“It’s so nice you all still stay here together,” she said.
“It can get a bit much,” Colt said. “But we tend to stay out of each other’s hair when we need our space.”
“Our father built this place way back in the day,” I said. “Cassidy, our oldest brother, is technically the owner now, and he tends to run a pretty tight ship. But the deal is we all have our rooms and they are always our rooms. No matter what.”
“Speaking of rooms,” Colt said. “I am just about done. I think I am going to head on up to mine. But before I do, I need to give your shoulder a look.”
“Ahh dammit,” I said. “Go on.”
I let him pull my shirt down on one side and examine my shoulder. When he moved it around a bit, I winced but didn’t cry out in pain, which I decided to take as a win. Deciding he was done looking at it, Colt slapped the shoulder and I finally did make a noise.
“Oh, whiney baby,” he said, laughing. “It’s fine. It’s going to suck for a few days, but it doesn’t look like you did any real damage to it. If I were you, I’d take a long hot shower.”
“Loosen the muscles?” Jane said before I could stop her.
“Because he smells bad,” Colt and I both said. It was one of Colt’s favorite setups and joke punchlines. He got me with it when I was eight the first time, and he’d used it as many times as he could since then. Still, it got a laugh out of Jane, while I rolled my eyes.
“Seriously,” Colt said. “You smell out loud. Plus, your shoulder could use the heat and getting cleaned up. It’ll be a bruise tomorrow but nothing much more than that. Goodnight, Jane.”
“Goodnight, Colt,” she said.
Colt went up the stairs to his room, leaving me and Jane alone in the kitchen.
“Well,” I said, standing and putting my plates in the sink to rinse them off. “Would you like the grand tour?”
“I would love that,” Jane said, joining me at the sink and adding her dishes. I rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher, starting it up before we walked away.
“This is the dining room,” I said as we entered the long room with the ridiculously long table. “We can actually fit the whole family in here with a few extra seats left, but it gets loud. Cass has us doing at least one dinner a week with everybody, and it can get nuts in here.”
She nodded along and followed me as we entered the living room.
“Oh, I love those curtains,” she said.
I snickered. “You would. We hadn’t changed the curtains since Mom died, but when Gia came in, she gave this place a fresh coat of girliness. She and Anna and Shannon all ganged up on us recently and said if we didn’t redecorate some of the house, they would do it for us. So we just let them. The curtains were Gia’s idea. Next up, upstairs.”
I began walking and felt her hand slip into mine. Grinning like a loon, I walked hand in hand with her up the steps.
“Oh, wow,” she said as we reached the upper floor.
I waved my arm at the massive expanse of space that we often called the library, with its doors at various places indicating a bedroom.
“This is the library, slash playroom, slash boardgame room,” I said. “It’s where little Gabby spends her time when she comes over, hence the pink bean bag and lamp. There’s a bathroom here between my room and Garrett’s. It’s mostly mine now since he spends so much time over at Anna’s. Then this is my room, and then this,” I pointed to the end of the hall, “is the guest suite. Follow me.”
“Guest suite?” she asked.
“Yeah, well, it’s fancy,” I said, opening the door. “It’s just a little bedroom with a bathroom attached, but it’s where we let guests stay when they come over and don’t want to drive home. Like Anna’s dad. He stays here when we do family dinner nights usually. Let me set you up.”
Colt had already brought her bags up to the room, so she had her things, but I went into the closet and grabbed a couple towels and some other bath accessories. Setting them on the sink in the bathroom, I gestured toward the tub.
“I figured you might want a nice relaxing bath, so I got out the bubble-bath