September, 2019
“Hi!” Mom said happily, kissing Gage on the cheek and pulling him into the house. “And now, this is your girlfriend, right?” she asked, turning expectantly towards Cady, already holding out her arms for a huge hug.
Cady plastered on what Gage was sure was supposed to be a cheerful grin, but instead looked more like a painful grimace as she stepped towards his mom, dutifully accepting the incoming hug. She seemed to understand that she was going to get hugged, whether or not she wanted to be. Watching the awkward-as-hell exchange, Gage was torn before laughing and worrying to death. His mother could be a little overwhelming even to the most extroverted people, and that definitely didn’t describe Cady. But if Cady was going to get intimidated by his mother, just wait until Grandma showed—
“There you are, Gage,” Grandma said primly, stepping up behind Mom as Cady quickly pulled back from his mom and turned towards this new threat. Seeing the austere woman in front of her, she seemed to drain of all color, quickly matching the pale beige of the door jam. If she lost any more color in her cheeks, she was liable to pass out. “And this is…?”
“Mom, Grandma, this is Cady Walcott. Cady, this is my mother, Donelle Dyer, and my grandmother, Nana Dyer. My grandma and grandpa are the ones who owned the bakery before me.”
Cady put her hand out to formally shake Donelle’s hand but his mother pulled Cady in for a second big bear hug instead, even more enthusiastic than the first one had been. “I’m so glad to meet you! I’d just about given up on Gage bringing anyone home to meet the family.”
“Gage has a lot of life left ahead of him,” Nana said stiffly. “Plenty of time to bring girls home.” She put her hand out to shake Cady’s, the differences between her and her daughter-in-law stark and raw.
Scrambling for something – anything – to say, Gage was saved by his younger sister. “I’m so glad you came!” Emma said, crowding up behind their grandmother. “I told my big lunk of a brother that you were too good for him and that he ought to count his lucky stars that you keep saying yes to dates but still, I’m glad you continue to take pity on him, even if you’re just doing it because of me.”
“Are you trying to say that Cady is dating me so she can spend more time around you?” Gage asked incredulously.
“If the shoe fits,” Emma said in an overly sweet voice. “C’mon, Sugar’s in here,” she told Cady as she began dragging Cady out of the overly crowded entryway. “I told her to bring Hamlet to keep Cream Puffs company.”
“Hamlet?” he heard Cady ask before the door to the study closed behind them.
“Thanks for letting me drop Cream Puffs off beforehand, Mom,” Gage said, turning back to his mother, avoiding the reproachful gaze of his grandmother. Creamsy had ended up settling into his house quickly and they’d decided that it would be best for all if she just stayed with Gage full-time. “Trying to juggle the puppy and Cady in my truck…I need to get a dog carrier. Somehow, we didn’t think of that while we were picking up supplies in Franklin after the arts festival back in June.”
“No problem, dear,” Mom said. He could tell she wanted to nag him about cutting his hair – her fingers had even reached out to touch it before dropping down to her side – but in a spate of self control he didn’t know she possessed, she managed to keep her thoughts about his hair to herself. After looking at her husband – Gage’s dad – for twenty years in the Marine Corps, she tended to think that anything longer than a buzz cut was simply out of control. “Hey, you want to go tell Chris that it’s time to eat? Dinner’s on the table. I think he’s down in the basement.”
Of course he was down in the basement, and probably playing video games to boot. Despite having graduated from high school back in May, he was still doing almost nothing of value with his life.
Hell, at Chris’ age, Gage had been in charge of dinner three times a week, helping out as his mother worked late night shifts down at Kmart to make ends meet on military pay – not always an easy thing – and taking care of his younger siblings to boot.
He doubted if Chris even knew how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.
Biting back his thoughts on his parents’ parenting choices when it came to the baby of the family, Gage moved past his mother and grandmother and thundered down the stairs to find Chris lazing on the couch, controller in hand, blazing his way through Call of Duty. “Ah, shit,” Gage said, feigning worry. “You’re about to have your ass kicked when you go around this corner.”
“What do you mean?” Chris mumbled, not even looking up from the TV to greet his older brother. “There’s no one around this corner—”
Gage pushed the power button on the game console, plunging the giant TV into blackness.
“Yup, dead,” Gage said in a very cheerful voice, over the curses his brother was hurling at his head. “Oh, dinner’s ready, by the way. And my girlfriend, Cady, is here. Try not to be a troll.”
“You shithead!” Chris was yelling. “I can’t believe—”
“Better hurry up,” Gage said mildly, talking over his teenage brother without a smidgen of guilt. “Everyone’s waiting.” He took the stairs two at a time, listening to the insults grow quieter as he left his brother behind. He used to be like a second dad to Chris – with a 12-year gap between them, he’d helped bottle feed and change diapers and keep Chris away from the electrical outlets for years. Chris had been the gap-toothed, adorable baby of the family who everyone loved, and then…
One day he woke up with hormones coursing through his veins and had been a prick ever since. His parents had doubled down on the niceness factor, hoping to sway Chris back into humanity through kindness, but Gage saw over the intervening years that coddling had only made the problem worse.
If only he could convince his parents to let him be Chris’ boss for a spell. It’d make a damn world of difference, in his humble opinion. Surely couldn’t make him any worse than he was right now, anyway.
“Is everything okay?” Cady asked, sticking her head out of the dining room doorway, her mahogany curls swirling and bouncing around her angelic face as she looked worriedly past Gage and down into the basement. “Someone sounds really angry.”
“It’s just Chris,” Gage said reassuringly. “He lost the level he was playing on his video game. He’ll be fine.” He cupped his hand under Cady’s elbow and steered her back into the dining room. His mom had added another leaf to the table, stretching the boundaries of the dining room to its limits and forcing Gage and Cady to sidle around the table, shuffling and knocking into the backs of chairs as they went. “Where’s Jaxson, Rose, and the boys at?” he asked Sugar, who was already crammed up against Emma, as they went. Not that they had any room for them at the table if they had shown up but it only seemed polite to ask.
“Jaxson’s ex has the boys this weekend, and Jaxson said he wanted to stay home and get some repair work done around the house. With a five-month-old underfoot, I don’t know how much he expects to get done, but I guess we’ll see.” Sugar clearly looked amused at the idea of getting anything productive done with a baby in tow, and Gage didn’t blame her. As adorable as Rose was, she tended to be a mess maker at this age, not a mess cleaner.
Much like Cream Puffs, actually. That day that she’d found a box of Kleenex…
Cady and Gage finally squeezed into their chairs – Cady able to maneuver in the tight space a lot easier than Gage was, yet another benefit of being so tiny – and after his father said a quick grace, they dug into the food, passing it around, laughing and teasing each other as the dinner progressed. Gage was impressed to see Cady holding her own, answering his grandmother’s questions about the Smoothie Queen evenly; not visibly intimidated by his grandmother’s stern expression. Grandpa wasn’t saying much, but that was to be expected – he wasn’t much for talking. Chris was sitting sullenly in his chair, picking at his food, clearly pissed at Gage, shooting him death looks whenever he thought their mom wasn’t looking.
“Jaxson says you’re doing great things at the fire department,” Sugar said loudly, directing the comment in the general direction of Chris but clearly intending the entire family to hear her. “You and Angus have been showing up to all of the training meetings and learning a lot. At least, that’s what Jaxson has been telling me. Are you thinking about becoming a firefighter now that you’ve graduated from high school?”
Chris’d just graduated at the end of May, and had spent the summer “contemplating his options.” As far as Gage could tell, that’d meant Chris was spending his time debating between playing Call of Duty or Battlefield One. Was Chris going to be 42 and still living in their parents’ basement?
God, he hoped not.
“Maybe,” Chris said, straightening up a bit in his seat and looking interested for the first time in the meal’s conversation. “He thinks I’m doing good?”
“He does,” Sugar said firmly. “Says you’re a natural.”
Chris grinned proudly at the wife of the town’s fire chief, stunning Gage into silence.
Chris, smiling? Since when did Chris smile? He threw pity parties for himself and acted like the whole world was out to get him. He had that typical teenager angst in spades.
But when he smiled, he was…he was almost handsome.
Gage felt like something in his brain just broke. Surely this wasn’t happening. Chris didn’t know how to be anything but a surly, snarling teenager.
He looked at Cady to see if she was catching this, if she was seeing the same thing he was, but she just sent him a cheerful smile of her own and then went back to listening to Chris, who’d started talking happily about the National Junior Firefighter training program, pitching in questions about pay and training as she listened, and he realized that she didn’t know. She didn’t know that Chris had had a personality transplant right there at the dining room table. She didn’t know that this wasn’t what Chris acted like.
Ever.
He looked down the table at Emma instead and caught her bemused smile as she stared at their younger brother. Gage knew her; knew she was wondering in that moment if this was all some sort of elaborate prank that someone had paid Chris to participate in, and what the final punchline would be.
Before the punchline could reveal itself, though, talk turned to the old mill in town – the whole reason Chris and his best friend Angus were involved in the junior firefighter program to begin with. A little over eighteen months previously, they’d been smoking outside of the mill before school one morning and a discarded cigarette butt had accidentally set a pile of greasy rags on fire. Angus had caught most of the flack from the debacle but Gage was sure Chris was just as much to blame. He was happy that both of them had ended up in the volunteer firefighter program. Chris deserved to be a part of the punishment as much as Angus did. It had been just like Chris to avoid the brunt of the blame.
“Angus and I have been helping out on Saturday mornings at the farmer’s market,” Chris said, jerking Gage back to the present. Chris? Just helping out? Since when?
“How much are you getting paid?” Gage asked bluntly, refusing to let Chris get credit for “helping out” when it was actually a job. Gage didn’t “help out” at the Muffin Man – he worked there.
Big difference.
“Now, Gage—” began Mom.
“Jaxson says he’s been working hard,” Sugar put in. Gage wanted to glare at his employee and tell her to keep her nose out of this but he knew Emma would get pissy if he did, so he bit down on his tongue. Hard.
“We got paid a few times—” Chris retorted, and Gage snorted his derision – he knew Chris would only do something if paid, “—but most of the time, we’ve just been volunteering. After what happened…before…it just seemed…” The teenager trailed off, shrugging, staring down at the dining room table like its woodgrain contained all of the secrets of the universe.
Gage sat back, stunned for a second time that meal. Chris knew how to smile, and he had a conscience and could feel guilty about almost destroying a local landmark?
The conversation ebbed and flowed around Gage as he stared at his younger brother, lost in thought. They were still discussing something about the previously burned mill and the farmer’s market that now happened there every Saturday, but Gage heard very little of it.
After the bakery had started turning a consistent profit, about two years ago or so, Gage had bought a house just a couple of streets behind the bakery, thinking he could then walk to work when the weather was nice. Living on his own, he’d missed a lot of the family drama and had been the happier for it – not seeing Chris disrespect his parents at every meal was best for all involved, honestly.
But had he also missed Chris growing up, even if it was just a little bit?
Chris caught Gage staring at him and sent him a, “What are you staring at?” defiant look in return. Gage cooly arched one eyebrow and then deliberately turned to listen to Emma talk about an especially awful client at the architecture firm.
Obviously, Chris may’ve grown up, but not that much.
“…a bell tower. On top of a bank! I asked the guy point-blank if he was going to ring the bells every time someone was late on their house payment, and my boss kicked me so hard in the ankle underneath the conference table, I had a bruise for a week. But seriously! Bells on top of a bank. Next, he’s gonna want a moat filled with alligators to surround it, to protect the bank from the bank robbers or something.” Emma shook her head in disgust as everyone laughed. “People be weird…” she mumbled loudly under her breath. “And rich people are the worst, because no one will tell them no. My boss keeps telling me that I can’t tell clients that an idea is stupid, but if I don’t, who will?”
Gage hid his grin behind his hand. One thing was for sure – you never had to guess how Emma felt about something or someone. She was liable to tell you, whether she probably ought to or not.
“How did you end up in Long Valley?” Grandma asked Cady bluntly, over the remaining chuckles. They all died off instantly, everyone’s gaze swiveling to Cady. Her eyes got wide, and Gage knew that she’d been enjoying not being in the spotlight, and was probably wanting to crawl under the table any second now. “For a Boise girl,” Grandma continued crisply in her most intimidating no-nonsense voice, “Sawyer doesn’t offer much. What made you think you ought to move up here? And how do you like snow?”
“Grandma,” Gage said defensively, “Cady doesn’t need to explain every little decision – Long Valley is beautiful. Of course she’d want to live here—”
“It’s okay,” Cady said, putting her hand on Gage’s arm, sparks of pleasure shooting up his arm at the feel of her soft hand on him. He instantly shut up. “I was roommates with a girl from Sawyer while we were both at BSU,” Cady continued, looking his grandmother straight in the eye as she spoke. “Hannah Lambert. Teacher over at the elementary school. Anyway, we came up here a couple of times and went hiking together. Just fell in love with the area. I hadn’t been here for quite a while but I came up just after the new year and went hiking up in the Goldfork Mountains; found the empty storefront next to the Muffin Man on the way back to Boise. I didn’t have anything tying me to Boise at that point, so…” She shrugged. “I bought the store and moved.”
“You went hiking up in the mountains in January?” Emma asked, awe in her voice. “I guess you do like snow, then.”
Cady laughed lightly, turning to Emma with another light shrug. “A lot of people really hate it but I love it. I struggle with the short days more than I do the cold and the snow. I think I have a touch of S.A.D. but I manage okay.”
“Sad?” Chris asked. “You mean, you cry a lot?”
“Seasonal Affective Disorder – S.A.D.,” Cady corrected him. “It means your body doesn’t like winter months when the daylight hours are short. You’re affected by the lack of sunlight, in other words.”
“We live in a deep valley,” Dad said, speaking for the first time since he’d said grace over dinner. “We have even less daylight here than y’all have in Boise. When the sun sets behind the Goldforks to the west, we have hours of twilight before it actually gets dark.”
“Winter is coming,” Cady acknowledged, “so I’m just going to watch closely and see how it affects me. If it gets really bad, I’ll order in a special light.”
At the table of blank faces all staring at her, Cady clarified, “There are special lights made specifically for people with S.A.D. They put off light that’s in the right spectrum. Helps provide enough real light – instead of artificial light – to fool your body into still functioning, even during the winter. They’re pretty expensive but much better than hibernating every winter.”
Even Grandma looked impressed by this information, which was really saying something.
As the conversation drifted again, Gage put his hand on Cady’s thigh and squeezed, telling her without words how proud he was of her. She smiled shyly up at him, and he felt his blood heat up.
It’d been a whole summer now of hand holding that’d slowly morphed into kisses, but never anything more than that. Keeping his hands to himself had been agony, but today’s meeting with his family was testing his self-control to the limits. He wouldn’t have guessed that a family meal could be sexy as hell, but seeing Cady impress the people in his life who truly mattered to him; the people whose opinion he cared about…
Yeah, it’d made him horny.
Or, he was just in a constant state of horniness, to the point that watching paint dry would do the same thing.
He wished he could pull her discreetly down to his old bedroom and show her just how proud he was of her, but there was little chance of that. Dinner was finally ending and Cady was helping clear off the table, chatting with Emma and Sugar as she went, while Dad, Grandpa, Chris, and Gage went into the living room. It was such a bullshit male patriarchy thing – the women did the dishes while the men went and sat on their asses – but Gage was silently thankful that Cady wasn’t protesting, at least openly, about it.
Traditions were hard to kill off, and Grandpa Dyer was certainly of that generation where men just didn’t do dishes. Even when he and Grandma had owned the bakery, Gage had never once saw his grandfather wash a dish or a pan or even a whisk.
Gage knew the upcoming conversation would be dull, if it even happened at all – neither his grandfather, father, or brother tended to talk much – so he decided to make the excuse that he needed to take Cream Puffs for a walk so she could have a potty break. Dad waved him off, already settling into his easy chair to read a golfing magazine, so Gage slipped down the hall to the study where they’d kept the dogs locked up during dinner and hooked a leash onto Creamy’s collar.
Hamlet, thrilled at the idea of getting to go for a walk, danced around, his giant tail whapping and thunking against every surface in the crowded room, his deep excited bark painfully loud in the enclosed space. Moments later, Sugar showed up at the door. “Hamlet, quit it,” she scolded him and with what could only be described as a pout painted on his face, the Great Dane settled down with a low whine, crossing his paws over his nose dolefully as he watched Creamy get ready to leave.
“That is one picked on and abused dog,” Gage said to Sugar, laughing. “I’ve never seen such sad eyes in all my life.”
“He’s the master of guilt,” Sugar admitted, rolling her eyes. “Emma and I will take him here in a minute. He’ll live. He just gets so damn excited every time he sees a leash in someone’s hands. Are you going to take Cady with you?”
“I hadn’t planned on it. I was just going to hurry out for a quick stroll around the block – keep Cream Puffs here from peeing on Mom’s carpet. Do you think I can sneak Cady away from the kitchen?”
“It’s super crowded in there. Your mom’s kitchen isn’t a bad size, but it isn’t meant for that many people. Not to mention that I think your grandmother has come up with more questions to grill Cady on. You might want to save her.”
“Shit,” Gage muttered under his breath. “Okay, thanks. See you at work tomorrow?”
Sugar nodded as he wound his way out of the room, careful to keep Hamlet in the study as he closed the door behind him and Creamy. “Let’s stop by the kitchen real quick,” he told the puppy that was busy straining at the leash, trying to smell and lick every surface she could reach. “You can stop licking the end table leg now,” he told her dryly. “Really, it’s not necessary to taste everything you can reach, you know.”
Cream Puffs was busy burrowing her way into a decorative basket of blankets and shawls, though, and obviously didn’t think Gage’s advice was worth worrying about as she emerged from the basket with his mother’s prize cashmere shawl clamped tightly in her mouth, tail going a million miles an hour, a look of pure pride on her tiny face.
“Shit!” he yelped, dropping to his knees and trying to slowly pry the tiny puppy teeth off the shawl without hurting the fabric in the process. “Mom will kill you if she sees you chewing this thing up,” he told the dog seriously, finally managing to extract the shawl without destroying it. Thank God. He lifted the small animal out of the basket and snuggled her against his chest, figuring there was only so much damage she could cause while wrapped up in his arms.
“It’s a damn good thing you’re so cute,” he told her as he worked his way towards the kitchen. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t last a day. Hey, Mom,” he said, poking his head into the kitchen, “mind if I steal my girlfriend away and we go for a walk?”
His mother’s eyes lit up at the word “girlfriend” and he knew that in that moment, she would’ve said yes to any request at all. She’d badgered him for so long to bring home “a nice girl,” he wasn’t sure if she’d know what to do with herself now that he’d introduced Cady to the family.
Hmmm…Probably badger him about popping the question, actually. And then she’d be badgering him about when the wedding date would be. And then it’d become the question of when would she “finally” be able to get her hands on some grandchildren.
His mother was impossible, honestly.
“Of course, of course,” Mom said brightly, shooing Cady towards the door, snatching the half-washed frying pan out of Cady’s startled hands. “Us old married women don’t need help anyway. Emma, come back here!”
Emma, who’d been oh-so-casually heading out of the kitchen alongside Cady, turned back to their mom, a guilty look on her face. “You said the married women didn’t need help,” she protested even as she began scooping up leftovers and tossing them into a Rubbermaid container. “I’m not married.”
“And you also don’t have a boyfriend here,” Mom retorted. “Nice try.”
Gage snagged Cady’s still-wet hands and pulled her towards the front door, not daring to put Cream Puffs down until they got outside. Once the puppy got her short legs underneath her, she took off like a rocket, chasing a leaf that was lazily drifting down from the sky. Cady had been right – it was starting to cool down and the leaves were changing. Soon, it’d be white as far as the eye could see.
“Sorry about that,” Gage said, waving his hand back towards his parents’ house as they set off down the sidewalk, tugging Creamy back onto the sidewalk every few steps as the overly excited pup tried to tear off in a new direction to chase something equally as fun and amazing as the leaf; rolly pollies, a grasshopper, and a moth all being chased down by the ferocious predator. Gage rolled his eyes at the dog’s antics and then grinned down at Cady, snagging her hand in his and squeezing it. “My family can get sort of…overwhelming at times. They don’t mean to be.”
Except Grandma, and I’m not touching that bucket of worms with a ten-foot pole—
“Why doesn’t your grandmother like me?” Cady asked as a few more leaves twirled down from the maples lining the street. “I swear I didn’t do anything to her, but…”
She drew in a breath and continued on before Gage could say anything. Could think of what to say.
“And don’t tell me that it’s all in my imagination. She hasn’t liked me from the word ‘go.’ She was shooting me frosty looks at Emma and Sugar’s birthday party back in April! Your grandfather seems all right – at least, he hasn’t said much – but your grandmother…makes me think that there’s something to multiple lives after all, because I sure as hell didn’t do anything to your grandmother in this life. I must’ve pissed her off in the last one.”
Gage let out a belly laugh at that, surprising Creamy into stopping her attack of the leaf that had had the temerity of swirling and twirling through the air to land on Cream Puffs’ back. Staring up at Gage for a moment, Cream Puffs debated whether this noise had anything to do with the possibility of getting a treat or pettings or a belly rub, and finally, deciding that it did not, went back to tearing the deserving leaf into shreds.
Gage stopped walking, pulling Cady to a stop next to him, giving the time necessary to Creamy to decimate her opponent that was somehow staying defiantly in one piece despite the tiny puppy’s best ferocious attempts.
“So, I think I mentioned that my dad was in the Marine Corps for twenty years, right?” Deciding that if he was going to stand still, he might as well be holding Cady by more than just the hand, he pulled her into his arms, feeling her melt against him, bending over to bury his nose in her curls and breathe in deep. Her hair somehow smelled just like what he imagined sunshine would smell like, if such a thing could have a smell.
She nodded yes against his chest, and so he continued, forcing his lust-addled brain to string words together.
“My grandmother was pissed about it, to put it lightly. My father has two siblings – my uncle Dean and my aunt Patricia – but Dad was the oldest and he was supposed to be the one to take over the Dyer Bakery. He’d spent his whole childhood in that bakery, though, and had just wanted the hell out of Long Valley. He saw the Marines as his one-way ticket out of town. He was leaving, and he was never coming back. My mom was his high school sweetheart but a year behind him in school, so he waited around until she graduated and then they left Sawyer together on graduation night.”
Creamy started pulling at her leash and Gage looked over and realized that she’d given up on her plans to destroy the leaf and instead had started back down the sidewalk without them.
“You’re killing me, smalls,” he told the puppy but still, he pulled back, letting his arms fall away from their natural position around Cady’s tiny waist and instead snagged her left hand in his. If he couldn’t hold her against his body, he would at least hold her hand. They began to wander up the street again, stopping every couple of feet or so, so Cream Puffs could attack another one of her enemies.
“She’s going to be ready for a nice long nap when we get back to your parents’ house,” Cady said with a laugh as they watched Cream Puffs dive into a small pile of leaves, biting and snapping as she rolled in circles.
“Good thing we have such a fierce protector on our hands,” Gage agreed dryly. “She’s going to be sawing logs here in a minute. Anyway, my grandma…she didn’t want to admit that maybe her obsession with the bakery and the long days every kid had spent in it had just perhaps caused problems, and instead decided that my father joined the Marines because my mother pushed him to do it. Her reasoning went something like, ‘He didn’t join until Donelle graduated from high school, therefore it is Donelle’s fault he joined.’”
Cady opened her mouth to object – to point out the obvious flaws in that argument – and Gage held up a hand to stop her.
“You don’t have to tell me she had it wrong. I saw it with my own eyes. My father just doesn’t like to bake. It completely skipped his generation – him, Uncle Dean, and Aunt Patricia all detest being in the kitchen. You can’t pay them enough to spend their days slaving over a hot stove. But me? I’ve loved it since I was old enough to walk. I was the kid who made my own treats to bring to the bake sale at school. I was the kid who made my own cookies for my own after-school snack. There are some pictures of me when I was like three or four in frilly aprons of my mom’s that she’d tied onto me…I tripped over the hem one time and split open my lip.” He stopped and lifted Cady’s finger to the tiny hairline scar that ran along the top of his lip. He kissed the tip of her finger and then forced himself to start walking down the street again before he made an utter fool of himself. “My mom made me kid-sized aprons to use after that. I was into GI Joes as a kid – after all, my dad was in the Marines, right? So I had to love military stuff too, obviously – and so I had probably the only GI Joe apron in existence. I wore that thing until it fell apart.”
They followed the curve of a cul-de-sac that led them, inexorably, back in the direction of his parents’ house. Cream Puffs, perhaps realizing that her walk was heading towards finished territory, finally decided to get on with it and squatted in a bright green clump of grass. They stopped and waited patiently for her to finish, Gage more than happy to let the dog take all the time in the world that she needed.
“Although I now really, really want to see pictures of you in frilly aprons with flour all over your face,” Cady said with a teasing grin, “what does any of this have to do with your grandmother not liking me? I’m pretty sure I wasn’t there for any of this.”
“Yeah, but you’re a girl in case you didn’t notice,” Gage said wryly, “and the last time the apple of Grandma’s eye fell in love with a girl, she lost him to the military and she didn’t get to see much of him or of us grandkids for the next twenty years. It didn’t matter that we were coming back here for most major holidays and every summer; we still didn’t live here. And maybe my dad moved back here after he got out of the service, but that doesn’t make up for the time lost. At least, not in my grandmother’s eyes.”
“So, she’s afraid that you’ll fall madly in love with me and that’ll cause you to join the military?” Cady asked, wide-eyed.
Gage let out a frustrated sigh and tugged his hand away from Cady’s to run it through his hair. “I know it sounds a little nuts. And to be fair to my grandmother, I don’t think she worries about me joining the military. I’ve bought the bakery. I’ve been running it for four years now. I’m 30 years old, which is a bit long in the tooth to be a new recruit. So, it’s not that.”
Creamy began kicking her back legs as hard as she could, intent on covering up the tiny brown pile on the grass, but Gage pulled a poo bag out of his pocket instead and scooped the shit up inside of it, twisting and tying it closed.
“Ready to go back?” he asked the tiny pup, but she was already at the end of her leash, straining to smell a nearby fire hydrant. They moved a little closer so Creamy could smell it and pee all over it without choking herself to death in the process.
“She’s just…” Gage started again, and then sighed. How did he make his grandmother appear to be the loving, caring woman that he knew her to be, while also admitting that she had faults just like everyone else?
“It made her really possessive, you know? She isn’t this way about Emma or Chris – just me. She’ll eventually get over it; she and my mom get along great now, even though they didn’t speak to each other for years. My grandma said some pretty nasty things about my mom to my father, and he didn’t come visit them for the longest time. Wouldn’t bring us grandkids home either. Finally, for the first and probably last time in her life, my grandmother apologized. Things started to get better after that. We began coming back to Long Valley for short visits when I was in elementary school; they became longer as I got older. My mother and grandmother became thick as thieves, and my mother started bringing us back to Idaho even when my dad didn’t have any leave he could take. When they were fresh out of high school, they’d sworn that they’d never come back to this one-horse town, and now look at ‘em – living here. On purpose.” He chuckled a little at the irony, and then looked up to realize how close they were getting to his parents’ house.
He slowed his pace to a crawl, not willing to give up the singular company of Cady just yet.
“With my grandmother, just…be polite, don’t rise to her baiting, and wait her out. She’s at least proven that she will eventually ‘get over herself’ and stop treating people like crap if given enough time. She simply takes a while. My mom, on the other hand, will love a person straight out of the gate. She’s never met a stranger in her life. Until you prove to her that you’re a jackass and not worth a bucket of warm spit, she’ll be as friendly and kind as can be. But if you ever piss her off…boy howdy. Watch out. My grandmother will ice you out if she’s angry; my mom will scream you out. Just duck and cover because things are probably going to go flying through the air when my mom’s mad. Thankfully, she doesn’t lose her temper now like she used to. In fact, I wish she’d lose her temper a little more with Chris, honestly. I don’t miss the screaming fests, but she lets him walk all over her and Dad. He gets away with shit I could never have even dreamt about.”
Cady tugged him to a stop at the head of the sidewalk that meandered up to the front door, lined with the orange and red and gold of mums and marigolds.
“Now that I’ve met this no good, terrible younger brother of yours, I have to say, I don’t know why you hate him so much,” Cady said bluntly. “He didn’t seem half bad at dinner. Volunteering at the fire department? Helping out at the farmer’s market? Not hardly the actions of a teenage delinquent.”
Gage opened up his mouth to tell Cady exactly why it was that Chris “volunteered” at the fire department and farmer’s market when Emma opened the front door. “There you two lovebirds are!” she called out. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back. Cady, if I’m going to go over things at the store with you, we better get on it. I need to get going for Denver soon.”
“Where’s Sugar?” Cady asked.
“Went home. Said Jaxson was probably in desperate need of help by now with Rose. He still doesn’t like changing diapers.”
“I don’t think that’s an activity that becomes more pleasurable as time goes by,” Gage muttered under his breath, and then, “Do you want me to come with you guys?” He was holding tight to the leash for Cream Puffs as she did her best to lunge towards Emma, clearly dead set on loving his sister – ie, lick her from head to toe. Realizing he was still holding onto the used baggie, he opened the trash can on the curb, ready for pickup the next morning, and tossed it in. Speaking of poop…
“I can stay out of it or I can come,” he told Cady, keeping his voice studiously neutral. He didn’t want to butt in where he wasn’t wanted. “I’m good either way.”
“I’d love to have you there,” Cady said firmly. “After all, how are you supposed to know what your jobs are if you’re not there to see what Emma thinks needs to be done?”
“Oh, my jobs, eh?” he said with a teasing laugh, and then leaned down and whispered, “And how, exactly, do you plan on paying me for all of my hard work?” He was a puff of breath away from her, wanting nothing more than to make her want him as much as he wanted her, and was rewarded with a sigh and a flick of a pink tongue across pink lips.
Pink, he decided just then, was his very favorite color.
“Well, I can’t,” she whispered breathlessly, “pay…uhhh…much, but…” She trailed off, apparently incapable of speech, her eyes drifting closed as she moved up on tiptoe, that delicious pink mouth finally coming into contact with his and his heart stopped and soared and the world flashed by and nothing existed, nothing at all except for Cady, her tiny, warm body snuggled up against him, every delicious curve on her pressing—
It was the wolf whistle that finally got through to him.
He pulled back, bleary-eyed, staring around him, trying to remember who he was and where he was and—
“If you two are done mauling each other in public,” Emma said loudly, as if talking to a very deaf and very slow old man, “we really do need to get going. I have to leave for Denver in 45 minutes if I’m going to make it home at a decent hour.”
“Emma, I do hate you,” Gage said mildly, cupping Cady under the elbow and steering her towards the passenger side of his truck. “When you finally find a guy worth a hill of beans and bring him home, I plan on making your life miserable. Just so you know.”
“As any good older brother would,” Emma said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Any less, and I would think you’d taken ill and would need to go see a doctor. See you over there?” she tossed over her shoulder, heading for her car. “Oh, whoops,” she muttered, doubling back and sticking her head through the front door. “Bye, Mom! See you guys later!” She pulled the door shut and headed for her car again. “See you over there?” she asked rhetorically, and pulled her driver’s side door shut.
Cady had settled into the passenger seat, her eyes still glassy with lust as she snuggled Cream Puffs onto her lap. Her swollen lips, her mussed hair…Gage had never seen such a delicious sight in all his life. Out of all of the tasty desserts that he’d made, he’d never wanted to eat anything as much as he wanted to nibble up one side of Cady and down the other in that moment.
Cursing his sister under his breath, he slammed the passenger side door closed and stalked around to the driver’s side. A part of him wanted to just drive Cady to his house, his sister be damned – a very large, very hard part of him – but he wouldn’t put it past his sister to drive to his house and knock on his door if he didn’t follow her to the shop.
A living hell. I’m going to make her life a living hell when she finds a boyfriend. Please, dear God, let it be soon. I’d really, really like to exact revenge already.
Tomorrow would work fine for me, God. In case you were curious.