I tried for distraction. "How do you think Manuel is doing with the shop?"
"Good," Noah grunted. "Although maybe I should call him and see."
"Maybe if you want him to quit."
"I've called too many times?" He grimaced when I nodded. He heaved a big sigh and pushed me off his lap so he could leverage himself out of the chair. "I'm no good at giving up control, Grace." He looked down at me with a serious expression and then out toward the lake again.
"I know." I had some ideas about helping him with that, but I'd tell him about them later, when we were alone and didn't have to go down to dinner with the entire family sans Josh.
Noah took one last long look at the lake and said "I'm going to live here someday. Oh not in this house, specifically, but I'm going to have a big-ass house right here on Lake Michigan."
"I believe it," I said. And I did.
DINNER WAS EXCRUCIATING. LANA’S MOM had brought out the Royal Daulton china, the stuff with the 14k gold trim and lapis lazuli inlay. It was grotesque, and I think I read somewhere that you could actually get food poisoning from this stuff. Lana looked at me from across the table, a smirk on her face. For Aunt Sarah to bring out this china, she must feel really threatened by Noah. She was obviously trying to prove something, although I'm not quite sure what. Maybe she just liked playing Marie Antoinette to our peasant.
Noah looked thunderous and grim as he stared at the elaborate place setting and the dozens of utensils lined up on the side and top. I nudged him and waved my hand across the setting from the outward to the interior, and I think he got it. He nodded at me but didn't look any happier.
Uncle Louis came in at the end, and Noah stood up to shake his hand. Lana rolled her eyes at me and mouthed "suck up." Sadly the table was too big so I couldn't kick her, but I quickly stuck my tongue out. Unfortunately this did not go unnoticed by my mother. Her medication dosage must be working pretty well for her to be a sentient being at this late hour of 7:00 p.m.
"Really, Grace, those are terrible manners," she said reprovingly. She sat next to Lana, with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Louis filling out the head and foot respectively. Yes, Aunt Sarah was the head of our household. She claimed that it was easier for her to direct the staff in serving from her position. No one dared point out that the serving door was in the middle of the room.
We were sitting at one of the smaller tables. I think Aunt Sarah had three that she cycled in and out of here depending on the number of guests in the party. The room looked rather silly with just the six of us seated in here, but that was Aunt Sarah for you. The family was a joke, but we all ate together in this formal setting when we were home. Lana and I speculated that this was because Aunt Sarah was a poor, pageant girl, and this was the way she thumbed her nose at the DAR, the Daughters of the Revolution. She'd never gotten into their exclusive Mayfair club, even though she spent days trying to trace down some member of her family somewhere that could be one of the original boaters.
I wondered what Noah's family lineage looked like but was afraid to ask. He'd probably take it wrong and as a sign that we shouldn't be together. God only knew what was cycling through his mind right now as he looked at the gold-tinted silverware and the fancy plates. But tonight was bound to be a circus, and hopefully that would put to rest any thoughts of inferiority he had.
As the evening wore on, though, Lana’s earlier advice to be more assertive took root. Maybe I could make Noah feel more secure, but not in the way Lana had thought. I’d be assertive in my own way.
Noah
THIS HOUSE LOOKED LIKE A friggin’ palace. I knew I was going to hate this place just from the exterior. Having only seen about a quarter of the house, if you could call it a house and not a mini hotel, everything had confirmed my initial feelings that this was a bad place. Every big house I'd ever been in—which was all of two, Bo’s and Grace’s—was filled with nice shit and unhappy people.
Grace's mom looked half dead. She'd warned me, but I don't think I was fully prepared. She wore some long, filmy thing that Grace swore was not a nightgown, but I wasn't really convinced. Grace's aunt, Sarah, spent the whole dinner criticizing Lana. Heck, if I stepped wrong it was somehow Lana's fault.
"I see that you are still taking those psychology courses," Sarah said. "Has it done anything to help your own psychosis?"
Nothing like having your momma call you crazy at the dinner table to make the meal taste like sawdust. Lana picked at her meal, and that brought about another wave of criticism. "Do you need to go back to the clinic and learn how to eat?"
No one mentioned Grace or even looked at her. She might as well have been invisible. Her uncle Louis talked to me, and that was about it.
"Josh tells us that you'll be on a pay per view match this New Year's Eve."
"Yes, sir," I said, holding back the urge to salute. "My second."
"Who's your opponent?"
"It's Fred 'Granite' Marquita."
"And why's he 'Granite’?” Uncle Louis asked. Bo would've said it's because Fred is dumber than a caveman and just as unwieldy. Privately, we call him Flintstone.
"He's a hard hitter. His jaw is like granite."
Grace made a worried sound beside me. I knew that she was afraid I’d get hurt. MMA was a bloody sport, and everyone, even the winner, walked away with injuries. I’d told her that few people got seriously injured and then joked that if I did break something that it’d put me out of the game. She didn’t think that was very funny.
The fighting was just a means to an end. It was a way to make big money in a short time, legally, and then I’d pour those funds into buying and selling franchises and then leveraging those assets into something bigger. Something big enough that I could buy a house like this. Except we wouldn't eat in a room like this. I'd want a room with a ton of windows that overlooked the lake and the table would be round and filled with our kids and Grace's gorgeous face.
In my vision, Grace would be smiling too, instead of staring at her plate.
"You going to win, then?"
"Yes, sir." I had to win. Winning was the only option. What I didn't tell anyone but Bo was that I wasn't sure if I could win. Flintstone had years of experience on me. I had only one professional fight under my belt. I'd won dozens of gym matches, but I'd only fought on a pay per view card once. I just got signed a few months ago. My small rise had been called meteoric, and I knew that Flintstone was aching to take me down a notch or five. But I had to win. I had to. In a fight, the person who wants it most wins. The person who is the hungriest wins. It isn't always the one with the harder jaw or the most experience. And I knew that Flintstone would never want this win like I did.
We finished the meal in near silence, broken only by the clatter of the forks against the plates. I didn't even know what I was eating. I think it was fish, but it had a ton of sauce and was far too rich in flavor. I abstained from eating it, explaining to Louis that I had a strict dietary regimen to follow. This was a mistake.
"I wish you would have said something about your guest's eating habits," Sarah sniped to Lana.
Grace had had enough of this and interjected, "It's no big deal. Noah can get something from the kitchen later."
"If you think that the staff works at your pleasure, Grace, you are sorely mistaken. We eat together, even if we aren't all family, isn't that right, Deborah?” Sarah was amazing in her ability to hit more than one target with her insults. “Grace, you aren't a true member of this family, and your mother is a wastrel.” Grace nibbled on the corner of her lip and opened her mouth to say something more but Lana, shook her head from across the table, and Grace sat back.
"I'm fine," I said and shoveled a big piece of glazed, sauced fish into my mouth. I washed it down with a big gulp of water and then wiped my mouth.
"You are a big boy," Sarah said, eying me. It sounded vaguely like a come on, and if we were anywhere but here at the table, I would've pegged that as an invitation, but surely not. I looked uncertainly to Uncle Louis who had checked out by checking his cellphone.
I was afraid to look at Grace and Lana. We finished the dinner in awkward silence, and then the three of us escaped to the rec room in the basement. The basement of the house had actual rooms; it wasn’t just a dirt hole people hid in from twisters. This basement had a wine cellar, a movie theater, a pool table and a couple of pinball machines.
Neither Lana nor Grace played with any of the toys, so they must be for Josh. We ended up watching a movie, and then Grace took me up to her bedroom. It was pink and white, just like I thought it would be.
The bed was high off the ground and there was a painted white desk with a mirror on top of it and a white dresser. A long mirror sat in the corner, also white. The carpet, however, was a deep, shocking pink.
I blinked a couple of times, and Grace laughed sheepishly. “I liked pink when I was twelve, what can I say?”
“It suits you,” I replied. The dresser table held a picture of me when I was deployed. Bo must’ve taken it. I was seated on my ass with my shitty-ass squad automatic—that got jammed up with the dust-like sand that was over in Iraq and had to be disassembled in the middle of a firefight to clean out—slung across my lap. I’m not sure what Grace saw, but I looked tired.
“You look bad ass,” Grace said, stroking her hand up and down my back in a way that might’ve been comforting but instead, like anything she did, just made my dick hard.
“Yeah? I was probably half asleep,” I joked.
“You always look deliciously edible. Even Aunt Sarah thought so,” Grace teased. She left me to pat the wide expanse of her bed in invitation.
"So that wasn't just me?" I wandered around Grace's room. I felt like Pigpen, dragging in a bunch of dirt with me. I finished my circuit and sat down on the edge of Grace's bed. It was soft. Kicking off my shoes I laid back on it and looked up at the ceiling. There was some plaster trim around her light fixture. A chandelier. Who had chandeliers in their bedrooms? This was crazy.
“No, Lana and I both thought it was creepy and weird.”
The light was blocked, and I turned to see Grace standing by the side of the bed. “You shouldn’t sleep alone tonight.” Her look was mischievous. While I didn’t think Aunt Sarah would make me a midnight visit, I was willing to use any excuse that would allow me to be with Grace. “Let’s go to your room.” She held out her hand.
I got up, picked up my shoes, and allowed her to lead me across the way from the family wing to the guest wing. There were wings in this house. Chandeliers in the bedrooms. I liked none of this. I felt like my world was spinning completely out of control.
Inside the bedroom suite, Grace locked the door and walked to the middle of the room and dropped to her knees, splaying her hands palm up on her thighs and her head down.
"What are you doing?" I asked. Was she praying? Was this a yoga pose? Did she want me to do yoga with her? Man I remember the last time I saw her do yoga. After about twenty minutes of the yoga session Grace had talked me into attending, I had to get up and leave. When Grace came out, I left the intramural basketball players I’d been shooting the shit with and came over and laid a deep, wet one on her.