Chapter Twenty-Two
Ben
The house looked pretty damn good. All Grandma’s things were finally out and Charlie had come by to do a proper deep clean with her team. It hadn’t been dirty at the open house, but I held the houses I sold to a high standard. And this wasn’t just any house. All the responsibility of this sale fell squarely on my shoulders. But I had it totally under control. The wooden floors shone. The stained glass windows sparkled. And everything smelled like cookies because I’d put some in the oven at six-thirty.
Ava knocked on the door just as I pulled them out of the oven, letting herself in as she called out. I wouldn’t say that I hurried to her, but I didn’t lose any time getting there to greet her.
“Oh my God, it smells amazing in here.” She took a deep inhale, a knowing smile taking over her full lips. “Did you bake cookies?”
“Nestlé Tollhouse did,” I corrected her with a grin. “I felt badly that you got such a haphazard tour the first time around. This time, you can have the full client treatment.”
“I guess this means that the oven works,” she teased, meandering toward the kitchen and gawking at each room along the way.
Her hair was down today, which was unusual when she worked. It fell in a river of blonde to her chest, where she sported a Jethro Tull t-shirt.
“Have you gone to any of the concerts?” I asked her, scooping the cookies onto a plate.
Her perfectly arched brows furrowed. I nodded toward her shirt.
“Oh!” A soft smile accompanied her understanding. “Some of them. I haven’t seen Jethro Tull, though. The tickets were pretty expensive when they came to Chicago, and it was right around when I was buying the bakery.”
“Who have you seen?”
“U2, of course. John Mellencamp while I was in Bloomington. The Eagles. Bon Jovi. And Aerosmith.” She ticked them off on her fingers as she listed them. “Not too many, but enough to earn at least a few of the t-shirts.”
“Do you listen to anything other than classic rock?” I asked, setting the plate of cookies between us.
Ava grabbed one. “Of course. I love it, but at least half of my passion for it is driven by nostalgia. Long drives with my Dad up to the beach at Lake Michigan or the museums in Chicago. He always had it playing. What about you?”
“I’m more of an indie rock fan myself, but I haven’t given serious thought to a genre in a while.” It wasn’t until I grabbed my second cookie that realization dawned. “Is that why you named the bakery that? Because of your dad?”
Ava’s sky blue eyes looked at something so far away I’d never see it. “Yeah. He always pushed me to do it, so it felt right to dedicate it to him. Don’t worry, though. I named one of my specialty desserts after Mom so she didn’t feel left out,” she added with a cheeky grin.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” I suppressed the urge to take her hand.
“I miss them still,” she told me, “but I make sure to keep things around that remind me of them. Then they never feel so far away.” In one swift movement, she was standing and pulling out her phone and a piece of paper. “But enough of my sob story. I need to get after this list Jules gave me.”
Ava and I spent the next half hour wandering around the house taking photos and random measurements that Jules wanted double-checked. The list was incredibly thorough and more detail-oriented than I’d expected. It mainly focused on the entryway and the rooms directly connected to it, but Jules had also requested a few details from the upstairs bedrooms. As we measured the square footage of the third bedroom, my eyes landed on a small door hidden in the corner of the hall just outside.
In my hustle to get the house ready, I had completely forgotten about the secret passageway. It was easy to miss, especially if you weren’t coming to this bedroom specifically, with the roof slanting to block the view of the door from most angles and a wall taking care of the rest of them.
“There’s something I forgot to tell you about the house.”
I watched as Ava spun toward me, the measuring tape crinkling loudly.
“Is it a problem?”
“More like an adventure.”
Her brows lifted. “You have my attention.”
I moved toward the little door, turning back before I opened it. “One question: is dust a big problem for you? Because I don’t think this part’s been cleaned.” If it had, Charlie was going to be getting a bonus from me, because I forgot to mention it at all on our walkthrough.
“It’s not a deal-breaker.” Her eyes lit up, flicking between my face and the door in front of us. “Come on, I’m dying here. Open it.”
It took a bit of a jiggle to get the white beadboard to open the way it should. A little shove here, a little shouldering there, I managed to trip the opening mechanism. Even without a handle, it swung creakily toward us.
I went first so that Ava didn’t end up with a face full of cobwebs, each step up the bare-bones staircase felt more and more like a trip into Narnia, walking through a portal to a completely different place and time. I hadn’t been up here since the day before Grandma died. And, in spite of it being one of my go-to play forts as a kid, I hadn’t thought of it since then, either.
The musty smell that followed us through the narrow hall dissipated when we reached the fort, followed by an unfamiliar ache in my chest as I took in a scene straight out of my childhood, utterly untouched by time.
Grandpa’s replica WWI canvas army tent stood fully assembled in the center of the wall to the right, opposite the rectangular stained glass window that sat in the topmost peak of the house. Board games and books filled a pair of three-foot tall white bookshelves. In front of the tent, a pile of sticks was propped up to look like a campfire, cookware scattered across the floor nearby.
My first instinct was to shut down and refuse to give space to the overwhelming feelings creeping through me. I didn’t need to get lost in the past any more than I needed to get lost in a forest. I was just fine right here.
But then Ava brushed past me, gasping when she reached the doorway and took in the room.
“This is so cool,” she whispered, almost reverently. “I bet you loved this as a kid. Hell, I’d love this as an adult.”
I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just watched as she meandered to the shelves that overflowed with the games that had kept Liam and I busy for hours. Delicate fingers brushed over them, as though touching them somehow helped her understand the room.
“Which one was your favorite?” Ava turned, looking at me expectantly.
Normally, I would have turned around the moment I opened the door instead of driving further down memory lane. But this was the most progress I’d made toward anything other than an adversarial relationship with Ava. While I was under no illusions that she’d date me, it would be great to count her among my friends.
So instead of shutting all of this down, I walked over to join her and grabbed the Connect Four game. “This one.”
Snatching it from my hands with a look of pure mischief, she scurried into the tent and started setting it up. I sat across from her, a wave of nostalgia crashing over me as I recalled a hundred times that I’d done exactly the same with Liam. I couldn’t stop staring at the pots and pans beside our “campfire.”
“What game was that?” Her soft question broke me away from the memory.
I turned to find her waiting patiently, the game ready to go. She nodded in the direction I’d been staring.
“We were going to go ‘fishing’ and cook our dinner at camp.”
“That sounds like a wonderful game,” she smiled. “I always wished that I’d had a sibling to play with. You and Liam are so lucky.”
In that moment, it hit me. She didn’t have any siblings. I’d never really given that serious thought before now, but it meant that her parents had been her whole world. And that when she lost them, she’d been truly alone.
“You’re right,” I agreed, swallowing a lump in my throat. “We are lucky.”
“Are you okay?” She scooted a little closer. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Reaching for the stack of black game pieces, I said something I never thought I’d admit, let alone aloud to a near stranger.
“It hurts more than I thought it would to be back in this house after so many years. I’m still not used to it.”
A sad smile tugged at one corner of her full lips. “I always see that as a good thing.”
“Really?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my tone.
“Yeah,” she nodded, grabbing the red pieces. “That means it meant something to you.”
“How do you live in the same house?” I asked her. “Doesn’t it just make you sad all the time?”
“Everything made me sad for a while,” she began, dropping the first piece into the board. “But now I feel worse when there are no reminders of the happiest times of my life. When I surround myself with it, it means that everywhere I look is a reminder of something that brought me joy. I choose to hold onto that feeling, the memory of being happy, instead of the sadness of it being gone.”
While I appreciated the wisdom of that sentiment, something about the way she said it made me pause after playing my piece. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, though, so instead I lightened the mood as we played.
I learned that her favorite band was The Eagles, but she’d never quite kicked the boy bands of the nineties. I may still know all the lyrics to “Bye Bye Bye,” but that didn’t mean I was about to spare her some good-natured teasing about that one.
I guessed that her favorite color was pink, but she insisted it was yellow. Agree to disagree, there. I’ve seen her bakery. I learned that even though she lives on the lake, she doesn’t particularly like to swim, and she’s been too scared to try taking her parents’ old pontoon out alone. She’d always had her dad help her.
By the time I’d whooped her in three rounds of Connect Four, I realized that I didn’t really know the girl I’d been crushing on in high school. But I really liked getting to know her now.
We packed up the game and I offered her my hand to help her up. When I pulled, she flew forward faster than I expected, nearly knocking into me. My hands grabbed her waist to steady her as a reflex, but the way they lingered when her eyes fell to my lips was anything but accidental.
Her face was inches from mine. She smelled like strawberries and vanilla, the scent and her closeness the only things I knew.
When her full lips parted, I wondered what it would be like to taste them.