#some assembly required

Just follow these easy steps:

✅ Assemble kelp parts in cold, nutrient-rich water  ✅ Add fish and invertebrates  ✅ Add sea otters! 🦦 ✅ Watch your kelp forest thrive  ⚠️Warning: Without sea otters, your kelp forest may end up with an urchin overload!

"Crazy, like a two-hundred-and-forty-one-year-old being jealous of a high school junior?"

Although Carter wasn’t “Mr. Susie Homemaker” by any means, he hadn’t been able to pass up the opportunity to lend his aid — or rather, to her, when Andrea off-handedly mentioned needing to assemble a new bookcase.

It wasn’t that he was trying to earn her good graces. No, no, of course not, but after their little heart-to-heart in the middle of the night, both had become so swept up in their own personal routines that it almost felt as if…well…he’d imagined their sudden bond, and the thought didn’t sit well with him. And least especially once Princess started (loudly) talking about how she wanted to fix up Andrea with her cousin, some engineer with a boat, or whatever tripe she kept spouting to talk him up.

'If he’s so great, why’s he still single?' Carter sourly thought.

Regardless of his feelings on the matter, Andrea had accepted the help, so he was now sitting with her on the floor of her living room, several pieces spread haphazardly across the carpet while her dog supervised with a vague sense of interest.  

With a soft curse, Carter squinted at the instructions, only to grimace once he realized they were upside down. Because of freaking course they were. Quickly rotating the paper, he grumbled to himself before complaining, “How do people even read these hieroglyphics? I mean, am I really supposed to know what ‘man standing over pole’ is supposed to indicate?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have said he was good at this…but hell, once Princess mentioned that her oh-so-perfect cousin could probably help, Carter and his big mouth had leapt at the opportunity, and more or less sealed his fate.