Twenty-Two
Piper
Four days ago, I was in a gas station bathroom wearing a dress that wasn’t mine, pressing my hands against a door and trying to remember how to breathe.
Four days ago, I was walking down an aisle that felt like a corridor with no way out.
Four days ago, I ran for my life and right into Griffin’s Camaro.
It feels like something that happened to someone else.
We’ve been drifting south, stopping whenever the road shows us something worth exploring.
We found a bookshop yesterday in a town whose name I’ve already forgotten.
Griffin lingered in the engineering section for twenty minutes while I sat on the floor in fiction and read the first forty pages of a romance novel, before he just bought it for me.
We ate tacos at a place with a resident cat that willingly accepted steak offerings without shame.
Every night, two beds. Every morning, coffee and the road.
I never thought I’d be sharing a room with another man every night, but we’ve reached a level of cohabitation that’s become dangerously easy. He makes coffee if he’s up first. He doesn’t talk until I’m ready to talk.
I’m glad it’s him. I’m choosing not to examine why.
What I am examining is the fact that Griffin Hayes is currently folding my underwear.
It’s the natural result of four days on the road with a bag holding three sets of clothes.
When the laundromat in this coastal town turned out to have only one folding table and no privacy, Griffin simply picked up my bag and started sorting.
I didn’t object because I was busy eating a bag of chips and couldn’t think of a way to stop him without making things more awkward.
But now he’s folding my underwear.
What has my life actually become?
The laundromat is called Suds & Such. It’s warm and smells like synthetic lavender.
The machines hum. Outside, the afternoon has hit that slow, golden phase.
Griffin is annoyingly efficient at this.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, wiping crumbs from my lap.
“You know you can.”
“Did you ever tell Noah about your parents? Like, properly?”
He looks up. “Where did that come from?”
I gesture at the laundry piles. “My brain wanders in laundromats. I was thinking about when we were kids. You were always at our place, but you never talked about them.”
“Honestly, I don’t remember much about them.” He folds a T-shirt and sets it down. “What brought that up?”
“You said something yesterday about your grandmother. About how it was mostly just the two of you for a long time.” I watch him. “I was wondering how much Noah knew.”
“Noah knows the shape of it,” he says. “He knows they died in a car accident. I didn’t go into detail because there’s so much I don’t remember. But it’s not his thing to push on, not mine to put on him.”
“No,” I say. “He wouldn’t push.”
“Your brother has a specific skill set. He doesn’t ask questions. He just appears when you need another person in the room.”
I smile at that. “That’s him exactly.”
Griffin picks up another item.
“How old were you?” I ask. “When you went to your grandmother’s.”
“Six.”
“Was it—” I pause. “Sorry. You don’t have to—”
“It was good,” he says anyway. “She was strict. She didn’t do sentiment, and her house had rules, but that’s exactly what I needed. I wanted walls.”
He holds up what he’s folding to examine the seam, and it is absolutely a pair of my underwear. I watch him put it on the pile with the same composure he applies to buying the gas station snacks.
“Tell me something,” he says. “You’re interrogating me, so I get one.”
Fair. “Go ahead.”
He leans back in the plastic chair, legs stretched out. “Childhood fear. Something stupid.”
I look at him. “What do you mean?”
“Not spiders or the dark. Something specific. Something embarrassing.”
I think about it for three seconds. “Escalators.”
He arches a brow at me.
“The bit where you have to get on,” I continue. “The timing. I always thought I was going to miss the step or get my foot caught and get swallowed by the machine.”
“How long did this last?”
I shrug. “Honestly? I still think about it.”
He’s trying but failing not to smile. “Escalators, Piper? Really?”
“What’s yours?” I say, pointing a finger.
“This doesn’t leave the laundromat.”
“Obviously.”
He’s quiet for a second. “Carousels.”
I open my mouth to laugh.
“Not the spinning,” he says before I can get there. “The horses. The faces on the horses. They look wrong.”
I press my lips together.
“They’re screaming,” he explains. “Look at them next time. They’re all screaming. What kind of person puts a child on a screaming animal?”
“Griffin.”
He scrubs a hand over his face. “I was six. I screamed back. My grandmother was furious.”
I can’t hold it anymore. The laugh bursts out of me. “She made you get back on it, didn’t she?”
“Twice.”
“Classic Betty.”
“Said if I let it win, I’d be running from things my whole life.” He grabs another T-shirt. “Which was a lot of emotional weight to put on a carnival ride.”
“Did it work?”
He considers. “I don’t run from carnival rides anymore.”
“Victory.”
I’m still smiling. The dryer behind us ticks down its last few minutes. Outside, the light has turned to amber.
“Noah pushed me onto a carousel when we were twenty-two,” Griffin says.
I chew slowly on a chip before asking, “What happened?”
“I got off after one rotation and told him if he said anything, I’d tell Donna about the car incident.”
“What car incident?”
His eyes widen. “An entirely different story.”
“Griffin—”
“No.”
“I’m the confessional,” I remind him.
“The confessional is closed on the car incident.”
I narrow my eyes. “Does Madison know about the car incident?”
“Why would Madison know?” Something moves across his face. “Did Noah tell Madison?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never heard of the car incident until thirty seconds ago. Tell me.”
He rubs a hand over his jaw. “Noah’s first car—”
“The Toyota?”
Griffin nods. “He decided he was finally going to be a man of mystery. He took a girl—I think her name was Tiffany—up to the old overlook behind the water tower.”
“Noah? Mr. Safety?”
“He was eighteen. Hormones are a hell of a drug.” Griffin leans in, his voice dropping an octave. “He forgot the parking brake. They were in the back seat. Things were… progressing. Until the structural integrity of the back bench gave way under the rhythm of the moment.”
I choke on a chip. “Griffin, no.”
“Piper, yes. The seat collapsed into the trunk. And because Noah’s foot hit the gear shift during the panic, he knocked the car out of park. They rolled twenty feet down the incline and wedged the front bumper directly into a massive ‘Welcome to Town’ sign.”
I am vibrating with the effort not to scream. “Did he get out?”
“He couldn’t. The seat had him pinned. He had to call me from Tiffany’s phone at two in the morning because his own was trapped under the collapsed bench. I had to drive up there with a crowbar and a flashlight.”
I put my face in my hands. “Please tell me she was at least dressed.”
“She was wearing his track jersey. He was wearing… well, defeat. I had to pry the seat off him while the local deputy stood there with a notepad, asking if he’d been operating the vehicle safely. Noah just looked at him and said, ‘Officer, I wasn’t even operating the vehicle.’”
Griffin shakes his head, the memory finally breaking his stoic expression.
“He didn’t talk to me for a month. Not because I saw him like that, but because I had one of those old disposable cameras in my truck, and I took a photo of the seat before I helped him out.”
“You still have it?”
“In a secure vault,” Griffin says, his eyes glinting. “It’s my retirement plan.”
He stops folding to glance at me. I can see the memory playing on his face. “Your parents fed me six days out of seven that year.”
I know this story. “Mom always said you were the easiest guest she ever had.”
“She made me call home every time I stayed past dinner, which was every time.” He pauses, lost in a memory. “Every time I called, my grandmother asked if I’d eaten. I said yes. She said good. That was the conversation.”
I think about younger Griffin walking two streets over every afternoon. Sitting at our kitchen table doing homework while my house exploded with its usual noise. He chose the noisy house over the quiet one. Every single day.
“You’re basically my family,” I say, and then, because it feels like it needs to be said properly: “A good version of it.”
He picks up the bag and starts putting the folded piles in.
“Same,” he says, looking at me.
The teenager is gone. The older man has finished his chapter. The machines have gone quiet.
“Escalators,” Griffin mutters after a minute.
“I was eleven. The timing is everything.”
“The timing,” he repeats, like this explains every single thing wrong with my personality.
He picks up both bags. “Gerald knows.”
I stand up. “Gerald is a penguin.”
“He’s trustworthy, though.”
“He absolutely is,” I agree.
We push out into the evening, and I think about eighteen-year-old Griffin going to help his best friend at two in the morning, six-year-old Griffin needing walls, and the man walking next to me, who folded my underwear without making it a weird thing.
Same family.
Yeah, I think we are.