by Mignon Mykel
At the Prescott house, I parked my car in the same spot I always did and walked to the garage code box, punching in the four numbers to open the door. Just like I had access to their house, they had a key to mine—not that I went out of town that often, but the few occasions I did go back home, Sydney watched over my place.
When I entered through the mudroom, I noticed the dryer already running and I couldn’t help but chuckle. Sydney was such a housewife. I didn’t know many people who were almost finished with a load of laundry by eight on a Saturday. And by the looks of the linen and some bed clothes folded on top, the dryer’s load was not her first of the day.
I walked through the mudroom and into the living area, where I could hear Brody squealing happily and Brandon talking loudly over him. I smiled as I entered the room, taking in the chaos that was the Prescott household.
Sydney would have picked the place up the night prior; there was no doubt the place had been immaculate this morning. That is, until the boys woke. And sure enough, there were books and cars strewn on the floor, large Lego blocks intermixed with magnetic tiles all over the coffee table, and one very sleep rumbled Sawyer on his stomach with Brody climbing all over him.
Good lord, that man.
I quickly took in his bedhead as he rested his cheek on his forearms, the hooded sweatshirt he wore with the sleeves pushed up, and his lounge pajama bottoms that, likely due to being a human jungle gym, dipped just slightly while his sweatshirt rose just enough, showing the tantalizing V of muscles in his lower back.
Sawyer had been fit when I met him, but he was muscle and then some these days. What I wouldn’t give to see all his muscles up close…
I sighed. Not happening, Grace.
Not wanting to get caught staring by either him or his sister, I stepped further into the room. “Good morning,” I said with a bit too much cheer in my voice.
Sawyer lifted his head, propping his chin on his forearms, and offered me a tired smile. Sydney, on the other hand, stopped her conversation with Brandon. “Hey, Grace! How are you this morning?” When Brandon tugged on her shirt, Sydney’s face morphed into stern mom and she told him, “I said no.”
I chuckled lightly to myself. Sydney was such a cute mom.
“I’m taking the kids to a playdate,” Sydney said as she stepped past her oldest and came near me. When she passed, I frowned and followed her into the mudroom where she pulled out the diaper bag. I watched her pack it up with a few pairs of super cute, boxer briefs for Brandon that were on top of the dryer, and diapers for Brody and Brie. The woman had diapers and wipes in every room in this house.
In went a new onesie for the littlest Prescott and shorts and shirts for the boys.
I kept my gaze fixed on her movements, unsure of what to do. Slowly, this change in plans had my heart accelerating and blood pumping. She did say we were doing breakfast this morning, right? What happened to that?
Just like a flip of a switch, the racing started completely, first in my head, followed by a tightness in my chest.
“That I forgot about,” she added quickly, making me realize that maybe this really hadn’t been planned. “You don’t mind keeping Sawyer company for an hour or two, do you? I totally screwed up on this, planning it back when the schedule came out and I knew Cael would be gone. We’ll be back before lunch. I’m so sorry, Grace.” She offered me a sympathetic smile. She almost pulled it off too. “It was scheduled months ago.”
They say that people who were trying to believe their own lies continuously added to their story.
Sydney was digging herself a big hole.
Still, I was unnerved by the idea of spending the day with Sawyer and just Sawyer. It was one thing for me to be with Sawyer when she was nearby. It was quite another to be completely alone with him.
Sure, yesterday we had started to ease back into the comfortableness we had once before, but Sydney was there and now she wasn’t going to be. I didn’t know if I was ready to do the one on one thing with Sawyer yet, not with my conflicting anxiety and libido.
My libido needed to cool itself. It didn’t matter how sexy I thought that man was—the bottom line was, and would always be, there was a physical distance between us and we were better off not going down that road.
Again.
“I’m sorry?” Sydney said, a wince of her own on her face.
I shook my head clear of the jumble. “It’s… It’s ok.”
Sydney stood and shouldered the simple black diaper bag, her eyes searching mine. The similarities between her and her brother were uncanny. Their looks, their ability to see straight through me…
The only difference was Sydney didn’t often call me out on whatever she saw in my face.
Sawyer always did.
“It’ll be good for you, yeah?” she added.
My lips curled crookedly on their own accord. “Sure.”
After giving me a tight hug, she turned back to the living room, calling out, “Boys!” She walked past them to where Brielle was hanging out in a swing and took her out, moving her to her car seat. I stayed standing in the entryway between the mudroom and living room, slightly at ease but still not completely there. I contemplated going home, but that wouldn’t be fair to Sawyer.
The man did look like he needed more sleep though, so I could save him the trouble and just head out after Sydney so he could be alone and maybe rest. That was part of the reason for him coming out here anyway, right? To rest? To get away?
When his back was free of Brody, Sawyer pushed to a stand, frowning. “Where you going?”
I didn’t miss the fact that Sydney avoided Sawyer’s eyes, keeping her head down as she completed her tasks and rounded up her kids, helping with shoes and sweatshirts in a hurried fashion.
“Playdate I forgot about,” she answered.
My gaze flipped to Sawyer, watching for his reaction. Would he be upset, relieved, annoyed? What would he be with this news?
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a read on him. He crossed his arms over the gray hoodie and yawned, shrugging. “Ok.”
Ok?
Ok?
So he was ok with this. Well, obviously he was ‘ok’ with this, he just said as much.
My eyes were still on him so I caught as he looked to me and raised his brows pointedly. He didn’t say a word but I could sense what he wanted me to hear.
Stop thinking so much.
“We’ll be back around lunch,” Sydney repeated to her brother what she had told me a little bit ago. “You two have fun!”
And in a flurry of activity, they were gone.
Leaving just me and Sawyer.
Sawyer
After Sydney ditched us from the breakfast she planned, I looked to Grace. When Sydney was herding her children out the door, I moved next to Grace as I issued my goodbyes. Grace was still next to me, her hands worrying in front of her as her eyes were fixed on the door my sister and her kids just went through.
Grace and I had been getting somewhere yesterday and now we were back to square one. Hell, we were back to square negative twenty-five. Sydney’s disappearing act today certainly wasn’t helping matters.
“You still up for breakfast?” I asked her, hoping she would relax, even just a fraction.
When she had walked into the house earlier, I had to fight for indifference, keeping my head down and allowing Brody to climb all over me.
Side note? It was like a massage. The kid could crawl all over me any day he wanted.
But I had to force myself not to look up at her.
She’d been on my mind all morning. Hell, she’d been on my mind all night, prior to thinking about her after the bodily fluids fiasco at three. But she absolutely consumed my thoughts after that point.
Her smile, her laugh. Her body. She and I together, back then.
The two of us as friends.
The stilted moments I’d do anything to do over or even simply erase.
The months of no contact that I wish I could have just se
nt a quick joke, a freaking meme that made me think of her—because God knew I thought about her often—anything to keep that wall from going up.
And the fact she’d had a panic attack bad enough for her to take a major step back from one of the biggest accomplishments she had taken in her effort to beat her demons. That one took up a lot of residence in my head in the early hours of the morning.
Now I watched as her body relaxed a little more and she looked to me. She still grasped her hands together in front of the oversized sweatshirt she wore, but she didn’t look as tense as she had a few moments ago. “Ok. There’s this really fun brunch spot with a live DJ and a Bloody Mary bar.”
While that sounded pretty fun, “I’ll cook.”
Her hands dropped to her sides and her eyes widened a fraction. “You’ll cook?”
I shrugged. She made it sound like guys couldn’t cook. “Well yeah. What’s your favorite?” I turned away from her and moved through the room, dodging cars and monster trucks, and toward the kitchen island. “French toast? Pancakes? Waffles?” I started opening up doors, trying to find frying pans. “Omelet?”
Bingo. Skillet.
I grabbed it, realizing it was probably the largest skillet in the history of skillets, and brought it down to the counter. Grace had moved toward me and was now sitting at one of the three bar stools on the opposite side of the island.
“What do you want?” I asked her again, plugging the device in. I went through the upper cupboards now, finding an olive oil spray to use.
“I’m still getting over the fact that you want to cook for me.” I glanced up at her from spraying the black surface and watched as a blush rose on her cheeks. She didn’t mean to add that ‘for me’ but it was true.
I wanted to cook for her.
Even if it was just breakfast.
“Grace.” I found a spatula and pointed it in her direction. “What do you want?”
With a small smile on her face, she finally answered. “French toast, please.”
“Gotcha. One order of French toast, coming right up.” Finding everything I needed, I brought all my supplies back to the counter.
“Can I help?” Grace asked from her seat on the other side.
“Want to crack eggs?”
“Let me guess. You can cook but you always manage to get a shell in there?” she teased and I found myself fully relaxing. If she was joking again, maybe this morning’s step back wasn’t as bad as I thought.
“I said no such thing,” I answered instead, pushing a bowl and the carton of eggs over toward her. “Crack six.”
I started pulling out bread from the loaf, placing it on a plate. I turned to the cabinets behind me, finding Sydney’s spices and pulled down cinnamon and vanilla extract. When I put those in front of Grace, who was finishing up her last egg, she looked from the items to me. “What are those for?”
“For French toast?” My brows drew in.
“You just dip the bread in the egg…”
I chuckled. “Oh no, sweetness. You need to fancy it up a little. Put a decent drop of vanilla in and some cinnamon. I’ll get you a fork to whisk it.”
“Who taught you to make French toast?” she asked, but still doing as I requested.
“My mother.”
“Well, ok then. Susan knows what she’s doing, I guess.”
I handed her the fork but didn’t let go when she took it from me. “Oh, my mom knows what she’s doing, so it’s ok then?”
With her smile wide, Grace tugged at the fork. “Just let me whisk the eggs, Soy.”
God, I wanted to kiss her so badly right now. She was completely open, completely relaxed, and I wanted to devour that up. Instead, I let go of the fork and went back to the fridge, trying to find bacon or sausage, some sort of breakfast meat.
My brother-in-law was a professional athlete. Surely they had some sort of morning protein in the form of meat.
I made a face when I found turkey bacon, but figured it didn’t taste too bad. “Turkey bacon?” I asked, holding it over my shoulder as I continued to rummage through the fridge.
“Sure.”
I lowered the package to my leg and, not finding anything better, closed the fridge and opened the package, pulling out four strips and placing them on the side of the now warm griddle.
“You about done over there?” I asked, lifting my chin toward her bowl.
“Yeah, but the cinnamon keeps clumping at the top.”
I reached for the bowl, pulling it toward me. “It’ll be fine. Trust me.” I winked across the island at her and after swirling the egg and vanilla spiced mixture once, dipped a piece of bread in and tossed it on the griddle, the sizzle as the wet bread hit the hot surface filling the air. I repeated the process with the remaining slices of bread and as they all cooked on one side, I started to clean up.
“I’m impressed.”
I looked over at Grace as I put the last of the fridge items away. “Why?”
“You cook and you clean up after yourself.”
“Woman, I live alone. If I didn’t cook or clean, my place would be trashed.”
She opened her mouth to say something and must have thought better of it, because she closed her mouth and smiled slightly instead.
“No, what were you going to say?” I pried.
She shrugged. “Just that not every man is like that.”
Jeremy.
She meant Jeremy.
Well fuck yes, I was better than that man. I’d never be more interested in the women around me when I had Grace in my arms. And I sure as hell would never let her walk away from me.
“Not everyone can be as awesome as me,” I offered instead, trying to keep it light when all I wanted to know was what really happened with Jeremy. They only dated for a few months, sure, but I had seen Grace. She’d been happy, as badly as that stuck in my craw. So what happened?
“What happened with what?” she asked, making me realize I spoke aloud my last thought.
It was my turn to shake my head and deny. “Nothing.”
But just like it was my turn to deny, it was her turn to pry. “No, what?”
I busied myself with flipping the turkey bacon and French toast and walked to the sink for the sponge, trying to buy time.
“Sawyer.”
Never had I been one to pussy foot around something, so why I was this, I wasn’t entirely sure. Taking the sponge and starting to clean up the counter, I looked at my hands as I asked, “What happened with Jeremy?”
When she didn’t answer right away, I looked up and saw she had shut down a little. Fuck me and my mouth.
But, surprising me, she lifted her head and answered me. “The easy answer is it wasn’t going anywhere. My feelings weren’t growing, even though we spent a lot of time together.” She shrugged a shoulder in the dismissive way that she always did. “It wasn’t mutual, but so far he’s seemed to be ok with it. I haven’t heard from him.”
I nodded, hoping that it was really all that simple.
I flipped off the griddle and removed everything from the heat, placing it on one large plate, another question weighing on my mind.
It would be a shitty move of me to say something. It would throw Sydney under the bus and I really didn’t want to do that to my sister. Grace deserved to have a close friend and I would hate if my bringing up Sydney’s statement this morning would put the same wall that was between Grace and I, between Grace and Sydney.
“I promise—it’s fine,” Grace said, leaning on the counter with her arms crossed in front of her. “We were only together a few months. Really, there’s nothing to worry about there.”
Bracing my hands on the counter backward, my fingers curing back over the edge, I looked over Grace. Did I bring it up? Did I ask?
She held my gaze, not shifting under the scrutiny. “What’s up, Sawyer?”
I went for it.
“You closed the store front because you had a panic attack.”
The Grace yesterday would have f
idgeted now, would have refused to meet my eyes, but the Grace right now? The one sitting in front of me?
She sat up straight, her chin coming out and elongating her neck. “I did.”
“It was bad.” It was a statement. I already got that much from Sydney.
“It was.”
“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath, my eyes shut tight. I knew it, but hearing it from Grace made it all the more real. I opened my eyes and looked at her across the island, wanting to move over to hold her, but not quite sure that was appropriate right this moment. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, the question having been on my mind most of the early morning hours.
This time, Grace did shift. “It was around the time I first started seeing Jeremy and I didn’t think it was right to go to you with it, when I had him.” Her voice lowered with her sentence until it was almost impossible to hear at the end.
I didn’t want her to have to go through it again, but I was a needy bastard. “Can you tell me about it?”
She regarded me. I couldn’t read what was going on in her head but maybe that was because I had nothing to go off of. I had been around her in slight panic attacks in large groups of people, but she always pushed through them. For this one to take her out… I had nothing to go on, nothing to help figure out what she was thinking.
Finally, she nodded. “Sure.”
Grace
The panic attack that proved to me that nothing I thought I had accomplished, I actually accomplished, wasn’t one that I necessarily wanted to talk about, but I could tell that it hurt Sawyer to know he knew nothing of it.
That I hadn’t opened up to him about it when I had nearly everything else.
He may think his jealousy was what started to build the wall between us, but suddenly I was realizing that maybe it was me. I had been stepping back. I had been keeping myself from him.
It was almost as if I had been trying to prove to myself that I could find what I had with Sawyer, in another man—or rather, in Jeremy.
And, well, Jeremy proved real quickly that he didn’t have the same qualities that I had appreciated so much in Sawyer. Still though, I stayed with him. I had known Sawyer for five years. I couldn’t compare the openness I knew with him, to a brand new relationship with Jeremy.