Page 72 of Saving Her Heart
Kendall
Two weeks after the fire, I'm watching Jax struggle to fit his oversized couch through my apartment door.
"Pivot!" Hudson shouts from inside.
"I am pivoting!" Jax grunts back.
"PIVOT!" Kane joins in, clearly enjoying this too much.
"If one more person quotes Friends at me—" The couch lurches forward, nearly taking out my lamp.
"Your couch is too big," I observe from my safe spot by the kitchen.
"Your door is too small," Jax counters.
"It’s standard door size. This is an abnormal couch size."
"This couch has a history. My dad helped me pick it out when I got my first apartment."
That softens me. "Fine. Then we'll make it work."
It takes another twenty minutes, some creative angling, and Hudson removing the door from its hinges, but finally the monstrosity of brown leather is in my living room. It absolutely does not match my cream and blue décor.
"It's—" I start.
"Hideous with your stuff, I know." Jax flops onto it, exhausted. "But it's comfortable."
I sit beside him, and he's right. It's like being hugged by furniture.
"Your boxes are labeled with a complex system I don't understand," Kane announces, carrying in a box marked "K-7-Blue."
"Kitchen, priority 7, blue tape means fragile," Jax explains.
"You have a system. Of course you do." I laugh.
"You have your binders color-coded by property and sub-sectioned by date," he points out.
"That's different. That's work."
"This is life. It’s more important than work."
Hudson brings in Jax's coffee maker—a complex machine with more buttons than my car. "Where does this go?"
"We don't need two coffee makers," I point out.
"Yours makes brown water. Mine makes coffee," Jax says.
"Mine is perfectly functional?—"
"Kendall, honey," Grace interrupts, appearing with baby Emma, "I've had your coffee. Let the man bring his machine."
The afternoon becomes a parade of Jax's possessions versus my space. His sports memorabilia, ‘But I caught that foul ball!” versus my gallery wall ‘These are professionally framed prints!’. His lucky fishing rod ‘It caught a marlin!’ versus my decorative vase ‘It's from Paris!’.
"This is harder than I thought," I admit, looking at the chaos of two lives trying to become one.
"It’s just stuff. It doesn't matter," Jax says, pulling me against him. "We'll figure it out."
"But where will we put everything?"
