Chapter 9 #3
“I thought about my future after we talked,” I said.
“I had never done much actual planning for it because I hadn’t really believed I would need to.
My life seemed predetermined, maybe not in the way I would have liked, but it was settled.
Last Christmas, I found out how bad the financial situation was.
That was when I felt the first threads unraveling.
” That was also when I’d started scheming about how to get money, and I’d come up with all kinds of ideas.
“I tried to get a second job but I couldn’t make that work, not with how much I was needed at Walter’s and I didn’t want to drop out of school.
I tried to make my brother and sister go get jobs so that they could help, but all Morgan did was close her eyes and pretend I wasn’t there and Max just pitched business concepts that were worse and worse.
” I’d hit on the wild dream of making someone fall in love with me and rescue us, because I hadn’t been able to figure out how I was going to do that myself.
Now I explained it to Shane. “I was looking for a rescue, trying to make one happen, but we didn’t really need that.
We only needed to let it all go. Poof, it’s gone, and no one cares,” I said.
Obviously, no one cared about me. They hadn’t managed to come to my college graduation and if they happened to notice that my bedroom was suddenly empty, they would probably only shrug and then close the door again.
“I don’t know why I wasted so much time,” I told him. “I don’t know why I didn’t see things the way they are.”
“What do you mean?” he asked me. “How are things?”
“I thought that my family would be together forever,” I answered.
“None of us really like each other—actually, I’m pretty sure that my dad hates me and probably my sister and brother do, too.
My mom has been disappointed that I wasn’t doing a better job of keeping everything going.
I knew all those things but I thought that at least we were connected. We had ties and bonds.”
“Hold on,” he said, and got up. When he returned, he set a box of tissues on the cushion next to me and he offered a T-shirt in his other hand. “Just in case.”
I used a tissue first. “I wish my family was like yours.”
“We have our problems. Everybody does,” he said.
If they did, they seemed minor. “You love each other, though,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, we do.”
“Can I stay here for the night?” I asked. I sounded pitiful but I didn’t care very much, not at the moment.
“Sure, of course. I have to go to the airport early tomorrow morning.”
“I can drive you so that you don’t have to park your truck there and pay for it!”
“The Woodsmen pay for my parking. But yes, that would be nice,” he quickly added.
“I wouldn’t mind that at all. I’ve gotten more used to being alone over the past few years, but it still feels strange.
Before, I had sisters, my parents, teammates, roommates, all kinds of people around. Now it’s just me.”
It was just him in a world that was getting harder to see through his beautiful blue eyes.
“I’ve never lived on my own. I won’t have a problem doing that when I move out, though.
You said that at one point, you thought I could live here in the second bedroom.
To help out with costs,” I reminded him.
“I did say it,” he agreed and then repeated, “I wouldn’t mind that at all.”
Good. “This has been such a weird day,” I said. “So much emotion.”
“Do you need the T-shirt?”
I did. “I’ll also do the laundry. I really like having clean sheets.”
“You know, my roommate in my freshman year of college didn’t know you were supposed to put on new ones.
He saw me changing mine and asked what in the heck I was doing.
He also hung his clothes on the end of his bed for a while and then just wore them again, like airing them out was the same thing as washing.
He was used to a maid,” Shane explained.
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to be one here. ”
“No, I won’t be a maid but I won’t live like your former housemates did, either. I don’t want to be afraid of what I’ll see when I turn on the lights and I also don’t want to worry about fight clubs in the living room.”
“I’m terrible at them,” he told me. “I can take a hit pretty well but I telegraph my punches and all I do is throw haymakers.”
“Have you been in a lot of fights?”
“Not if I could avoid them. I guess that’s why my skill has never improved,” he mused. “You don’t have to worry about wandering into a brawl in here.”
“And you would worry less, too,” I pointed out.
“I would try to make things easier for you, like with the driving, and whatever else you might need. If you wanted to walk somewhere at night, for example.” And I hadn’t ever said anything about it, but when I’d been at the gym with him, I’d noticed a few problems. Since he couldn’t see as well to the sides, due to the decrease in his peripheral vision, he hadn’t noticed a weight rack and had bumped it hard with his hip.
He hadn’t seen a woman waiting to work in and do her own set, not until I’d pointed her out and he’d turned his head.
There were little things that I could help with.
But he was frowning. “I don’t need a caretaker,” he told me. “I don’t need someone to watch me like that.”
“I wouldn’t be watching, but I would be here in case you wanted someone’s assistance, like I might if I couldn’t reach a very high shelf.”
“You’re pretty tall. Not six feet like you tell people, but tall enough.”
“Maybe I would need you to lift something extra heavy,” I suggested.
“You’re getting a lot stronger, too.”
“Well, maybe I just like having someone to talk to,” I told him, exasperated. “I lived in that house with four other family members and it was just the same as being alone. Maybe I don’t want to be alone all the time even when I’m with people.”
“That sounds reasonable to me. Did you bring your stuff?”
I had, which made me seem presumptuous.
“I’m bad at fighting, but carrying boxes is something I do very well,” Shane said. He proved it, too, by taking all of mine in one trip. “You don’t have very much,” he noted.
“No, I don’t. I left all the furniture since it doesn’t belong to me.”
“What did your mom say about you moving out? It seemed like she depended on you a lot,” he said.
“I didn’t tell her. She might realize that I’m not there, but she won’t mind since she doesn’t need me to work at the restaurant. Morgan will see that my closet is empty when she tries to borrow my clothes.” She was doing that a lot more, now that she was leaving the house so much with my mom.
“They’ll miss you.”
He was thinking about his own family and how they felt about him, but it was a false equivalency.
I had heard his side of the conversations when he talked to his mom, dad, and siblings, and they really got along.
They made private jokes, like how he had told his sister to watch out for birds before hanging up with her.
Then he’d explained how she had an irrational fear of anything flying, and would scream and run.
I couldn’t name anything that my sister was scared of or anything she really liked, either.
I doubted that she would have been able to do that for me.
I looked at him, thinking how nice it would be to know someone so well…and now I could! He could be my best friend and part of my future, and I could be a part of his, too. We would be friends forever and I would show up for him, just like he’d shown up for me today at my college graduation.
“There’s one problem,” he said as he put down my boxes in the little bedroom.
“I promise that I won’t care if you leave the seat up. Max and my dad always did that and I never said a word.”
“No, I mean that there’s no bed in here,” he told me. “We need to figure out where you’ll sleep. Also, there’s no bar in the closet for you to hang your clothes. We have to put one in.”
We spent the rest of the day doing homey stuff together, which took a lot of time. It was enough that I felt compelled to tell him that he didn’t really need to do everything with me.
“I can build this dresser,” I said. “You can go do what you want.”
“This is what I want,” he answered, picking up a hammer. “I like hanging out with you.”
That was lucky, since I liked it so much, too. I was really excited that I had come to stay—at least until I got a job and figured out the rest of my life. Those thoughts made my stomach drop so I focused on turning a screw into the particleboard. I could do this. I could do all of it.
I hoped.