3. Mia
MIA
Saturday morning smells like bacon and somebody’s aggressive cologne, and I come downstairs in my bikini with the jersey hanging open over it, unbuttoned, because it’s the closest thing to a robe I own out here.
The energy’s different today. Looser. Somebody swapped the bourbon for Bloody Marys somewhere around round six last night and nobody’s bothered to swap it back, and the whole house smells like celery salt and last night’s grill smoke drifting in through the cracked slider.
Tate’s shirtless at the stove, flipping something with more confidence than the recipe probably deserves.
Brooks has his laptop open at the table already, glasses on, a mug of black coffee steaming next to the mouse — dressed like he’s about to walk into a boardroom instead of a beach house, and somehow it works on him.
“There she is.” Tate points the spatula at me like a weapon, grease popping behind him on the stove. “Sleep okay, sweetheart?”
“Slept great.” I didn’t. I replayed Grant’s hand on my back until the sky went gray outside the guest room window, the way he looked at me in the kitchen like I was something he was trying and failing to talk himself out of. “You’re burning the bacon.”
“I’m seasoning the bacon.” “That’s smoke, Tate.”
He swears and turns back to the pan, and I steal his spot at the counter, and Brooks doesn’t look up but says, “Good morning,” in that low, even way he has, like every word costs something and he’s decided I’m worth spending them on.
I pour myself coffee and lean against the counter, watching the room wake up in stages — Jax still half-asleep and grumbling about something on his phone, Tate loud and functional the second his eyes open, Brooks already three cups deep and sharper than everyone else combined.
Four completely different men, and somehow this house makes room for all of it without anyone stepping on anyone else’s morning.
“You’re up early,” I tell him.
“I’m always up early. Markets open at nine-thirty regardless of what time this house went to sleep.
” He finally looks up, over the rim of his glasses, taking me in — the jersey, the bikini strap, the hair I didn’t bother fixing.
Nothing lecherous in it. Thorough, the way he’d read a contract before signing it. “You look tired.”
“I slept fine.”
“You didn’t answer the question I didn’t ask.” He goes back to his screen before I can decide whether that was an accusation or an invitation to keep talking. I decide it was both, and I don’t take either one.
We resume the draft over breakfast. Jax is louder than yesterday, looser, riding the thin edge of still-a-little-drunk-from-last-night.
Grant’s at the head of the table, coffee instead of a Bloody Mary, watching the board with the same focus he gives everything — total, unblinking, a little unnerving if you’re not used to it.
I am used to it. I grew up watching him look at problems like that.
I’m trying not to think about what it’s like when he looks at me like that instead.
Round nine gets heated. Jax wants a receiver Brooks has already flagged as a bust; Brooks says so, flatly, without looking up, sliding a printed stat sheet across the table like evidence in a trial only he takes seriously.
Jax throws a piece of bacon at him in outrage.
It bounces off Brooks’s glasses. Brooks removes his glasses, cleans them with his shirt hem, puts them back on, and drafts the receiver Jax wanted two picks later out of pure spite.
The table erupts. I’m laughing so hard I almost don’t notice Jax’s grin sliding sideways, aiming somewhere new.
“Okay,” he says, leaning back, arms crossed. “Since we’re all feeling generous — side bet. Loser of this round buys dinner tonight. Whole table.”
“Boring,” Tate says from the stove.
“Fine.” Jax’s eyes cut to me, then to Grant, then back, quick enough to miss, except I don’t, because I’ve spent a week reading this table like a draft board of my own. “Or we could make it interesting.”
Nobody says anything. The room’s air pressure changes — I feel it before I understand why, the way you feel weather before you see clouds.
Tate’s spatula stops moving over the pan.
Brooks’s typing pauses for exactly one beat before resuming, which from Brooks is the equivalent of anyone else standing up and leaving the room.
Grant’s jaw does the thing it did in the kitchen.
Small. Controlled. The same crack that’s been showing since the day I answered his door in his jersey.
“Jax,” Grant says. One word. Low.
“I’m just saying.” Jax holds his hands up, all innocence, all performance. “We could vote on the punishment. Democratically.”
“Or,” I say, before Grant can shut it down and before I can think better of it, “you could all admit you’re scared to bet against me, because I’ve out-drafted every single one of you twice already.”
That gets a laugh, breaks the pressure, moves the conversation somewhere safer. Jax rolls his eyes and calls me a menace and the draft resumes and I think that’s the end of it.
Then Grant’s hand finds my thigh under the table.
It settles there — flat, warm, heavy, resting on bare skin two inches above my knee where the jersey’s ridden up, and his eyes stay locked on the laptop screen the whole time, like his hand isn’t currently rewriting every thought I was having and he needs the rest of the table to believe that too.
I could move it. I could laugh it off, make a joke, put safe distance between us like I know how to.
I put my hand over his instead. Press down. Look at the screen like nothing is happening while four square inches of his palm burn a brand into my leg that I’m fairly sure everyone at this table can see from space.
Nobody says anything. Jax’s eyes flick to the table, to Grant’s arm, to my face, and he doesn’t say a word — which is somehow louder than anything he could’ve said out loud.
Even Tate, whose filter has never once slowed him down, keeps his eyes on the bacon like the pan suddenly requires his full concentration.
The draft resumes a minute later, voices a little too bright, everyone performing normal a little too hard, and underneath the table Grant’s hand doesn’t move for the rest of the round.
By noon we’ve moved to the pool. I strip down to the bikini on the deck, self-conscious for exactly the four seconds it takes Tate to cannonball past me and drag half the pool up with him, and after that there’s no room left for self-consciousness, only chlorine and sun and Tate surfacing in front of me with a grin the size of the Gulf.
“Get in here,” he says, and pulls me off the edge before I can answer, and I shriek and go under and come up laughing with his hands steady on my waist, keeping me afloat, easy and casual in a way that makes it feel like nothing even though it doesn’t feel like nothing at all.
He’s warm everywhere the sun’s touched him, cold everywhere it hasn’t, and his grip doesn’t waver even when I splash him in retaliation and nearly slip out of his hands entirely.
Tate laughs like he’s been waiting all week for someone worth playing with.
Grant’s at the grill. Thirty feet away. Not looking, which is how I know he’s looking. His knuckles are white around the tongs.
I duck under again, mostly to hide the smile I can’t get rid of, and when I come back up Tate’s already moved on to some story about his gym’s opening week, hands doing most of the talking, describing a treadmill delivery gone wrong with enough enthusiasm that I forget, for a second, that I’m technically hiding from anything at all.
Brooks is in the lounge chair with a book he’s not reading, watching over the top of it with the patient attention of a man who’s decided he has all the time in the world and intends to spend every minute of it where he wants.
Jax cannonballs in a minute later, more splash than technique, and comes up close enough that his shoulder brushes mine on the way to the surface. “You’re a menace at that draft table,” he says, grinning, water running off his jaw. “I like it. Fair warning — I don’t lose gracefully.”
“Neither do I.”
“I noticed.” His eyes drop briefly to where the water’s sitting at my collarbone, and then back up, unbothered about getting caught. “Careful what you get good at around here, sweetheart. This table rewards it.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I dunk him instead, and he comes up laughing, and for a few minutes it’s noise and sun and four grown men competing for my attention in ways that would probably terrify me anywhere else.
Here, in this water, with Grant thirty feet away pretending not to watch, it doesn’t feel like anything to be afraid of.
It feels like something I chose to walk into with my eyes open.
Later — sun-warm, chlorine-heavy, my hair dripping down my back — I lie on the deck with my eyes closed and let myself think the thing I’ve been not thinking for a week.
He’s not my father. He was never my father.
He married my mom when I was young and he was good to me and none of that — none of it — has anything to do with why my skin goes electric when he looks at me like he did in the kitchen last night.
That’s not a daughter thing. That’s not a stepdad thing.
That’s something with its own name, a name I haven’t let myself say yet, and it’s getting harder to pretend I don’t know what it is.
I think about the divorce, cold and settled now, the year after when I’d call him from my dorm room to hear someone ask how my day actually went.
I think about how easy it was to say yes when he offered the beach house, how I didn’t examine that yes too closely at the time because examining it would’ve meant admitting what I already suspected — that I wasn’t choosing convenience.
I was choosing him, the same way I’m choosing to lie here right now instead of going inside and putting real clothes on and pretending this weekend is about football.
I open my eyes. Grant’s still at the grill, jaw tight, eyes on the pool, on Tate’s hands on my waist, on the four inches of skin the bikini doesn’t cover.
His hand said what his mouth won’t. Mine pressing down said it back.
Now everybody at this table knows it. The draft board’s still up on the laptop screens, rounds left to play, a whole house full of people pretending the biggest thing happening this weekend is who gets the next tight end.
Nobody’s fooled. I catch Brooks watching the two of us across the deck with the same patient calculation he gives a portfolio he’s decided is worth the risk, and something about that look settles low in my stomach and stays there for the rest of the afternoon.