He was pretty sure Big Max was enjoying letting him sweat.
“Max! You gave him the boring job,” Linda scolded as she breezed through the kitchen, trailing crepe paper streamers. She paused to squeeze Big Max’s bum and then pat Grady’s cheek. “He’s not working you too hard, is he?”
“I’m planning to eat at least half of these later,” Grady assured her. “I can handle it.”
“Good man.” She smiled. “Mad Max never could stand still long enough to help with this part. He’s better off setting up the chairs and tables.”
Grady could see him through the kitchen window, wrestling with a canopy tent. He had taken off his shirt, which now hung out of the back pocket of his ugly shorts. Despite the mild weather, his chest and shoulders were starting to burn.
Also, Grady didn’t need to have that kind of visceral reaction to Max’s nipple piercings while he stood with his parents. “I should go tell him to put some sunscreen on.”
Linda snorted. “I’ll do it. Can’t have the two of you getting off-task.”
Lord. She wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t have to say it out loud in front of her husband while Grady was trying to work up to something.
Big Max added, “Maybe tell him to put his shirt back on too, before Grady peels the rest of that potato into ribbons.”
Grady looked down at said potato and flushed.
Big Max didn’t laugh at him, maybe at first because he was too busy watching his wife walk away. But even after that, he just kept cutting the potatoes into fries and submerging them in the water bath. Finally he took pity on Grady and said, “You know, Max was the easy kid.”
Max was still easy—easygoing, easy with his smiles, easy to be around.
“Which, thank God for that. His mother and I had our hands full with the other two. But I always felt….” He shook his head. “Between hockey and school and his brother’s and sister’s doctor’s appointments, sometimes it seemed like we barely saw him. And quirks that are cute in a kid don’t always make you friends as an adult.”
That brought Grady up short, because Big Max was right. Now that they knew each other, Max was easy to be around. For practically a decade before that, Grady thought Max was an asshole.
Okay, he still thought Max was an asshole, but now he thought it with a wash of affection.
He knew Max had been close friends with Hedgie, his former captain on the Monsters, but he hadn’t spoken much about the other guys on the team. Maybe they’d assumed the loud, brash, party-animal Max was his only dimension. Maybe Max had difficulties connecting with people the same way Grady did, and just coped differently.
“He was an awkward teenager, wasn’t he?” Grady said without meaning to.
Big Max barked with laughter. “God, every word out of his mouth an invitation to fight or fuck. Or fuck off.”
Grady smiled. “So not much changed, then.”
“Not ’til he met you.”
Oh.
Swallowing hard, Grady focused on the potato so he didn’t peel his knuckles off. He’d always thought of himself as the prickly one. He credited Max with giving him the courage to take off his armor.
For the first time, it occurred to him that the exchange hadn’t been one-sided.
Finally he found the ability to speak again. “I’m glad he did.”
“Me too.” Big Max gestured to Grady’s potato pile. “You gonna peel that next one, or what?”
That was, apparently, the end of the subject as far as Big Max was concerned. Grady wasn’t sure exactly what conversation they’d had or what itmeant, but he felt good about it.
Honestly, that itself was a little alarming.
At noon Big Max dismissed Grady from potato duty, and he went upstairs to wash his hands and moisturize with the thickest stuff he could find.
When he got back downstairs, everyone was sitting around a stack of sandwiches on the kitchen table. There were a handful of presents too.
Grady took the chair next to Max and helped himself to a sandwich, since everyone else had already started. “What, you’re not going to wait for cake to open presents?” A sheet cake the size of a football field was currently taking up the kitchen counter.
