by Sara Summers
I yawned yet again, and suddenly felt very sensitive and very vulnerable. It was late at night, and the two of us were completely alone, cuddling on the floor. The town we were in wasn’t tiny, but there weren’t any other people or houses for at least a half a mile.
It was just me and Grant, and laying there, I realized that I still didn’t know if he was planning on staying with me to keep building the museum, or going back to his old life.
“Hey, Grant?” I whispered, my tired eyes suddenly opened wide.
“Yeah?” he asked, his voice quiet and sweet.
“Are you going to stay with me? Do you want to run the museum, or do you want to go home?” I asked the question that was dying to be answered.
“I don’t know if I want to run the museum,” Grant whispered back. “and I still don’t know if I’m ready to be with you yet, but for now, I’m staying.”
His words weren’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but they were good enough to calm my worries for at least a few hours.
I hoped he would decide that the museum was the place for him, and I hoped he would fall in love with me and take me dancing and write me poems. I wanted the prince charming that romance movies had promised me, and I wanted a love story to go with him.
Before I met Grant, I hadn’t cared who the prince charming was, so long as he was charming and a prince who treated me like a princess. Since everything had started happening, however, my dream had changed.
I didn’t want some random prince to swoop in to save the day, I wanted Grant to do it. I wanted him to fall for me, I wanted him to romance me into being his woman, and I wanted him to be my happily ever after.
That was quite the realization for me.
I wanted Grant.
But did he want me? Would he want me, if I came with a museum?
I didn’t know, and frankly, that scared me. He did say that he was staying for now, and that would have to be good enough for me.
I went to sleep a little nervous, cuddled up on the nasty old carpet with the brand-new soulmate who was nothing like I’d dreamed he would be. My anxiety kicked in immediately, keeping my mind moving rather than letting me fall asleep.
It was a long night.
Chapter 13
The next day, we painted.
We painted a lot.
Literally, from sunup to sundown, we painted.
By that night, I thought my arms would fall off from rolling the roller brush so many times.
We went back to our house, and surprise, there was no food. We should’ve known that there wouldn’t be food; we hadn’t bought any. Still, it sucked to go home to an empty fridge.
But hey, at least our mattress had arrived. It came in a big vacuum-sealed bag, a great big mattress tootsie roll stuffed inside a me-sized box.
We opened the mattress in our room and left it to air up. It was one that had to expand when you opened the vacuum-sealed bag (off amazon, of course, where else could you get a vacuum-packed mattress?), so it needed a few hours to inflate.
“Let’s go to the store.” I suggested.
“Your foot hasn’t been up all day. Your sock is probably bloody again.” Grant pointed out. He seemed tired.
“It’ll survive. I’m tired of Wendy’s.” I stood up and grabbed the keys. “If you don’t come I’ll have to go alone.” I warned.
“Fine.” Grant muttered. He took the keys and we walked out to the truck, both of us dragging our feet.
We spent the next two hours at Walmart, grabbing everything I thought we’d need in a brand-new house. Between shampoo, food, pots, pans, dishes, and bedding, we spent way more money than I had in my bank account. Thank goodness the museum donors had covered our living expenses.
“Being a newlywed is hard.” I realized. “It costs a ton of money.”
“That’s why people have weddings, I guess.” Grant shrugged. He didn’t seem to want to talk, and I hoped that was only because he was starving and just wanted to get the heck out of there.
“I guess.” My words echoed his, my mind catching on the word “wedding”.
I had always wanted a wedding. There was a whole board on my Pinterest account, dedicated to the wedding that I should’ve known I’d never have. I was a shifter, after all, and we didn’t believe in marriage. We believed in soulmates, in having one true love and sticking with them through the thick and thin of things.
Believing in marriage, to shifters, meant believing in divorce, which was not even almost an option for any single one of us. Whoever your soulmate was, however you felt about them, you were stuck with them.
But that didn’t affect how I felt. I wanted a wedding.
I had always wanted a wedding.
If not a wedding, I wanted a prom, or to go dancing, or just any reason to get all dressed up and pretty. I wanted to be a princess for a day or an hour, I wanted to feel like I was beautiful and special.
Feminism (which I believed in, for the most part, I might add) said I didn’t need a date or a wedding or a pretty dress to feel beautiful and special, which was true. I didn’t need those things to feel that way. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want them.
Grant was starving, so I didn’t ask him to wait until we got home and cooked something. We grabbed Wendy’s to eat on the floor again (that was the night I realized we needed a table and about fifty other pieces of furniture), put away our groceries, and then went to bed.
The next day, everything repeated itself again.
Paint, paint, paint.
Shop, shop, shop.
Even with the food sitting at home in our fridge, we stopped at Wendy’s yet another time. If that makes us failures at adulthood, so be it. We were exhausted.
Honestly, not much happened over the next week. We painted the entire museum (it was massive, made even bigger by Jazz’s additions). It was a lot of painting, but completely worth it. The building looked a lot better when it was done.
Grant and I talked a little, but nothing else really happened between us. We didn’t kiss, we didn’t cuddle (other than at night sometimes), and we didn’t go on dates. We talked during the day sometimes, to fill the silence, but our country music did that for us plenty on its own.
We didn’t talk about our dreams or our desires or what we wanted most out of our lives. We just worked together, two separate people in the same room.
The next week, it was time to start laying tile.
Chapter 14
“How’s your foot?” Grant checked as we drove to the museum.
“It’s fine.” I shrugged. It was getting better, and didn’t bother me much anymore.
“Good.” He nodded.
Despite getting 8 hours of sleep the night before, we were both tired. We were tired of fixing up the museum and not having any free time. We were tired of painting (which we were finally done with, yay). Really, we were tired of working, day in and day out, without having any fun.
But the museum had to get fixed up, I reminded myself again and again, every day. If we didn’t fix it up, it would lose funding.
We watched a few videos to figure everything out. Once we felt like we were set to get started, we turned on our country music and went to town placing tiles.
The first half of the day flew by. My body was glad to be doing something other than painting, and at first, placing tiles was actually kind of fun. It was new and different, and I felt like I was learning something semi-useful.
After lunch, though, everything went downhill. My arms started getting tired, my legs were tired of alternating between lifting and crouching. We couldn’t stop though, because the museum wouldn’t finish itself.
Around 5 that evening, I was struggling to lift anything. I bent down to grab a new box of tiles, and as I straightened up, I lost my grip on the box.
“Whoa.” Grant grabbed me around my waist, catching both me and the box of tiles. I gawked at him, wondering how the heck he’d done it and also trying not to let the anxiety worm its way into my mind. “Are y
ou okay?” he checked.
“Yeah, fine.” I nodded.
That wasn’t completely true, though. Dropping the box hadn’t bothered me, but having Grant so close?
That had bothered me. I mean, I knew I was attracted to him, I’d just never felt so attracted to him.
Standing there, with his arms around me, I had wanted to kiss him. Like, I really, really wanted to kiss him.
But he let go, carrying the box where we needed it, walking away like he hadn’t been even almost as affected by how close we’d been.
Maybe he wasn’t affected by me at all, I didn’t know. All I knew was that the attraction between us had just kicked up a gear. Despite two weeks without anything romantic, I was somehow getting more and more interested in him.
I might’ve even said that I was starting to fall for him, if I hadn’t known that was ridiculous. I couldn’t fall for someone who didn’t romance me, could I?
That moment made me wonder if, just maybe, I could.
That evening, we finally bought a table. We just went with one from Walmart, they were nice enough for us. Grant put it together while I made dinner, and instead of turning on country music, that night I tried making conversation.
“So is there anything you’ve ever dreamed of doing?” I asked him. He was laying on the floor under the half-built table while I stirred the spaghetti sauce on the stove.
“Well,” he said, his arms above his head while he used a screwdriver to screw something into the almost-table. “I used to want to go to college.” He offered.
“That’s cool. What did you want to study?”
“Engineering.”
“Huh. That’s awesome.” I nodded, still stirring my spaghetti sauce. “Do you still want to be an engineer?”
“Yeah, I was planning on starting school in the fall, before…” he trailed off, but he didn’t have to say anything. I knew what he was talking about.
He used to want to be an engineer before I found out that he knew where I was and was going to try dating like humans. He would be going to school in just a few weeks, if only I hadn’t come along and ruined everything with my museum.
“Oh.” I said the words softly, nodding. I wasn’t sure whether to apologize or thank him or what, so I just left it at “oh.”
A few minutes later, I turned on country music to battle the guilt and anxiety that were making war against my brain.
Chapter 15
The next week was full of tile. So much tile, in fact, that I started having dreams about it.
I woke up in the middle of the night the day after we had finished tiling the museum. Sitting up in bed, I shivered. I’d just had a terrifying dream in which I’d died and gone straight to hell, only to discover that everyone in hell was forced to lay tiles all day every day.
Worst nightmare of my life.
I went into the kitchen to grab some water, since I’d been sweating at the idea of an afterlife filled with tile. Sipping it relaxed me, and I sat at the table to calm down for a minute.
I’d only been sitting down for a few minutes when my phone started ringing.
That was weird, since it was 1 AM. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen, but I answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Is this Kennedy?” A man’s voice asked.
“Yes.” I sipped at the water.
“Hi, this is Officer Pillborne from the Mount Vernon Police Department. I’m calling about a few reports we just received.”
“Okay,” I frowned.
“People driving past the old museum have been hearing loud cracking noise.” The officer told me.
“Cracking?” I raised my eyebrows.
“Yes.” He affirmed. My heart plummeted. There was only one thing in the museum that could be cracking, and it was the same thing I’d been having nightmares about.
“Eff.” I muttered.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Nothing, nothing. I’ll take care of it, officer. Thanks for calling.” I said.
“Have a good night, Miss Kennedy.”
“You too.” I closed my eyes, hanging up the phone and dropping my head to the table. “Not more tile.” I moaned. “I hate the devil.”
“What about the devil?” Grant rubbed his eyes, coming out of our room in basketball shorts and a t-shirt. I picked up my head just enough to see him, then dropped it back to the table.
“He loves tile.” I didn’t explain my nightmare, but he didn’t ask.
“Were you talking on the phone?”
“Yeah.” I spoke into the table. “Apparently, people have heard cracking noises coming from the museum.”
“Cracking? As in… Eff.” Grant cursed.
“We’re going to have to redo the tile.” I groaned into the wood that my face was resting on.
Grant punched his fist against the fridge. He didn’t leave a dent, luckily, but it looked like it had hurt.
“I’m going to bed.” He muttered, stalking back to our room.
I slept on the couch the rest of the night. No way was I sleeping with an angry man or otter, and he was both of those things.
Laying on the couch, I stared up at the ceilings and remembered my dreams, the ones Grant hadn’t bothered to ask me about. I remembered how badly I’d wanted to fall in love and have paint fights and get thrown over some hot man’s shoulder as he spun me around just to hear me laugh.
I wanted love, and what I had with Grant just didn’t feel like love.
We were together, but we weren’t. We were soulmates without any passion, basically two roommates who were dealing with each other because we didn’t have any other options.
I closed my eyes, and wondered if there was any way to change my life. I loved the museum and couldn’t wait for it to be done, but I wasn’t sure I could handle being with Grant if things stayed the same between us. Half the time, I didn’t even feel like he liked me as a person, let alone as his soulmate or his wife.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but my body wouldn’t listen. My brain wanted me to do something, to get up and act and change my situation, but my heart was on a different page. My heart told me that Grant wouldn’t change just because I did.
My heart told me that maybe, when he said he wasn’t ready to be with me, he was telling the truth.
I didn’t want to accept that there was nothing I could do, but what else was there? Giving up on Grant would mean giving up my chance to run the museum, and that’s what I wanted more than anything except love.
Part of me thought that maybe there was hope. Maybe Grant would wake up one day and realize he was madly in love with me, maybe I would do the same.
But another part of me, maybe the part of me that had to deal with anxiety every day, knew that our story wouldn’t go that way.
That part said that I’d lose Grant whether I gave up on him or not.
I rolled over and closed my eyes. Even the nightmare about laying tiles in hell was better than the nightmare that my love life was. I would’ve taken tiling over thinking about my relationship in a heartbeat.
And really, that was good, because we had to restart tiling the next day.
Chapter 16
“This isn’t happening.” I groaned, looking out at the broken tile in front of us. Even knowing beforehand that it was all going to be broken, actually seeing that our hard work had been for nothing sucked. “It’ll take an entire day just to get it all out, and at least another week to redo everything.”
“Eff.” Grant cursed. He kicked a chunk of tile across the room, and I could read the anger in his eyes. “What did we do wrong?”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head and sighed.
I reached up to itch the markings on my collarbone. I hadn’t shifted in over a week, and I was dying to go for a swim. My otter wanted to be free, I wanted to get out of the town, and Grant looked like he might lose it at any second.
“Let’s take today off.” I told him.
He looked at me
, angry and frustrated and surprised.
“I thought you were worried we won’t finish in time.” He said.
“I am.” I nodded quickly. “But we can spare one day. We haven’t done anything but work for three weeks, and we need to swim.”
“Deal.” Grant practically jumped to his feet. He was obviously dying to get out of there.
He was inside the truck and starting the engine before I even got out of the museum.
We were just two or three minutes from the ocean, and Grant drove way over the speed limit to get there.
The beach was pretty much empty (the water was freezing, no one wanted to swim) so we chucked our clothes onto the sand and shifted into otter form.
Grant took off as soon as his otter hit the water. He dove under and swam away before I could do or say anything to him. I tried not to be offended, but well, he just left me.
I enjoyed the water for an hour or so, swimming and spinning and napping and sun-bathing. It felt so good to relax that I didn’t even want to think about going back to the museum, or really, anything museum-related.
Another hour passed by, and though I wasn’t worried, I sort of missed Grant. It had been rude for him to leave me alone, but I could understand that he needed to get away for a little while.
Floating on my back, I took a long nap. The water carried me where it wanted to, and I didn’t argue one bit. It was nice to just sleep without having to worry about anything.
When I woke up, I knew that three or four hours had passed by, yet there was still no sign of Grant.
I started to worry.
Not wanting my anxiety to come back, I reminded myself that Grant was my soulmate and that he had chosen to come with me to build the museum. I hadn’t forced him, so he wouldn’t just ditch me on the beach. If he was gone, he was probably just swimming to burn off some energy.
My mind wandered back to the museum. As hard as it was to spend all day every day just fixing up the building, it was worth it. I would get to run the museum, I could show people inspiring paintings and help them learn shifter history. I had always loved history, and paintings… well, there was no doubt I loved paintings.