Page 58 of Brother in Law with Benefits

"I looked at one house." He sounds almost sheepish, which is a tone I've never once heard from Grant Guilligan. "Three-bedroom. Good yard. Ten minutes from Mom's, five minutes from the clinic. I told myself I was just curious about the market."

"Were you?"

"No." His arms tighten around me. "I was doing math on a life I hadn't asked you if you wanted yet. Which, in retrospect, might have been getting slightly ahead of myself."

"Slightly."

"I panicked a little."

I twist around to look at him, delighted despite the exhaustion pulling at every part of me. "Grant Guilligan, did you house-hunt for me before we'd even said I love you?"

"I'm efficient. I don't like wasting time once I know what I want."

"That's either the most romantic or the most terrifying thing you've ever told me, and I genuinely cannot decide which."

"Both," he says. "Probably both."

"Send me the listing."

"Yeah?"

"Not tonight. Not — I'm not saying yes to a house at eleven PM after the day I've had. But send it to me. I want to look." I settle back against him. "I want a lot of things I've been too scared to say out loud. Might as well start with a listing."

"Camden mentioned Chris might actually visit again before Christmas," he says, after a moment. "If tonight's dinner was any indication. He asked about my job like he actually wanted to know the answer, not like he was performing interest."

"Progress."

"Slow progress."

"Still progress." I yawn, unable to fight it any longer, the day finally catching all the way up to me. "Tell me something boring. Something with no emotional content whatsoever. I need my brain to stop for a minute."

"Deb thinks the western trench line needs to be rerouted around the old Hendricks property because the soil survey came back showing more clay than the original engineering report accounted for."

"Perfect. More."

"It affects the timeline by maybe two weeks, but it's better than hitting groundwater we didn't know was there halfway through—"

I fall asleep somewhere around groundwater, tangled in him, the succulent watching over both of us from the windowsill, and for the first time since Diane poked her head into the supplyroom that afternoon, the ugly thing Chris tried to plant in me finally, quietly, goes still.

Not gone. Probably never fully gone.

But quiet enough, tonight, to let me sleep — lulled, in the end, not by declarations or proof or even great sex, but by the low, steady sound of the man I love talking about clay soil like it's the most important thing in the world.

Maybe, tonight, it is.

19

Grant

Iknow something's wrong before Sophie says a word, because she's alphabetizing the spice rack.

Not just organizing it. Alphabetizing it. I watch her do it from the doorway, coat still on, keys still in my hand — cumin, then curry, then dill, none of which needed touching, all of which she is now touching, one at a time, with the focused, unblinking attention she usually saves for a chart she doesn't like the numbers on.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey." She doesn't turn around. "How was the site?"

"Fine. Deb thinks we'll beat the two-week estimate on the western trench."