Chapter Twenty-Six
There was a Brad-shaped hole in Ivy’s life, and she was filling it with moving boxes.
Since all of her attempts to pack the living areas of the house had been in vain, Ivy had moved on to the storage areas. She organized decades of tucked-away bric-a-brac into labeled boxes. Most of those labels said Donate.
A snow cone machine they hadn’t used since she was ten? Donate. An entire box of her toys? Donate. Her baby quilt? Keep. Shoeboxes of photos that had never been sorted into albums? Keep, but set to the side to give her parents a job that would distract them from trying to distract her.
If she didn’t know better, she might have started to believe this whole move was just a ruse.
But what would the deception achieve? Sure, it had gotten her back to Coeur-de-Lac after she’d avoided it like a plague town for a decade, but they wouldn’t keep up the fiction now that she was here.
Would they? No, they wanted to move. She was positive.
They were just having a hard time facing such a massive change. Who wouldn’t?
Ivy stretched and yawned. She considered herself a morning person, but she was a night owl compared to Grant.
He’d talked about taking the morning off and sleeping in, but he was awake at eight even though they’d stayed up late into the night.
Did his shower wake her up well before she was ready?
Yes. But it was hard to be mad at a man who looked that good in a towel.
She’d lured him back to bed by showing him her boobs, and they’d had sex for the third time in less than twelve hours.
Grant didn’t have, as far as she knew, any special techniques or a playbook of different sexual positions, but every time with him was extraordinary.
It was as natural as breathing. She could tease him and laugh with him, even when he was inside of her, and she felt so safe and cared for that her brain could shut off its constant loop of worries and lists so she could be fully present.
It had only been a few hours since he’d dropped her off, but she already missed him. If he’d been there helping her, they’d have packed up the entire house.
Or they’d have made it through one box before ending up in her childhood bed doing adult activities.
Ivy smirked. That was a distraction technique her parents hadn’t considered.
All they had to do was dangle a horny Grant in front of her and she’d be occupied for days.
But it begged the question: Why were they trying to distract her from doing what she’d come to Coeur-de-Lac to do?
And why hadn’t her mom told Grace the truth about their imminent departure?
The doorbell rang, and she sighed. When she was finally making some progress, she was getting interrupted.
Maybe if she ignored it…
There was a knock at the door.
Ivy sighed, louder this time, though no one was in the house to hear it, and pushed herself off the floor.
The door was in sight when there came another ring followed by a more insistent knock. Whoever was on the other side either had something really important for her or nothing better to do.
Ivy looked through the peephole. It was someone with nothing better to do.
Austin stood on her porch with his hands in his pockets, rocking forward onto his toes and back onto his heels, like he was five again and waiting for someone to answer so he could ask Ivy if she wanted to come play.
Against her better judgment, she opened the door. He smiled brightly, and her heart didn’t flutter at all. It didn’t even twitch.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him. Maybe there was a gas leak on the street and he was doing his neighborly duty to warn her.
“I was at home and it occurred to me that you might be home, too.”
She didn’t know what he wanted out of this interaction, but she could guess why he was at her door.
“Austin, are you bored?”
He nodded sheepishly.
Ivy folded her arms. “Are all of your cool friends busy?”
“Why would they need to be busy? What if you were the first person I thought of?”
She arched an eyebrow and fixed him with a no-nonsense stare that had been sharpened by years of working with the traveling masses. Austin blew out a noisy breath, defeated.
“Yeah, they’re busy. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hang out with you. Catch up. Talk about old times.”
“What about Piper? Does she not want to hang out with you?”
“She’s at work with Grant.”
“So you’re bored bored.” Ivy was ready to tell him to go home and watch reruns of Law & Order: SVU or The Big Bang Theory, but Austin looked at her like he was the last puppy in the window at the pet store. “If you want to hang out, you have to help declutter our junk.”
To her surprise, Austin stepped inside.
“Where do we start?”
To Ivy’s shock and delight, Austin was a helpful, hard worker. He took directions well and moved heavy things without complaint. She’d almost forgotten he’d been raised by Tim and Grace Underwood.
They talked the entire time, reminiscing about their childhood.
Austin told her about his first few shitty years in L.A.
He even managed to ask her questions about herself—where she liked to travel, the best food she’d eaten around the world, if she’d recommend going to South Korea for skin-care treatments.
It was like he really cared about becoming her friend.
After a few hours of labor that was almost hard, Austin’s stomach audibly rumbled. Ivy’s eyes widened and she slowly turned to stare at him.
“Was that you?”
He shrugged. “I’m hungry.”
“It’s Wing Wednesday at Curly’s,” she said. “Starr texted me. We could go there.”
Austin frowned like he was trying to remember the nutritional information for a plate of buffalo wings when his stomach rumbled again.
“How do we get there? I don’t have a car.”
“My mom left me hers in case I needed to run any errands today,” Ivy said.
Austin chuckled. “God, this is like high school all over again.”
“We didn’t hang out in high school,” she reminded him as they headed through the house toward the front door.
“No, I meant like, bumming a ride from a friend so you could get milkshakes or go to a party.”
“We had very different high school experiences.”
Austin changed her mom’s radio station from NPR to the student-run station from the college. He said it was the best mix of music he’d ever heard.
“You don’t always get what you want, but you always get what you need.”
And he was right, because singing Mariah Carey with the guy she’d been obsessed with since before she started her period and hearing him try to hit her whistle notes was healing in a way she never could have anticipated.
Downtown Coeur-de-Lac was busier than she’d expected.
Instead of parking right outside of Curly’s, she had to park on the same block as the movie theater.
She made a point not to look at the theater, because she’d think about what she’d done with Grant in the adjacent apartment and then she’d end up with redder cheeks than she could reasonably blame on the cold air.
But she couldn’t fully push Grant out of her mind, because he lived rent-free in her head, upgraded from locked basement to penthouse suite.
Curly’s was the quietest she’d seen it, but there were still older locals bellied up to the bar and some college kids who wanted to take full advantage of happy hour.
“Ivy!” Starr threw her hands in the air excitedly when she saw her. “You came!” She barely glanced at Austin. “Oh, hey.”
“So, about Sunday night—” Austin started, but Starr cut him off.
“We’re going to pretend that didn’t happen, okay?” She gave him a tight, condescending smile, then turned the full force of her attention back to Ivy. “Are you thirsty? Hungry?”
“You said it was Wing Wednesday, so we’re here for wings,” Ivy said. “And not tequila.”
“Wings go best with beer.”
When Starr came back after putting in their order, she had a frosty mug of beer for Ivy and a glass of water for Austin.
“Where’s my beer?”
“You’re in time-out.”
He shrank on his barstool and obediently sipped his water.
“How did your family take it when you told them about the show?” Ivy asked after Starr went to tend to the other customers starting to fill the bar.
“Oh, the usual way. Mom’s worried I’ll be living in a van, and not in a fun content-creator way.
Dad’s pissed because he’s Dad, and anger is his default output for fear.
I told them I had projects in the pipeline, but…
” He shrugged. “I keep trying to find the bright side. TV shows take a lot of time to film and you’re never sure of your availability for other projects, so at least I’m available now. ”
“What else?” Ivy prompted.
“That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Not having a steady paycheck is going to suck.”
She considered giving him her beer but didn’t want to end up on Starr’s shit list. “What did Grant say?”
Austin snorted. “Grant doesn’t give two shits about me. I doubt he even knows the show is canceled. Or he thought it was already canceled, so he thinks this is old news.”
“That’s not true,” she protested. “He cares about you. You’re his brother.”
“Assuming he cares because he’s my brother is something an only child would say.” He sounded defeated. “Sibling dynamics are complicated.”
“Try managing your parents solo. At least you have backup.” Ivy took a big gulp of her beer and regretted it. The beer was bitter and hoppy. She had to stop letting Starr bring her drinks without providing guidance.
“Managing Mom and Dad is Grant’s job. If you’re the ‘and Son’ in Underwood & Son, you get to deal with the Underwood.”
Ivy left Austin at Curly’s after his “busy” friends showed up. She was reasonably sure he would have stayed with her if she’d asked him to, but it was a lot later than she realized and she used that as her excuse not to spend time with people who didn’t know her well enough to properly dislike her.