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Grace’s first boyfriend is Eric Wright, in kindergarten. She doesn’t mind him, until two days later when he pushes her out of her place in line as they’re getting ready to go to recess. She punches him and ends up in the principal’s office, waiting for her father to pick her up.
Daddy gives the principal a look when the situation is explained, then he laughs the whole drive home.
(Mommy does not find it nearly so amusing. Aunt Bobbi does, though.)
-
Grace’s actual first boyfriend is Walker Hughes, when she’s eighteen. He holds her hand instead of pushing her, and they see a lot of movies and visit the museums and hike through the woods.
(She’s older now, which means the tables have turned between her parents, Mom happy and pleasant about the relationship and Dad really wishing Grace would just go back to the punching tactic.)
Eventually though, Walker gets accepted into Princeton, and Grace is packed up for NYU. It feels like tragedy, but it passes.
-
Her next boyfriend is barely that, mostly because it takes them four months of early lectures, late night papers, and mainlining Red Bull before they realize they’re not so much dating as they are best friends.
So, Harrison sticks around as one of her very favorite people, even though her siblings refuse to forget that she dated him for the briefest of times.
-
The first girlfriend she has is Rachel Ellis, a chem major who is immediately impressed with Grace’s knowledge of both biology and chemistry. She basks in the pleased feeling for a few minutes before offering up the fact that it’s mostly secondary knowledge from her mother’s job and research.
This of course means that Rachel is an instant hit with Grace’s family, talking shop with her mother and helping Simon with his homework.
It lasts for nearly ten months before Grace realizes that Rachel is a hit with everybody’s family, including the other two girls she’s been seeing.
-
She takes the whole Rachel thing a little harder than she would’ve expected of herself before any of it happened. She tries to keep her breakdowns confined to her apartment, her room, her bed. She tries to keep her stiff upper lip in front of other people, and apparently does a pretty decent job of it considering the amount of dates Harrison, Eli and Emery keep setting up for her.
Grace doesn’t really mind, for the most part. She sees a few movies, gets a few dinners, goes to a concert, an aquarium, and a botanical garden. A couple of guys, a couple of girls. It’s good to have distractions, and she always has a decent time. Some dates are better than others.
She’s caught out one night when she forgets that her Uncle Trip is stopping by to pick up a few movies. She’s curled into a ball on her couch, swallowed in the heavy comforter she dragged off her bed, and she doesn’t hear the door opening until it’s too late to hide her swollen eyes and hiccup-y breathing.
He sits down by her hip and then hauls her into his lap (“c’mere, sweet girl”) and even though she’s almost twenty-two, even though she’s nearly as tall as he is, she still curls as close to him as she can get and stays that way through the entirety of Jurassic Park.
-
She is definitely not looking for a relationship when she meets Ada.
“You can find wonderful things when you’re not looking for them,” her mother used to say.
In this - as in many, many other things - Jemma Simmons-Ward was right.
-
There’s a list of people that Grace typically shares important things with, and about 97% of the time, the list is in the same order. The nature of the information sometimes changes who knows first, as it does now.
“Can you hand me the soldering iron, please?”
Grace is trying to organize the list in her head so intently, she doesn’t notice her sister is speaking to her until a bolt hits her in the knee. Resisting the urge to throw it back, she narrows her eyes. “What?”
Hadley sighs and pulls away from whatever vaguely aerial machine she’s building, a grease stain smudged on her cheek and over the gentle slope of her nose. “Are you going deaf too?” She holds a hand out. “Soldering iron.”
Grace hands over the tool and lifts herself up onto the lab bench, careful of a rack of test tubes filled by their mother this morning. “So. I was thinking of bringing someone to the big extended family picnic this weekend.”
Hadley gropes around on the counter beside her until her fingers find the blowtorch. “Sounds good. Harrison?”
“You know I’m required to yell for Dad if you turn the blowtorch on. You’re still on probation.” Watching her sister heave a rather dramatic sigh, Grace starts tracing the lines on her palms to distract herself a little. “And no, not Harrison. Just… you know, someone.”
Hadley is in the process of lifting the welding helmet from the shelf and Grace is preparing to holler for Dad, until the younger of the two seems to process. “Wait. Wait. You want to bring someone to the picnic? And it’s not Harrison?”
“H, I just said-”
Hadley whirls around to face her sister quick enough to get whiplash (and also almost wound her with the blowtorch, which is definitely on). “Are my aids working? Are you actually telling me that you’re dating someone? Do mom and dad know? You’re going to bring this person to the picnic? Are you trying to scare them off forever?”
Grace groans and slides off the counter. “Ugh, I knew I shouldn’t have told you yet.”
“You better tell everybody before you show up with a date! You know what happened to Emery’s date last time!” Grace makes no effort to respond, except to pinch the bridge of her nose when Hadley hollers, “Give me fifteen minutes of the blowtorch before you tell Dad!”
-
Ideally, Grace had wanted to drive to the park with Ada, so they could do some last minute preparation and so she wouldn’t have to arrive on her own. However, her brand new… person, has to work for the first part of the afternoon.
So, when the bright green Mazda pulls up in the parking lot, Grace is quite literally in the middle of trying - and utterly failing - to wrestle her Aunt Bobbi to the ground.
This is not the first time she’s been sneak-attacked today, because her father’s former team is supposedly trying to help her with her training at the Academy. She’s skeptical of that statement. (She’s also afraid her Aunt Tasha is going to drop out of a tree for most of the day.)
On the plus side, Ada knows a lot about Grace’s chosen profession at this point in their… relationship… and therefore, a pretty decent amount about how her family incorporates into that profession.
On the other hand, she hadn’t warned her person to expect to find her grass-stained and in a headlock by her Amazon of an aunt when she made it to the family picnic.
Just her luck, Grace figures, that this is the first impression for either side.
Grimacing a little, she taps out and climbs to her feet to make her way to the edge of the pavilion area. “I’m so sorry that I’m about to do this to you.” She whispers quickly to Ada when she wraps her in a one-armed hug. “And I will do my very best to stick with you the entire time.”
“I’m not worried.” Ada’s wide brown eyes smile up at her, and she tucks a dark curl behind her ear before she presses her forehead to Grace’s. “I trust you.”
“You should probably wait until after this mess to make such a daring statement.” Grace replies with a wink, before turning to face her gathering family. To her slight panic, they all seem to be zeroing in on the two of them, despite her mother’s attempts to shoo them off. “Here goes, then. Everybody, I’d like you to meet Ada.”