I hear the front door close.
“You weren’t going to call me?” my dad asks, sounding so affronted I laugh as he wraps me in a hug.
“I would have gotten around to it…eventually. Once I figured out the logistics of where I’m going to live for the foreseeable future and what I’m going to wear to work considering the majority of my wardrobe is probably in the process of freezing into blocks of ice.
Ugh.” I groan. “I never should have bought a house. If I had just rented like I wanted to and not let you convince me a house was a good investment or whatever, all these logistics would be someone else’s problem. ”
“Soph,” my dad says, wrapping an arm around me, “logistics are my favorite thing. I live for logistics.”
“Same,” Tyler says with a grin, giving my dad the complicated handshake, hand slap thing they’ve been doing to greet each other for basically our entire lives. “It’s offseason, and it feels like fate that I haven’t figured out how I’m going to spend it. Now I can spend it doing this.”
“What is this exactly?” I ask.
He gestures around the room. “Your house, obviously. You have to work, and Sarah has school, so neither of you have time to sit around and wait for contractors and plumbers and whatever people you call to dry up a house when it looks like…well…this.” He waves a hand everywhere. “I can do that.”
“I already called my virtual assistant,” my dad says, and yeah, he’s the kind of guy who has a virtual assistant on retainer, not because my dad needs assistant-type help personally, but because he doesn’t want anyone he loves to be even the slightest bit inconvenienced by anything, ever.
He’s good like that, and it tends to come in handy when, say, my heat breaks and my entire house floods in the middle of the winter.
“He’s working on getting someone over here today to deal with the water remediation, and he’ll take care of finding a contractor and scheduling everything. ”
“Give him my number,” Tyler says immediately. “I have nothing but time until training camp starts in July. I can handle everything on this end. You guys don’t have to worry about a thing.” He grins at me. “I’m aces at decorating. Leave it all to me.”
“So hot,” Sarah mutters quietly enough that only I can hear.
And yeah. Normally I would chafe at two men making decisions for me, even if one of those men is my dad and the other is my best friend and neither of them have a misogynistic bone in their body.
But I can totally get on board with take-charge Tyler. Take-charge Tyler is smoking hot.
Besides, home stuff makes me die a little inside. It’s so fucking boring.
“Good man,” my dad says, taking out his phone and hammering out a message. “What about places to stay?” He glances at Sarah. “Sounds like you’re staying with Maya, but what about you, Soph?”
“With me,” Tyler says before I can get a word out. “She already has a bedroom at my house and has some stuff there anyway, so it’s just logical.”
My dad glances at me, and it’s full of meaning I can’t quite decipher.
I’m mildly concerned he’s about to protest me staying at a guy’s house despite the fact that the guy is Tyler and also that I’m twenty-six years old, not twelve, but then his expression changes and he just nods.
“Sounds great. Thanks for being here, Tyler. You’re a good friend. ”
Tyler gives me a long look, his lips curving up into his signature smile that makes my stomach swoop. “I would do anything for Soph. Literally anything.”
My heart shimmers at his words, and despite the fact that my house is in shambles and I’m probably going to have to go to work in the pajamas I’m wearing since everything I own is waterlogged, this day suddenly doesn’t seem so bad after all.