Page 20 of How to Date a Younger Man
Griffin quickly grabs the other end of the box, his eyebrows raising. “Why don’t you let me do all the heavy lifting, okay?” he says, taking the box from my hands a little too easily.
“What, are you worried this old lady is going to break a hip or something?” I place my hands defiantly on my hips, but secretly, I’m relieved. The last thing I want to do is mortify myself further by throwing out my back or dislocating a disc. Then I’ll really feel like a senior citizen.
“You’ve got to stop saying shit like that. You’re thirty-six and that is definitely not old.” Griffin’s eyes are laced with concern rather than their signature playfulness.
“Yeah, well, let’s see if you’re still singing that tune once you hit thirty.”
He shrugs and smiles, stacking the box of law books on top of another and carrying them both down to the truck. Show-off.
Griffin might be annoying, but I’m truly grateful he’s here. Kristen and my mom offered to come by the new house and help arrange everything once it all gets there, but when it came to finding someone to help me actually transport my belongings, I figured I’d have to shell out a small fortune to a moving company. There was no one else to call. But then Griffin overheard my plan and insisted on being the one to help.
Over the past couple of years, he’s become someone I can depend on, especially since he starting dating Cora last year. Not only has having a girlfriend taken the majority of his attention off me and shifted it to someone else, but it’s forced him to mature in ways he didn’t even know he had to in his man-whore days. Not that he’s totally grown out of all his bad habits. At the end of the day, Griffin is who he is. But lately, I’ve liked having that person around more and more.
Once he’s loaded up all the boxes, we begin the careful process of moving the few pieces of furniture I decided to keep. A lot of things I bought new, like the dining table and my beautiful new oyster-colored sectional that I had delivered to the new house. But some things I couldn’t bear to part with, like the antique bookcase I bought when I first moved to Los Angeles.
“This thing weighs like a thousand pounds,” he says, straining to lift one corner of the bookcase and shaking his head.
“It’ll be fine. We’ve got this,” I reply, rubbing my hands together and stretching out my legs.
“Are you sure you don’t want to try to sell it? Will it even fit in your new place?”
Now he’s just being silly. My new place is over a thousand square feet bigger than my loft.
I stop stretching and sigh, running a hand over the back of my neck. “I know it’s not the prettiest piece of furniture in the world. but this bookshelf was my first real possession, the first thing I picked out and paid for all on my own. I had to pay a hundred dollars extra for the guy to carry it up those stairs for me, but it was worth it because having it in my space made it finally feel like it was mine, especially once I’d filled it with my law books. And now that I’m moving into this new house, my dream home, the first place that’s fully, completely mine . . . maybe it’s silly, but it feels like this bookshelf has to be there.”
He nods, his eyes trained on the grayish wood, but I can’t tell if he’s sizing it up or getting ready to throw it out the window. Suddenly, without warning, he lifts the bookcase, groaning a little under the weight, then hefts the thing out my front door and lugs it down the stairs.
“Wait, Griffin—don’t hurt yourself!” I call after him, following him down the stairs and hovering my hands around the top of the shelf, stunned by his stupid, if not sweet action.
Miraculously, he gets the thing down the stairs and into the truck all on his own, his biceps bulging beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt and sweat beading on his forehead. He groans loudly once it’s loaded, panting and leaning against the cool metal of the truck. I stand in front of him, my arms crossed and eyebrows knit together, waiting for him to explain himself.
“What?” he asks, still struggling to catch his breath.
“Don’t what me. Are you trying to kill yourself?”
He shrugs. “The bookcase is important to you. I found a way to get it down the stairs.”
“I could have helped, you know.”
“You said you paid the guy who sold it to you extra to get it up there, all by himself. I figured that meant I’d be able to get it down without help on my own too.”
