17. SEVENTEN
SEVENTEN
CORY
The Adler home was nothing like the house I grew up in. For starters, it was welcoming. Worn, chestnut colored hardwood ran throughout the house, and there wasn’t a drop of white in sight. Different colored blankets were thrown over the backs of brown leather couches in a way that indicated they weren’t there for decoration. A rust-colored armchair sat in the corner by the fireplace—a functional one by the looks of it—and behind it was a bookshelf that was filled partially with books, and partially by board games that looked like they’d been played often. Images of the Adlers huddled around the handcrafted wooden coffee table, rolling dice or slapping cards down against its smooth surface, popped into my head. The deep teal walls were decorated with mismatching photo frames, each housing smiling faces.
Annette would’ve had a stroke upon entering.
Maybe we should’ve brought her.
“Garrett, honey, hi!” His mother swept in and hugged him tightly, and even though he towered over her, something about her essence made her feel larger than life.
“Hi, Mom.” His smile seeped into his voice. He let her go after a moment and gestured to where I stood off to the side. “This is Cory.”
She turned to look at me, her blue eyes a shade or two darker than Garrett’s, and smiled. “It’s so nice to finally meet you!”
There was no warning before she wrapped me up in a hug of my own, her curly light brown hair attempting to smother me. I didn’t mind; she smelled like brown sugar and sunshine.
She pulled back and gave me a once-over the way people in movies do when they’re embracing someone they can’t believe is actually there. A blush rose to my cheeks at her perusal.
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Adler.”
She pointed a finger at me, a serious expression lining her features. “You’ll call me Shelby. I won’t have any of that ‘Mrs.’ crap. Now follow me, I want to introduce you to Jack.” She grabbed my hand without hesitation, and I threw a questioning glance over my shoulder at Garrett, who just chuckled to himself quietly.
“Jack, look who’s here!” Shelby called excitedly as we entered the kitchen.
Looking at Jack, I could see where Garrett got his looks from. He was an older version of Garrett, right down to the head of messy, dark brown hair and square jawline, though Jack had a dusting of facial hair growing over his. Everything but Garrett’s eyes and dimples were all his dad.
Jack set down the potato he was in the middle of peeling to come give me a similar hug to his wife’s. Tight, encompassing, and warm.
“We’ve heard a lot about you, Miss Cory. Garrett here hasn’t shut up about you.”
I shot Garrett a smirk and then looked back at his dad. “Well, hopefully I live up to whatever version of me he’s told you all about over the last couple of weeks.”
Shelby laughed loudly. “You mean the past couple of years?”
My head whipped toward Garrett.
Years?
My eyes must’ve betrayed my thoughts because Garrett stepped closer to me, his hand sliding to the small of my back as he leaned down to whisper into my ear, “I think not knowing your name that night had the opposite effect you intended.”
I went to tell him to elaborate on that bombshell he’d just dropped, but we were interrupted.
“Is this her? Nevermind. Obviously it’s her.”
I expected the hug this time, wrapping my arms around his sister’s slim figure. “You must be Linnea.”
Her smile lit up her entire face, and she looked at Garrett. “You told her about us?”
“Of course I did. I had to prepare her before throwing her to the wolves.”
She grabbed my hand. “Don’t listen to anything he’s said. We’re amazing.”
“That’s pretty much what he’s told me.” I laughed .
“Oh, well then, listen to everything he said!”
“Okay, okay, the rest of this meet and greet has to happen somewhere that’s not in my kitchen. Scoot!” Shelby waved a dish towel through the air.
When we were settled back in the living room, Linnea wasted no time peppering me with questions. Unlike Garrett’s questioning the night of our bar bet, his sister seemed content with surface-level questions, with a specific interest in my tattoos and how Garrett and I reconnected.
“Is Darcy coming?” Garrett asked after a while.
“Yeah, I think so. She said she was on her way not too long ago.” She pulled her phone out to check their sister’s location, but as luck would have it, Darcy chose that moment to walk through the front door.
“Speak of the devil!”
Darcy looked around the living room, taking the three of us in, before she honed in on me, her hazel eyes holding a calculating look to them.
Where Garrett closely resembled his father, and Linnea was a mini version of their mother, with Darcy, the Adler genes muddled together more than they took a side.
She had their father’s height, and his hazel eyes, but she inherited their mother’s dimples, and her cheekbones. Her hair wasn’t dark like the Adler men, but it wasn’t light like Linnea’s and Shelby’s. It was impossible to say who she looked like, just that it was obvious she was related to them all.
“Who are you?”
Garrett jumped in. “Darcy, this is Cory. I’ve told you about her, I think.”
“Oh, you’ve told us about her. No question about it.” Linnea winked at me.
“The Cory you met at Hayes’s wedding?” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked me over. I didn’t think anyone else noticed, but I did.
This was the reaction I was accustomed to. All the hugging, and eager welcoming, while nice, felt foreign. Like I wasn’t the intended target, but it was ricocheting off Garrett and getting me by mistake. But Darcy’s skepticism and caution? That, I was used to.
“Yup!” I inwardly cringed at the amount of cheer in my answer.
She nodded slowly, pursing her lips. “Cool.”
And then she headed into the kitchen without a backward glance at me or her siblings.
Garrett grabbed my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t mind her.”
“Yeah, she’s like an outdoor cat,” Linnea chimed IN. “Kind of feral, but also secretly in desperate need of cuddles.”
I smiled at her because, yeah, I knew exactly what she meant.
***
Dinner with Garrett’s family was nothing like I expected. I thought Kinsley’s family dinners were as “homey” as they came, but it turned out that the family meals in the movies also existed in real life. I imagined this is how the Grinch felt when he was invited to Christmas dinner with the Whos.
As conversation flowed, I felt simultaneously like the newcomer I was, and a member of their family. They asked questions to get to know me, but from the pressed-lipped smiles and side-eye looks Shelby kept sharing with Jack, it seemed like they knew much more than they were trying to let on. Part of me loved that Garrett talked to them so much about me, but it was also a touch unsettling to be in a room with people I was meeting for the first time, but who had met me through whatever Garrett had told them years ago.
Which was another thing I couldn’t get over. We’d shared one drunken night at a wedding and he told his whole family about me—couldn’t stop talking about me, if Linnea and Shelby were to be believed. Sure we’d talked at the bar for a while, and on the way to the hotel room, but the rest was just sex. Mind-blowing, world-altering sex that I thought about frequently and desperately wanted to recreate, but still, just sex. He hadn’t really known me. He certainly hadn’t known me well enough to develop any feelings about me one way or another.
But when I looked over at Garrett after we polished off our helpings of Shelby’s mixed berry pie that she’d made, he looked so sure of me. Of this. There was no hesitation when he invited me to meet his family, and there definitely wasn’t any hesitation in the way he’d slid my sundress up ever so slightly so he could brush his thumb over the skin just above my knee under the table.
When everyone was done, Shelby and I grabbed the plates from the table and brought them to the sink where I washed and she dried. I had started to do it on my own, a habit apparently still intact from eating with my parents, but Shelby insisted that would be terrible hosting.
I was just rinsing off the last plate when I felt Shelby’s eyes on the side of my face. I turned off the faucet and passed her the plate, waiting for her to speak.
“You’re good for each other.” Her voice had a wistful note to it.
A small laugh escaped me before I could tamp it down.
“Don’t you laugh at me, I’m serious!” She swatted at me with the dish towel.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh. It’s just new. Him and me. The whole relationship thing in general really.” I don’t know what had the words pouring out of me, but Shelby felt like a safe person to pour them out to.
She smiled and put the plate into the cabinet with the others before drying her hands. “You know, Jack and I knew each other our entire lives.”
“Really?”
She smiled. “Yup! He grew up right across the street from me. Our parents were friends so we grew up together. I never saw him as anything other than a friend, even after he told me he saw me as more.”
I spotted Jack and Garrett talking on one of the couches. “Poor Jack.”
Shelby nodded her agreement. “It was an awkward couple of years after that, but when we came back from college one summer, he was outside mowing the grass, and I just watched him from my bedroom. I’d had all these worries about and reasons for why we couldn’t be together in my head for so long, but then watching him push a mower back and forth that day, I thought to myself what if ? What if I gave him a chance? What if none of the other crap mattered? So I marched over there and told him he could take me for ice cream. I don’t think I even said ‘hi’ first.”
The image of a younger Shelby aggressively telling a surprised Jack he could take her on a date, made me laugh.
“We went for ice cream and the rest is history. We’ve been married for thirty-two years now, and that was the best “what if” I decided to try out.”
“That’s really sweet,” I smiled at her, leaning back against the counter.
She came to stand next to me, where we stood quietly looking at her son and husband for a moment.
“The point I’m trying to make is, that even if you know someone their whole life, starting something new, or changing a relationship to be something more, is always daunting and terrifying. I always say if you don’t feel like throwing up at least a little bit in the beginning, it’s not true love.”
I barked out a laugh, blowing our cover with the men in the living room. Garrett flashed me a smile, and my stomach did a little flip.
I looked at Shelby who was still smiling at Jack. “Do you still want to throw up? ”
Her smile turned into a grin, and she patted my shoulder lovingly. “At least once a week.”
We joined the rest of the family in the living room where it had been decided that it was game time. Linnea and Darcy were going back and forth over which game to play.
“You guys have Monopoly?” I asked and Garrett shook his head muttering something under his breath that sounded a lot like here we go .
“Oh, okay! I see how it is, Cory.” Linnea laughed and stood to grab the box from the stack.
“Just so you know, we don’t play nice in this house,” Darcy said.
It was the first thing she’d said to me since our short conversation when she’d arrived. Maybe I should’ve been put off by her cold shoulder, but like calls to like and all that, and I could respect her distance.
“Good. Neither do I.”
A person can learn a lot about someone by the way they play Monopoly. Garrett, for instance, played the long game. He was okay with waiting for the dark blue Park Place and Boardwalk spots if it meant he could have the best spots on the board. Linnea went for the brown and light blue spots because they were cheapest and she could put houses and hotels on them faster. Darcy played how I did: buy whatever spaces you land on and make other players pay dearly to attempt a color set. It often meant we didn’t get color sets of our own right away, but it meant that the other players didn’t either, and by the time they did, they were too broke to do anything about it. It also meant the game went on forever.
Shelby declared bankruptcy after about thirty minutes, and Jack and Linnea followed not too long after. Darcy stuck it out for awhile, but in the end, I had absolved too many of her family’s properties to be bested, and she had to fold, too. It was just Garrett and I battling it out, but I held his beloved Park Place.
“What will you give me for it?” I asked, steepling my fingers over the rainbow of cash I had tucked under the edge of the board.
The playfulness in his eyes took on a devilish gleam. “Anything.”
“Anything?” I raised an eyebrow.
“You can have it all. My properties. My money. You can even have my top hat. Just leave me the Boardwalk.”
“What if I want more than that?” I hoped he picked up on my meaning.
He flashed me that dimpled smile of his. “Anything.”
I bit my lip, trying to ignore the way his teasing had my body heating and my fingers itching to lose themselves in his hair. “That’s a terrible deal. How are you going to put houses on them with no money?”
“Let me worry about that.”
I left him a singular dollar, his top hat and his random brown color set because having the entire board but the dark blue squares seemed unnecessary to secure the win.
I should’ve left him nothing.
His family had left for after-dinner coffee once Darcy had lost, but they returned as we neared the end, where somehow Garrett was winning. He had hotels on all of his properties and I was coming up on the homestretch of the board.
“Just don’t roll a three or a five.” His voice was smug with pre-winning excitement.
I flipped him off, which earned a laugh from his family, and a smile from Darcy. Small wins.
I rolled, and it was over.
A one and four stared up at us.
“How?” Linnea yelled. “Every time! He does this every single time!”
All the while, Garrett stared me down from across the board, the heat in my body mirrored in his eyes.
“Good game.” I held out my hand and he took it, still not breaking eye contact.
We stayed long enough to have the coffee Jack insisted we drink because Shelby made a whole pot, and then we said our goodbyes. Garrett and I promised we’d be back soon, and then we were stepping out into one of the last warm nights of summer.
“You’re driving.”
I gave him a questioning look. “What? Why? It’s your truck.”
He bent his head down to my ear and whispered, “Just do as you’re told,” before slapping my ass, and leaving me standing there mouth agape, as he climbed into the passenger side.