14. Grant
GRANT
The house takes a while to settle after Sandra’s car disappears down the road — not quite silence, more a kind of collective exhale, four men and one woman recalibrating from crisis mode back into something resembling a normal Tuesday afternoon.
Nobody rushes it. The guys leave an hour later, and none of them make it into a bigger production than it needs to be.
Jax goes first, bag over his shoulder, and stops at the door long enough to grip my hand and pull me into the kind of half-hug men give each other when they mean more than they’ll say out loud. “Next year. Same place?”
“Same place.”
“Good.” He glances past me toward the kitchen, where Mia’s saying goodbye to Tate. “Take care of her. I mean that. Not the way I usually mean things.”
“I know you do.”
He hesitates at the threshold, keys already in hand, something unusually serious sitting behind the grin he can’t fully commit to right now.
“I’ve watched you date exactly four women since I’ve known you, Grant, and none of them made you look like this.
Whatever this is, don’t let anything talk you out of it.
Not her mother, not the world, not your own second-guessing at three in the morning. ”
“I don’t plan to.”
“Yeah.” He claps my shoulder, hard, affectionate in the way only Jax manages to be while also sounding like he’s issuing a threat to anyone who’d disagree. “I know you don’t. That’s why I’m not worried.”
He heads for his car, tossing one last comment over his shoulder about draft rankings that makes no sense out of context, and I watch him go with something that feels a lot like gratitude for a friendship I’ve never once had to explain myself inside of.
Brooks is next, characteristically brief, characteristically exact. “Take care of her,” he says too, like the two of them coordinated it without either admitting to it. He doesn’t need to elaborate. I don’t need him to.
“I will.”
“I mean it about the portfolio too. Send me her transfer paperwork when the campus move happens. I want to make sure her tuition account is set up right — no reason to overpay on fees when there are better options.” Even in a moment like this, Brooks can’t help but be Brooks.
It’s one of the things I love most about him.
“I’ll have her call you.”
“I know.” He shakes my hand once, firm, and something passes between us that doesn’t require more words than that — two decades of friendship compressed into a handshake and two sentences.
Tate doesn’t do handshakes. He picks Mia clean off the ground in a hug that makes her laugh for the first time since her mother’s car pulled out of the driveway, sets her back down, and says, “Call if you need anything. I mean it. Three in the morning, doesn’t matter.”
“I will.”
“And hey.” He turns to me, unusually earnest for a man whose default setting is loud and easy. “What you did today — standing your ground with her mom, not backing down — that took guts. I don’t know if I could’ve done it that clean.”
“You’d have done exactly that. Probably louder.”
He laughs at that, big and genuine, some of the tension finally leaving his shoulders.
“Yeah, probably.” He claps my shoulder on his way past, hard enough to actually register, and then they’re loading into two separate cars and pulling out of the driveway one after the other, waving, and the house goes quiet in a way it hasn’t been since before Friday afternoon.
I stand in the doorway a minute after the sound of engines fades, listening to nothing but wind and gulls and the quiet of a house exhaling after a full weekend of holding its breath.
Mia comes up beside me, slipping her hand into mine, and we watch the empty driveway together like it might still have something to tell us.
“Feels different,” she says. “Quiet like this.” “Good different or bad different?”
“Good.” She leans her head against my shoulder. “Like the loud part is over and the part that actually matters is only starting.”
The great room feels different empty — bigger, quieter, the gulf light coming through the sliders uninterrupted for the first time all weekend.
Mia’s sitting on the kitchen counter where the draft table used to command the room.
The laptops are gone. The cheat sheets are recycled.
The bourbon’s capped and put away. Just the two of us now, the gulf outside the window, the wind pushing against the glass in long, patient gusts.
The refrigerator hums somewhere behind me, the only sound in a house that’s spent three days never once being this quiet. I cross the kitchen and stand between her legs, my hands finding her face.
“I love you.” No lead-up, no speech — I’ve never been a man who does speeches, and this isn’t the moment to start.
“Not the way I did when you were family. Not the stepdad version. The real one. The one that made me bring the draft here instead of the bar in Tampa. The one that made me keep a spare key ready for a beach house you’d already been living in for a week before I ever showed up.
” I pause, watching her face, watching the words land somewhere real. “You already knew.”
She smiles, unsurprised. “I knew before you did.”
She’s probably right. She usually is — she read the situation faster than I let myself, called it before I had the nerve to name it, and I’ve spent this whole weekend catching up to conclusions she reached somewhere around the second night.
I kiss her, not urgent this time, slow in the way that comes after a fight is finally over and you’re still standing, still holding what mattered through it.
“I meant what I said to your mother,” I tell her, forehead against hers. “You’re not confused. You never were.”
“I know.” Her hand finds the back of my neck. “But it’s good to hear you say it anyway.”
“There’s something else.” I pull back enough to look at her properly. “I’ve been thinking about it since the drive out here, honestly. Longer than that, if I’m being fully honest with myself.”
“That sounds serious for a man who doesn’t do speeches.”
“It’s not a speech. It’s a fact.” I take a breath, steadier than I feel.
“I don’t want this to be a summer thing, or a college-break thing, or something we quietly stop talking about once real life resumes.
I want you here. Not visiting. Living. I want your name on the mailbox next to mine and your books on my shelves and your car in that driveway every single day, not just on weekends when the timing works out. ”
She stares at me for a long moment, something bright and startled moving across her face. “Grant, we’ve been together for five days.”
“I’ve loved you for longer than five days. I didn’t let myself say it.” I mean every word of it, and I need her to hear that I do. “I’m not asking you to decide anything today. I’m telling you what I want, so you’re not wondering.”
“Okay.” Her voice is quieter now, something soft settling into it. “I want that too. I didn’t think you’d say it first.”
“I told you. I don’t like leaving things unclear.”
We end up on the beach at sunset — our spot now, though it’s only been ours for a handful of days, the kind of ownership that doesn’t need years to feel permanent.
Sand still warm from the day’s heat between our toes. Her back against my chest, my arms around her, the gulf gone flat and gold the way it does this time of evening, indifferent and beautiful in the way big water always is.
“What happens now?” she asks.
“Whatever you want to happen.” I say it the same way I said it that first night, except this time it isn’t an open question with an uncertain answer underneath it. “I know what I want. I’ve known since the second you walked in wearing my jersey.”
“Tell me.”
“You. Here. However that looks — the house, the campus commute if you want to finish school close by, whatever version of a life you want to build. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m done pretending there’s a version of this where I let you go.”
“What if I want to change my major? What if senior year sends me somewhere else entirely — an internship, something I can’t predict yet?”
“Then we figure out the logistics. I didn’t say I need you chained to this house. I said I need you in my life, in whatever shape that takes.” I tuck a strand of wind-loose hair behind her ear. “I’ve built companies out of harder problems than a commute.”
“That’s an awfully practical way to talk about love.”
“I’m a practical man who happens to be in love. The two aren’t in conflict.”
She’s quiet a moment, watching the water. “My mom might never come around.”
“She might not.” I won’t lie to her about that, not tonight, not ever. “But you didn’t lose anything today that was worth keeping at the cost of losing yourself instead. That’s not a trade I’d ever ask you to make.”
“I didn’t make it for you. I made it because it was true.”
“I know.” I press a kiss to her temple. “That’s exactly why it mattered.” “How long do you think it takes? Something like this.”
“I don’t know.” I won’t lie to her, not about this, not about anything from here forward.
“People change their minds slower than they change their positions. She might need a year. She might need longer than that. But I don’t think you closed a door today.
I think you opened one she’s not ready to walk through yet. ”
“That’s a generous read.”
“It’s the honest one. Your mother isn’t a villain, Mia. She’s a woman who’s scared for her daughter and
doesn’t have the full picture yet. Scared people say cruel things. That doesn’t mean the fear underneath it isn’t real.”
“You’re defending her. After everything she said to you.”
“I’m not defending what she said. I’m explaining why she said it.
” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, watching the last of the light catch in it.
“I understand fear better than most people give me credit for. I spent eight months afraid of this — of wanting you, of what it would cost both of us if I let myself. Fear makes people say things they don’t fully mean.
I’d like to believe she’ll get there eventually. I can’t promise it.”
“I don’t need you to promise it. I need you to be here while I figure out how to live without it, if it comes to that.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The house behind us — my house, becoming our house, the place where a fantasy football draft weekend turned into the rest of both our lives without either of us planning it that way.
She leans into me. I pull her closer. Behind us, the porch light comes on automatically, the way it does every evening at this hour, and neither of us moves to go inside.
For the first time since Friday afternoon, nobody’s watching.
No friends, no phones, no mothers driving toward confrontations.
Only the two of us and the gulf and the beginning of whatever comes next, which, for once in longer than I can remember, doesn’t scare me at all.
Whatever this year brings, whatever it costs either of us, I know exactly where I’ll be standing when it arrives: right here, arms around this woman, watching the same water turn gold every evening for as long as she’ll have me.