When You Know

10 - The new Normal.

We saw Ruben and Jet every single day over the next few weeks, having dinner every night with each other, either at our house or at theirs. We also continued having Sunday family dinners with Tanner, Morgan and her stomach, and the number of people attending dinner seemed to increase week by week, with more of my family or Ruben's family coming too, eager to get to know the other side now that Mum and Ruben were dating again. Everyone was delighted they were back together, and it was genuinely difficult to figure out just who was more excited.

My Nanny Mary and Poppy Ray both cried when they found out, having known Ruben well when he was a teenager dating Mum the first time. All my uncles and aunts were so happy he was back in our lives, with both Uncle Bray and Aunt Hadley admitting to me in private that Ruben has grown even more attractive with age, though I didn't tell either Mum or Ruben that. I did tell Jet, though, who thought it was hilarious.

I got to know Ruben's mum, Lani and her husband Troy, as well as his father Jimmy and his wife Ange. Both his parents were really happy to see me and Mum at the dinners, and spent a long time talking about how they remembered me when I was little. I think Ruben must have spent more time with his mum when he was younger because she had a lot more stories of us than his dad did. He was nice though, working in the building industry like Ruben and Jet, but as an architect. His mum was a nurse, just like Morgan and my Uncle Bray, and her husband Troy was an ER doctor, so those guys always had heaps of illness and diseased things to talk about when they were around each other.

I really liked hanging out with everyone and getting to know them all better, but I much preferred when it was just the four of us—Mum, me, Ruben and Jet—which wasn't as often as I'd like considering five days out of the week we all had to be at school or work. When we weren't, though, we would go skating or kicking the footy, or go for long walks in the forest nearby. Ruben and Jet even took us out surfing, which Mum was surprisingly good at, and which I totally sucked at somehow. It bummed be out, mostly because everyone expected I would be really good considering I was a decent skateboarder and I just couldn't get the hang of it, therefore wasn't able to have as much fun as they all were. Ruben was really good, but Jet was amazing. He impressed me surfing just as much as I did him when I was skating.

When we weren't out being active, like when we were tired from school and work or the weather was garbage, we would hire movies or watch Netflix and camp out on the couch together eating popcorn. Even something as simple as watching a movie together seemed better somehow.

It was weird how much I loved the extra company considering it had only been me and Mum for so long. Now when Ruben and Jet weren't around, it just felt strange, like there was something missing in our lives. I loved that they were part of our normal already, just like I think we were theirs, too.

Jet said we should try to give Mum and Ruben space sometimes, so occasionally we hung out just the two of us. He would walk me to the skate park and roll around with me on Mum's board for a few hours so Mum and Ruben could have some alone time together. Mum had never let me stay alone with anyone except my family and Uncle Landon, so I knew she trusted Jet completely when she let us go together, her only condition being that he made sure I always wore my helmet and pads. Jet promised he would tie me down and force them on if I tried to skate without them, and he wasn't kidding. I skated off from Ruben's house once, and he chased after me, lifted me off my board and threw me over his shoulder, and wouldn't put me down and give me my skateboard back until I put my gear on.

"No one's ever left me in charge of anyone before, little dude; and it means a lot to me that Sadie did, so we're playing by the rules, okay? I don't want to mess this up for Ruben, Madd."

I knew what he meant. I found that I was always trying to be on my best behaviour when we were around them, and that I kept most of my smartass remarks—which come natural to me, I might add, and are very hard to filter out effectively—to myself. Mum was over the moon and sun and all the stars in the galaxy since being with Ruben again, and I wasn't going to stuff that up for her by being a brat.