8. Grant
GRANT
Monday morning, birds already working the shoreline for breakfast, and I’m standing at the kitchen window with coffee going cold in my hand, watching the gulf turn from gray to gold while Mia sleeps in my bed down the hall.
I’m forty-two years old. Divorced. Sleeping with my stepdaughter while three of my closest friends wait their turn a few doors down.
On paper it’s indefensible — I could write the legal brief against myself in my sleep, could hear Sandra’s voice reciting every line of it before she’s even said a word.
On paper, none of this should be happening.
Standing in this kitchen, watching the sun climb over water I’ve looked at every morning since I bought this place without once feeling anything close to this, I know it’s the truest thing I’ve done in longer than I can measure.
I think about last night more than I planned to.
Not the mechanics of it — I’ve made peace with those.
The part that keeps circling back is the look on Mia’s face when Jax pulled back and I took over, the way her breathing changed the second my hand replaced his in her hair.
She wanted an answer to a question she never asked out loud, and I gave it to her without hesitating once I understood what she was really asking.
Whether I’d survive sharing her. Whether the thing between us was strong enough to bend without breaking.
It bent. It didn’t break. This morning I feel steadier than I have in months, not less certain, and that surprises me more than anything else about last night.
Rain threatens off the gulf this morning, a gray line building on the horizon that probably means nothing for the draft but gives the light a strange, flat quality I haven’t seen all weekend.
I like it. It matches something in my own chest — the sense of a front moving through, weather clearing on the other side of something that felt, twenty-four hours ago, like it might never resolve into calm.
Jax wanders in first, hair a disaster, reaching past me for the coffee pot without asking. “Morning,
Commissioner.” He doesn’t look rattled by last night, doesn’t look like anything happened at all beyond a good night’s sleep. That’s Jax — everything rolls off him eventually, even the things that matter. “You good?” “I’m good.”
“Yeah.” He studies me over the rim of his mug, something more serious than his usual read passing behind his eyes. “You looked like you were about to come out of your skin for a minute there. Glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.”
“For what it’s worth—” he pours his coffee, not looking at me directly, which for Jax is its own kind of intimacy, “—I wasn’t trying to prove anything last night.
I know how that probably looked. I like her.
I liked being with her. But I’ve never once looked at her and thought she was mine to keep. That’s yours. Always was.”
“I know.”
“Wanted to say it out loud.” He claps my shoulder on his way past, easy, unbothered, and heads for the deck like the conversation cost him nothing at all, even though I know it cost him something to say plainly.
The final draft rounds start around ten, coffee cups replacing last night’s bourbon glasses on the table, and the energy in the house has shifted overnight — warmer, looser, the competitive edge still there but softened at the corners.
Brooks hasn’t made a move on Mia all weekend, hasn’t so much as touched her beyond that one deliberate kiss to the jaw days ago.
Tate’s been close, physical, present, but he’s held some invisible line too.
They’re waiting. Patient in ways that tell me how seriously they’re taking this, how carefully they’re reading the rules I laid out on the deck.
I respect both of them for it, for different reasons. Brooks because patience is his whole architecture — he doesn’t move until he’s certain, on a balance sheet or anywhere else. Tate because patience costs him something, and he’s paying it anyway.
Jax takes a photo somewhere in the middle of round eleven — laptops, bourbon, the cheat sheets spread across the glass table like a crime scene.
“Draft day,” he says, thumbs already moving.
“Commissioner’s beach house. Undefeated setup.
” He posts it to the league group chat without looking up, without thinking twice, the way he posts everything.
I don’t see it happen. I’m watching Mia argue with Brooks about a kicker, laughing at something he said, and I don’t think about phones or photos or the world outside this house at all.
Tate wanders through with two plates of eggs, hands one to Mia without being asked, and settles into the chair beside Jax like the whole morning is as it should be.
Brooks makes his pick a minute later — measured, the same calculation he brings to everything — and Mia leans over to read the name off his screen before he’s finished typing it.
“You’re stacking the same position again.”
“I’m building a floor. You’re chasing a ceiling. Ask me in December who made the better bet.” “I’ll remember you said that.”
“I’m counting on it.” He glances up at her, something warmer than usual in it, and for a second I watch him not act on it, watch him choose patience over the easy opening she handed him.
Tate’s less subtle — he ruffles her hair on his way past to the grill, gets swatted for it, laughs loud enough that Jax throws a pillow at him from the couch.
The whole house has settled into something that feels less like four men circling one woman and more like five people who’ve decided, independently, that they want to be exactly here.
Afternoon. The draft’s paused for a break, and I find Mia on the deck alone, feet up on the railing, sun on her face.
I sit beside her. She shifts without a word, head coming to rest on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her and we don’t talk for a while — only the two of us and the water and the quiet of a house full of people who’ve all decided to give us this hour.
“Tell me about the breakup,” I say eventually. “The real version. Not the one you gave Tate at the pool.”
She’s quiet a moment, tracing a line along my forearm. “He wasn’t cruel. He just wasn’t — present. I don’t think he ever saw me. Not the way—” She stops.
“Not the way I do.”
“Yeah.” She tips her head up to look at me. “That’s a weird thing to say about your stepdad, isn’t it.”
“I stopped being just your stepdad a while ago.” I mean it more than the casual way it comes out. “You know that.”
“I called you because I didn’t have anywhere else that felt safe.” She says it plainly, no drama in it, only fact. “I didn’t examine why you were the only name on that list. I knew you’d say yes.”
“I didn’t have to bring the draft here.” I’ve been circling this admission all weekend, and it comes out easier than I expected. “I could have taken the guys to the condo in town. I picked this house because you were already in it.”
“I know.” She says it simply, like she’s known it the whole time, like she’s been waiting patiently for me to catch up to something she settled days ago, without any need to rush me there. “That’s why I stayed.”
“You could have gone anywhere. You told me yourself — a car, a phone, friends who’d have taken you in without asking questions.”
“I thought about it. Sunday morning of the first week, before any of you showed up, I sat in that car a long while deciding whether to drive back to campus and forget the whole thing.” She shrugs, small, almost embarrassed by the admission.
“I didn’t turn the key. I told myself it was because I didn’t have anywhere better to be.
That wasn’t true. I only wanted to see what would happen if I stayed. ”
“And now you know.”
“Now I know.” She tips her head back against my shoulder, eyes closed, sun warm on both of us. “Ask me again in a year if it was the right call.”
“I don’t need a year to know that.”
She doesn’t push me to explain it, doesn’t ask me to prove the certainty out loud.
That’s the thing about her I keep underestimating — she takes a man at the plain weight of what he says and no more, and after three years of a marriage spent defending every sentence I meant, being believed the first time out feels almost unfamiliar.
I look at her — sun on her face, hair loose, entirely unbothered by the weight of what she said — and the word forms in my chest before I’m ready to say it out loud.
It’s nothing like the version I felt when she was family — nothing protective or paternal, none of the frames I spent months hiding behind.
This is the kind that rearranges a man’s whole life around a single person and never once asks first.
I don’t say it. Not yet. But I stop pretending, even to myself, that it isn’t there.
Evening comes on slow, the sky over the gulf sliding through a dozen shades of orange before settling into dusk, the draft grinding toward its final rounds, everyone looser now than they’ve been all weekend.
Tate’s manning the grill again, Brooks has moved his laptop to the couch, Jax is narrating every pick like it’s a broadcast only he can hear.
Mia’s curled against my side on the couch, jersey back on, bare feet tucked under her, and for a stretch of time that feels longer than it probably is, nothing exists outside this room.
I catch myself doing something I haven’t done in years — imagining forward.
Not the next hour, not the rest of the weekend, but months out.
A holiday table with all five of us at it.
A version of this house that isn’t rented out for one draft weekend a year but lived in, full-time, the way a home is supposed to be lived in.
I’ve spent three years alone in this place telling myself the water view was enough.
Watching Mia laugh at something Jax says, her hand finding mine without looking, I understand how much I’d been settling for a view instead of a life.
Tate flips a burger with more ceremony than the task requires, narrating it like a nature documentary, and Mia laughs hard enough that she has to set her drink down.
Brooks glances over from his laptop, catches my eye, and something passes between us — an acknowledgment, unspoken, that whatever this weekend turned into, none of us are walking away from it unchanged.
Somewhere in Miami, or wherever Bri lives now, a screenshot is traveling from one phone to another. Somewhere, Sandra’s own phone is lighting up with a message from a daughter she doesn’t know is sitting in a beach house, finally, exactly where she wants to be.
None of us know it yet, not one of the five of us in this room.
The house is warm. The bourbon’s low. Mia laughs at something Jax says and the sound of it fills every corner of the room, and for one more evening, the world outside this house doesn’t get a vote.
Tomorrow it will. Tonight, I let myself have this — her weight against my side, the fire dying orange in the pit outside, three friends who know what I am and haven’t once made me feel small for it.