“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 thatmy 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.
Chapter 10
“Thanks for meeting me.”
