4. Grant
GRANT
Tate’s rubbing sunscreen into her shoulders like it’s a job he takes pride in, and I’ve been at the kitchen window long enough that the ribs on the grill have started to char.
Saturday afternoon, the deck gone hot and gold the way it does out here around four, everyone loose on beer and a morning of good picks — Jax face-down on a lounger with a towel over his eyes, Brooks reading something on his phone with the stillness of a man pretending not to listen to the conversation happening ten feet away.
Tate’s thumbs work lazy circles at the base of Mia’s neck, easy, professional in the way big men sometimes are about small tasks, and Mia’s laughing at something, head tipped forward, dark hair pushed over one shoulder to give him room.
Every part of this is normal. Friends, sunscreen, a beach house in August. Except for the part where I want to walk out there and put my hand on the back of his neck and remind him whose house this is, whose name is stitched into the jersey folded on her bed upstairs, whose hand her hand pressed down on this morning at that table in front of everyone.
I haven’t said a word about any of it out loud. Standing here watching another man’s hands on her skin, I understand how much longer I have left before I do.
The tongs bend in my grip. Actually bend. I look down at them like they betrayed me.
“You going to break those,” Brooks says, appearing at my shoulder with a beer he hasn’t opened, “or are you going to go out there?”
“I’m cooking.”
“You’re not cooking. You’re doing something with a metal object that resembles cooking.” He opens his beer, eyes already on the deck instead of me. “I’ve known you since college, Grant. I’ve never seen you like this.”
“Careful.”
“I’m not being careful. I’m telling you what I see, because you’re my friend and somebody needs to before Tate does something you can’t unsee.” He takes a drink. “Go out there.”
“And say what.”
“I don’t know, Grant. You’re the one who’s been decisive about everything except this for as long as I’ve known you.
” He finally looks at me, steady behind the glasses, no judgment in it that I can find.
“You didn’t invite three of your oldest friends and your stepdaughter to the same house by accident.
Whatever you’re telling yourself about how this weekend happened, I’d stop believing it if I were you. ”
I don’t have an answer for that either. Brooks doesn’t wait for one — claps me once on the shoulder, the closest thing to encouragement the man’s capable of, and goes back to his chair like he didn’t say the truest thing anyone’s said to me all week.
I set the tongs down.
I don’t rush. I’ve never rushed anything in my life — not a build, not a deal, not this — and I’m not about to start walking across my own deck like a man who’s lost the thread. I cross it steady, unhurried, and Tate sees me coming before Mia does and his hands slow, then stop.
Brooks watches from the kitchen window behind me, silent, and I don’t wait for him to say anything else. Some decisions don’t need a second opinion once you’ve made them.
“Mia.” Two words. That’s all it takes. “Inside.”
She looks up. Whatever she reads on my face, it’s enough. She stands without a word, without a question, sunscreen-shiny and barefoot, and Tate’s hands drop to his sides, and he doesn’t say anything either. He knows. Everyone on this deck knows.
I walk her back through the sliding door, down the hall toward the master, and she doesn’t ask where we’re going because she already knows that too.
The hallway’s narrow. Same trade-off as the kitchen — water view over square footage, a decision I made without picturing this. She stops when her back hits the wall, and I crowd the space between us until there isn’t any left, one hand braced flat against the wood beside her head.
“You know what you’re doing,” I say.
She doesn’t blink, doesn’t shrink back against the wall the way I half expect her to. If anything she leans into the space I’ve closed, meeting the challenge instead of flinching from it. “Do you?”
I’ve spent months answering that question in my head every night and never liking any of the answers. I stop trying to answer it now.
I kiss her.
Not gentle. My hand finds her hair, her back arches off the wall into me, and her mouth opens under mine like she’s been waiting to find out what this felt like and refusing to admit it.
My thigh finds the space between hers. She makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my chest more than I hear with my ears.
Somewhere behind me, muffled through the wall, the game commentary drones on — someone’s still watching football twenty feet away while I have both hands on my stepdaughter for the first time in my life and don’t have it in me to care who hears.
Her fingers find the front of my shirt, twist into it, pull me closer instead of pushing me away, and that’s the moment I stop thinking about anything at all except the fact that she’s not stopping this.
She pulls back first, just far enough to breathe, forehead against my jaw, and for a second I think she’s going to say we should stop. Instead her hand slides up into my hair and drags me back down.
“Grant.” My name. Nothing else. Like she’s been practicing what it would sound like — not casual, not a stepdad’s name called across a kitchen, something entirely new, something that hits my ribs like a verdict.
I pull back far enough to look at her. Flushed. Breathing hard. Pupils blown wide, sunscreen and salt and the smell of chlorine still on her skin, and she doesn’t look away from me and she doesn’t look sorry.
She’s twenty-one. She was my stepdaughter — past tense now, the divorce final, no blood between us and never was. And I’m done pretending either fact is going to make me stop wanting to put my mouth back on hers right now.
“Don’t go upstairs tonight,” I tell her.
She nods. Doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t need to.
I let her go — one step back, hands at my sides, giving her the room to change her mind if she wants it.
For a second she doesn’t move at all. Just stands there against the wall, breathing hard, looking at me like she’s arriving at the same conclusion it’s taken me all these months to reach, only faster.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” she says. Quiet. Certain. Like she read the doubt on my face before I knew it was there. “In case that’s what you’re waiting to see.”
That undoes something in me faster than the kiss did.
I’ve spent a lifetime being the one who’s already three steps ahead — of a build, a bid, a room full of men who think they’ve read me and haven’t.
She got there first this time, read the doubt on my face before I’d finished having it, and named it out loud without so much as a flinch.
The solid ground I’ve stood on my whole adult life shifts a half-inch under my feet, and I let it.
I don’t trust myself to say anything back, so I don’t.
I nod, once, and step further out of her way.
She straightens off the wall, looks at me one more second like she’s memorizing the moment too, and walks back toward the pool deck like nothing happened, except her hand shakes a little on the door handle, and I notice, and it stays with me as the single most satisfying thing I’ve seen all weekend.
Dinner’s loud, plates passed hand to hand around a table too small for five people and too full of food to care.
Ribs, beer, Jax narrating an old highlight reel like it happened yesterday.
Mia sits across from me, eyes on her plate more than on me, and the two times she does glance up I feel it like a hand on my chest.
Tate doesn’t bring up the deck. Neither does anyone else. But the table’s quieter around the edges than it was this morning — a different kind of quiet, the kind that means everyone’s recalibrating something they can’t say out loud yet.
Brooks catches my eye once, over the rim of his glass, and doesn’t say a word.
Doesn’t need to. He already told me to go out there.
Watching me now, jaw tight, barely eating, he looks less like a man surprised by the outcome and more like a man confirming a prediction he’s satisfied to have gotten right.
Jax, for once, reads the room correctly and doesn’t push.
He keeps the highlight reel going, keeps the noise level up, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a blown coverage from three seasons ago I realize he’s doing it on purpose — giving the table something to look at that isn’t me and isn’t Mia and isn’t the space closing and opening between our chairs every time one of us reaches for the same bowl.
I’m grateful for it in a way I don’t say out loud. All that history between us, and Jax still knows when to talk and when the talking is a mercy.
Around ten, Mia stands, stretches, says goodnight to the table in general. Doesn’t look at me when she says it. Heads for the stairs first — habit, a week of sleeping in the guest room upstairs — and stops with one hand on the railing like she’s remembered something.
She doesn’t go up.
She turns down the hall toward the master instead, toward my room, and doesn’t look back to see if I noticed. She doesn’t have to. I noticed everything.
I give it twenty minutes.
Long enough that nobody at this table can pretend not to know what that wait means, and not one second longer than that, because I’m finished proving I can wait.
I sit through the rest of the highlight reel without hearing a word of it.
Jax refills my glass without asking and doesn’t say anything when I don’t drink it.
Brooks checks his watch twice, which from Brooks is practically an announcement.
Tate’s the only one who seems genuinely absorbed in the television, and I wonder, not for the first time tonight, whether that’s generosity or just Tate being Tate — a man who processes complicated things by finding something simple to focus on instead.
At the nineteen-minute mark I stand, say something about checking the tide charts for tomorrow, and nobody calls me on the lie.
Jax raises his glass an inch off the table, a silent toast to nothing in particular, and I ignore it on my way out.
At twenty, I’m standing outside my own bedroom door with my hand on the knob, feeling more like a man about to walk into a decision than a man about to walk into a room.
I’ve built houses from the foundation up.
I’ve closed deals worth more than most people make in a decade, walked into boardrooms that would send other men home sweating.
None of it required the kind of nerve this door does tonight.
The master bedroom door isn’t locked.