“Thank you.”
I step into the house he’s in the process of moving out of and stare at the massacre laid out before me. “Gabriel… I think you’ve been robbed. They just… they threw everything everywhere. We should call the police.”
“We are the police, and no… I just… for some reason I thought if I just emptied all of the closets and drawers into the living room, I would sit down and sort through things at night while I watched TV. And you want to know what I’ve done every night instead?”
“Been strikingly beautiful?”
“I’ve lounged on your couch stuffing my face with whatever gourmet meal you made for the night. You know you don’t have to make Michelin-starred food for me every night, right? We can eat like… a burger or maybe tacos or something.”
“I like putting you in a food coma so you don’t want to come over here and sort this shit. Really, I could hire someone to do this.” The last thing I want to do after a long day of work is sort through all of this stuff when I could simply pay someone to do it for us. And then I could spend that time loving on my sweet Gabriel.
“No! I want to sort it before it ever reaches our house since there’s so much of this I don’t need.” He grabs a couple of boxes before looking around the massacre for somewhere to sit. He teeters a bit when he tries to fit in the four-inch by four-inch space, then nearly sits on a small footstool that’s been flipped upside down.
“We should have sex. Even your ass is looking for something more fun to do,” I say while he battles off the footstool that just gave him a surprise jab in the ass.
Gabriel starts laughing as he shoves the stool back. “You weren’t supposed to see that. And it just grazed my ass.”
“It was aiming right toward the great beyond,” I say.
“Please don’t ever call it the ‘great beyond’ again.”
“Cave of wonders.”
I get a pillow with Lucy Fur’s face on it thrown at me for that one.
“I’m going to explore your ‘cave of wonders’ if you don’t shush it.” He says this like it’s a threat, but I would enjoy it significantly more than I’d enjoy any of this.
“I would let you. I would let you do anything you’d like, Gabriel. Take me now.”
“I’m not sure if that was romantic or concerning. I’m leaning toward concerning, but knowing your personality, I’m going to pretend it’s romantic.”
I watch as he lines up the two boxes and a trash bag. On one box, he writes “Donate,” and on the other, he writes “Junk I Must Keep.”
I pick up a grotesque lint ball off the ground and toss it toward the trash bag where it gets intercepted by Gabriel’s hand. It’s honestly quite impressive and makes me question if he’s part vampire with such quick hand movement and perception.
“You can’t throw that away!”
I narrow my eyes, confused if I’ve accidentally tossed a precious heirloom in the trash bag. “I can’t throw that… ball of… lint and dust bunnies away?”
“It’s not! It’s the first toy Lucille Pawl ever played with when she came home with me. She loved it so much,” he says as I watch it plop down into the “Keep” box. I stare at it while I question where exactly this “necessity” will go in our house. Hopefully intomytrash can.
I try again with a stick that looks like it somehow got carried in from outside, possibly hanging from someone’s shoelace that they didn’t notice. Into the trash it goes where it is immediately plucked out and placed in the keep pile.
When Gabriel looks up, he catches my eyes. “Lucille really likes that stick. Sometimes she carries it in her mouth like a dog.”
“When was the last time she carried that stick?” I have surely been around long enough to have witnessed such a thing if it was ever going to happen again.
“Time is not important.”
“Uh-huh… so like… we’re talkingyearsago. Good thing we’re keeping it, then. Boy, oh boy, the memories this stick holds.”
I pick up a shirt that isverymuch too small for him. It’s threadbare enough that it definitely doesn’t need to be donated. My hand hovers over the trash bag before I catch him staring at me. Then I shift it over to the donate pile but still, those eyes… And then only when it hovers over the keep pile does he smile and relax.
“Let me guess, one time Lucy Fur hacked up a hairball on it.”
“NO! My mom got me this shirt after I passed all these super-hard exams.”
“I see. My parents gave me a mansion, and I’ve just rented it out to some old guy who is probably going to die in it at this rate.”
