I’ve been hiding out at my former stepdad’s empty beach house for a week — one bad breakup, one dead lease, and a phone full of my mother’s calls I keep letting ring.
Then the front door opens on Friday afternoon, and Grant walks in with a case of bourbon, three of his oldest friends, and the fantasy football draft I forgot was this weekend.
I should grab my keys and go — I’ve got a car, a full tank, and three friends an hour up the coast who’d take me in without a single question.
I sit down at the table instead. In his jersey. With his hand settling on the small of my back like it’s been waiting eight months to land there.
Grant Callahan isn’t the safe, steady stepfather I remember. He’s bigger. Harder. The kind of man who runs a room without raising his voice — and every man at that draft table already knows the way he watches me isn’t the way a stepdad watches anyone.
Four men who’ve spent two decades competing over everything — draft picks, bar tabs, bragging rights. This weekend the only thing on the board is me.
By Saturday night the pretending is over. And once Grant stops pretending, he doesn’t just claim me. He shares me — on his terms, in his house, with the three men he trusts most — under one rule that never once bends: they get whatever I say yes to, but only he finishes inside me.
Then my mother’s car pulls into the drive, and I have to decide, out loud, in front of everyone, whether I’m the girl she thinks got manipulated — or the woman who chose every second of this and isn’t giving a single one of them back.
I’m not leaving. I never was.
