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“The shower is minus a hundred degrees.”
“Right. I came in to tell you Chase is doing something with the new pipes. He turned off the hot.”
Eight’s brother-in-law was a plumber. At this particular moment, Eight wished he’d hired someone he wasn’t related to and paid for labor as well as materials.
“That information would have been more helpfulbeforemy dick froze off.”
Yvonne smirked. “I don’t know. Looked intact to me.” With that, she ducked out and closed the door.
Eight got back to drying off and starting his morning.
It wasn’t even seven yet, and already Chase and Yvonne were here—Chase to do his plumber schtick, and Yvonne to help Marcella with the next painting project. If Marguerite weren’t on the retirement cruise they’d all chipped in to give her, she’d be in the middle of his morning, too.
Very quickly after Eight and Marcella had decided to get married in January, they’d decided neither wanted a big to-do. At Eight’s age, a big wedding seemed stupid, and Marcella couldn’t imagine herself in a wedding gown. So they’d taken a few weeks to talk out plans for this big life change, then gone to the courthouse toward the end of February, and done a private party at the Wayside Inn.
Now Eight was a married man, with in-laws. Turned out, the Lewis family was eyeball deep in each other’s life. That included him, now, too.
Marcella kept her own name, and they were working on the red tape to change Ajax’s birth certificate. He would now be Ajax Malcolm Lewis-Johnston. The hyphenate had been Ajax’s idea, and he was already using it before it was official.
While it had been a big discussion among Marcella and her mom and sister, Eight had had no opinion whatsoever on how or whether his wife and child changed their names. He hadthem, and that was all that mattered.
The thing they’d struggled most with was where to live. Eight had a house, bought and paid for. Marcella had an apartment. He’d thought the decision was obvious.
But Yvonne and Chase lived in the same complex, on the same courtyard, and the complex had a pool and tennis courts and all the other country-club shit decent complexes had. They’d lived in the same place since Ajax was a baby. Both Marcella and Ajax had balked a little about moving.
Eight did not want to live in an apartment. He’d graduated out of that life. Also, as president of the Bulls, it was better if he had some space around him, a bit more privacy.
But Marcella had said, not for the first time, that his house was a rundown eyesore, and she liked things a bit more well-maintained and modern.
The solution: they were remodeling his house.
Now that he was living in the midst of a construction zone, with Bulls, or in-laws, or paid contractors, or some combination of them all in his house eighteen fucking hours a day, Eight kind of regretted not selling and buying new.
But he liked seeing Marcella make this house hers. He didn’t even mind three-times weekly trips to Home Depot to pretend he gave a shit between fifteen swatches of blue paint that were the exact same color with different names.
His woman had lived in rentals since she was a kid, and she loved being able to paint and change what she wanted.
Eight had always been handy, but he’d never enjoyed home improvement. He’d much rather have his arms covered in grease than paint. But he was territorial enough that he didn’t like Chase and Pete having ‘honey-do’ lists in his damn house, so he stripped floors and replaced baseboards, painted ceilings, installed cabinets, tilled up his spotty, weedy yard, planted shrubs, laid sod, sank a fence, and on and on and on.
He was starting to like it. He was starting to feel proud of where he lived, what he was building. Not just a house. A family home.
For years, he’d helped Becker build up his own home, each new project giving his wife or his children a new piece of happiness. He’d seen how much that work had fulfilled his friend. Eight had helped, because Becker had asked and he’d have done anything for the one true friend he’d had in the world, but he’d never understood that fulfillment, why spending so many hours, so much of his limited free time, on projects other people wanted had made Becker happy, too.
Now he understood. Becker had been building his nest. Making his family and keeping it strong and whole. Something that stood even after he was gone.
Giving the people you loved a home they cherished, and knowing it would hold, was the best fucking feeling in the world.
~oOo~
“No, Bear! Gimme that!” Eight grabbed the ball of his socks with one hand and hooked a finger of the other into the slobbery mouth of the puppy they’d given Ajax for his eleventh birthday. When he managed to extricated the socks from Bear’s needle teeth, he scooped him up and set him outside the bedroom, closing the door on his furry little butt.
Ajax had picked him at the shelter, and they had no good idea what kind of breeds made his mix, but he had huge paws, so he wasn’t made of toy breeds, that was for sure.
By the sound of his howl when he didn’t get what he wanted—like access to the master bedroom—there was probably some Husky in there. Possibly wolf.
Eight sighed at the soggy hole in his socks and pulled another ball from the drawer. Maybe Marcella was right and he should bunch his sock pairs up a different way. Bear seemed to think the balls were his toys.
“Come on, Bear,” Ajax said on the other side of the door. “Outside? You wanna go outside?”
