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“I’m kind of partial to Nash’s Nibbles,” I admit.
She laughs, and it’s that sweet, musical sound that I can’t wait to hear for the rest of my life.
Chapter 63: Grayson Nash
Marrying the Defensive Back
I look around at the transformation this place has made over the last two months. It's unrecognizable from how it was when I first found it, but a lot about my life is unrecognizable from how it was as little as a year ago.
Coach Nash led the Vegas Aces into the playoffs for a second year in a row, and that means we’re preparing for another game in a couple weeks. Because of our record during the season, we get a bye while the wild card games are played this weekend. It also means we get a week off from practice, and I have to admit, as excited as I am to make the playoffs, I’m incredibly excited for a week off.
Soon I’ll have to announce my decision regarding next season. I know what I want to do now, and I’ve discussed it at length with Ava.
“I can’t believe the first batch in my bakery is almost ready,” she says, and the excitement in her voice is pretty much everything I dreamed of when I paid for the lease on this place.
These cookies aren’t for the bakery, though. They’re for a party she’s catering tomorrow. We finally got the kitchen in working order, and she’s been itching to test out the equipment ahead of our opening.
We’re not having our official grand opening until the first of March. It gives us almost two months to make sure we’re ready to roll. We still have employees to hire and a few more decisions to make about equipment and seating, but we’re close to ready. She wanted to wait until I was out of season so we could have a good couple weeks to focus on something aside from football.
I know where my heart is, though, and it’s no longer on the field. It’s planted firmly in Ava’s hands.
“Can you cut more of my super-secret ingredient?” she asks.
“Only if I can eat some.” I pop a Tootsie Roll into my mouth, and she giggles.
“Stop, or I’m going to have to make more.” She decided to make homemade Tootsie Rolls rather than using the store-bought ones like she always had in her kitchen sink cookies at Cravings, and I have to be honest…her homemade ones are even better than the original.
Maybe because she made them with love.
I set the rope onto the cutting board and make the slices just like she told me. We’re not calling them Kitchen Sink Cookies here. Instead, the special title she gave them was Nash’s Nibbles since she loved the name but didn’t want to use it for the bakery. And also since she already knows it’ll be our number one seller, and she wanted my name—her future name—attached to it.
For the bakery, she went with Cookie’s Cookies and Cakes.
This is our future, and I see her in every detail as I look around. She went with a polka-dot wallpaper made up of pastels, and the result is cheerful and happy—two adjectives I’d definitely use to describe my Cookie. Instrumental dance music plays softly in the background, and occasionally she dances around the kitchen with pure abandon and glee. I feel like she’ll do that thousands of times in the future.
What a road it has been. Sometimes I can’t believe it as I glance around, but this is it. This is our future.
I had no idea that when I looked beyond the game, I’d be the owner of a bakery with my future wife.
And it’s not just the bakery that’s different. It’s also the fact that our wedding is a little over two and a half months away.
She’d always dreamed of a May wedding, so the first weekend in May—two months after we open our bakery—we’ll be saying I do right here in Vegas.
And I can’t wait for the bachelor party the week before. We’re having a weeklong celebration, and Spencer and Beckett are both flying out for the whole week with their fiancée and wife, respectively.
Nobody ever would’ve guessed that I’d be next after Lincoln, but here we are. And as nervous as I was about marriage before Ava and I got together, now I see that just because my parents made mistakes doesn’t mean that we have to repeat them.
And we won’t. I lost her once. I’m not stupid enough to ever do it again.
“Where are we at on those Tootsie Rolls?” she asks.
I chuckle. “Coming right up, ma’am.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I glance up, and my eyes connect with hers at her use of sir.
“Say that again,” I dare her.
