Page 3 of Creed
No matter what, even if this new pair didn’t truly live here, this place was definitely as comfortable to them as a home.
I’d helped buy the property, and owned a third of the land, but it wasn’t my home. I was the stranger here. The new arrival that didn’t fit.
“Hey, Creed. You okay?”
Magnus’s question snapped me out of the daze I’d fallen into. I realized I’d been staring at my own plate for a while, not even seeing the food in front of me. I hadn’t even picked up my fork to start eating, which must have looked odd when the others were at least halfway done with their own meals.
Clearing my throat, I reached for my coffee mug, which had been refilled at some point. “Yeah. I’m fine. Um... Brody, didn’t you say there was something we needed to talk about?”
Brody sat at the head of the table like he was the father at a cliché thanksgiving dinner scene. Setting his cutlery aside, he satin silence for a moment with a pensive look on his face before speaking up. “In case anyone hasn’t noticed... there’s a giant hole in the middle of our property.”
Magnus snorted as he held back an ugly laugh. “No kidding. I’m lucky to have any of my garden left, and my plans for a greenhouse are definitely fucked. What about it.”
“Well...” Lacing his fingers together, Brody propped his chin on top of his hands. “We’re going to need to fix it. Which is going to cost money. A lot more money than we had planned.”
As everyone else cringed and muttered under their breath, I quickly ran a few numbers through my head.
When we’d bought this property and made our construction plans, we’d obviously saved extra for contingencies, but we hadn’t planned for a literal cave-in. I didn’t know exactly how much it would take to fix such a thing, but I could estimate a few numbers, and it didn’t look good. We’d probably be able to fix that house-sized hole in the ground, but it wouldn’t leave us money for anything else.
“I’ve called my boss at the logging company,” Brody continued, his breakfast now completely forgotten. “He’s allowed me to pick up a few more shifts, but that’s not going to cut it. So, any ideas?”
Magnus leaned back in his chair until the wood creaked from the strain of his weight. “I could enter a few more cage fights. It’s good money, but it’s not reliable enough for us to count on.”
“What about offering training?” Trent suggested.
Magnus dropped back onto all four legs of his chair with a heavy thud. “What do you mean?”
For such a large man, Trent looked surprisingly boyish when he blushed. “Well, when I was watching your last fight, I heard a lot of people talking about how skilled you were in the ring, and how they’d give anything to know your secret. I bet there’d be plenty of people willing to pay you to train them. I know firsthand how valuable a good trainer can be. When I first started competitive weightlifting, I went through three different trainers before I found a decent one, and let me tell you, they weren’t cheap.”
I knew about Magnus’s moonlighting work as a cage fighter, but I was surprised to hear that Trent had attended his fights. The man didn’t look like the type who would enjoy violence, even the recreational kind. It just went to show how much I didn’t know about Magnus or Brody’s partners.
Trent’s suggestion was a good idea. I could picture it. Out of the three of us, Magnus had always been the most personable, but he also didn’t take any bullshit. It could be a good job for him if he could get enough clientele, and from the sounds of it, he already had some interested people.
“Also, I’ve been thinking,” Trent continued, tapping his fork against his plate in a way that set my teeth on edge. “For my antique business, I do most of my sales online these days. I’d still keep the store for posterity’s sake, maybe open it a couple days a week, but there’s no reason for me to keep the apartment above the shop. I basically live here now, anyway, so I might as well rent it out to earn some more income.”
So, he was an antique dealer and a competitive weightlifter. Those seemed like an odd combination, and I wondered how he’d gotten involved with Magnus in the first place. I hadn’t heard much about how they met. While I was still serving overseas, it hadn’t mattered. Magnus’s blooming relationshiphad just been a story from a life that was happening on the other side of the world.
Now, it was going to be a part of my everyday life, and I was curious. Last I knew, Magnus still tripped over himself every time he tried to talk to someone that he found attractive, and I’d half expected him to stay single forever.
Magnus placed a hand on Trent’s leg, squeezing his thigh in a gesture that was so intimate I had to look away.
“Hey, Trent, we aren’t asking you for money. We bought this property. Taking care of it is our responsibility.”
Trent was already shaking his head, though he never tried to remove Magnus’s hand. “No. I basically live here already, and if I rent my apartment, then your home really will become mine as well. That means, I also need to take care of it.”
“I agree,” Ellis said suddenly. “He shrank in his seat a bit when all eyes turned toward him but kept talking anyway. “Brody, you... you said I could stay with you, but I can’t just be a freeloader. I’m not sure what I can offer, but now that I’ve got my identity back, I can at least start looking for a part-time job in town.”
Got his identity back?
There was a story there that I wasn’t aware of. I remembered Brody saying something about Ellis suffering amnesia not long ago.
Maybe it had to do with that?
I’d have to ask later.
The conversation turned toward everyone’s plans for the day. Trent was going to drive into town to check on his shop and start getting his apartment ready to rent, and Ellis asked to go along with him so he could start looking for work. Meanwhile, Brody insisted that he and Magnus needed to work on the hole in the middle of the property. We didn’t have the means to fix it, yet, but the collapsed ground at least needed to be shored up to ensure nothing else collapsed.
No one made any suggestions about what I should do. At first, I felt insulted, like I’d been purposely excluded from the conversation. Then, however, I realized I wouldn’t have known what to say if I was part of the conversation, and I felt relieved that I’d been left out of it.
