Mae shakes her head. “Dad.”
“Can you tell what we’re having for breakfast?” Pop says, laughing. “What should she say if she likes her?Coffee with soy milk?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad says. “If she’s cool, saycantaloupe.”
“Cantaloupe,” Mae says with a note of finality. “So how’s Nana?”
Pop laughs. “Back to normal, I guess. We offered to come down again for dinner tonight, but she’s apparently playing poker with some friends.”
“They’d better be careful,” says Mae. “She cleaned out my savings this summer.”
“We’re going for brunch tomorrow instead.”
“Give her a hug for me.”
“We will,” Pop promises. “And say hi to Cantaloupe for us.”
“That’s not her name,” Dad says, exasperated. “It was a code for…never mind. You’d make a terrible spy.”
“I’m completely okay with that,” Pop says. “Love you, Mae.”
“Love you guys too.”
She hangs up and glances over at Hugo. Here in the hotel bed, with the light from the window falling across his forehead, Mae is amused by how much this feels like a scene from one of her grandmother’s old romances. They’ve watched a million of them over the years—Nana for the swoony men, Mae for the cinematic history—and she’s always found them faintly ridiculous.
“Come on,” she’d say when the couple first kissed or when they were brought together by the most unlikely circumstances. “There’s just no way.”
Nana would usually just turn up the volume. But one night this spring, soon after finishing a full month of chemo, she hit Pause and turned to Mae with a look of great patience.
“It’s not supposed to reflect reality,” she said. “Reality is all well and good. But sometimes you just want to pretend the world is a better place than it actually is. That great and wonderful things can happen. That love triumphs over everything.”
It isn’t until now, though, that Mae fully gets it, the pleasure of letting reality fall away. Whatever is happening with Hugo is just as ridiculous as those movies. Maybe even more so. It’s unlikely and temporary and deeply uncharacteristic. But still, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s fallen straight into one of those stories.
This is what she’s thinking as she watches Hugo, who she’s assumed is asleep. But then his eyes pop open so suddenly that she yelps. He laughs and grabs her around the waist, pulling her close, making it alarmingly easy to forget everything else.
After a few minutes, she sits up again, and Hugo rolls out of bed, padding over to the window. He pulls back the curtains, and the light comes flooding in.
“Wow,” he says as Mae walks up beside him. It’s their first real view of the lake, which shimmers beyond the city, disappearing into the horizon. “That’s…beautiful.”
She knows he’s talking about the view, but when she turns, he’s looking at her in a way that makes her blush. “Let’s go explore.”
They decide that the first stop should be a diner. “Of all the things I want to see in this city,” Hugo says, “the most important is a stack of waffles the size of the Hancock building.”
At the diner, his knees brush against hers underneath the table, and Mae feels the spark of it each time. As she watches him pour an absurd amount of syrup onto his waffles, she realizes how much she wants to tell someone about this. The minute he gets up to use the restroom, she sends a text with a heart eyes emoji to Priyanka, laughing as she imagines her friend’s face when she gets it. Mae has never used one of those in her life. She’s never even wanted to. Not until this very moment.
She waits for a response, but nothing comes, which means Priyanka must be in class. She opens a new message to Nana instead.
Mae: So I used your line.
Nana: And??
Mae: It worked.
Nana: Always does. So you like him?
Mae: That seems like it would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do.
Nana: Why?
