“You two are disgusting,” Jo said gleefully, passing through on their way to the kitchen.
They both liked to cook, so they started grocery shopping together, waking up early on farmer’s market days to get first dibs. They often grilled out on the patio, sipping the rosemary-mint lemonade Merritt sometimes made—she drinking it plain; Jo, Simon, and Niko mixing it with beer or booze.
One night, they made her favorite comfort food, the juiciest, most flavorful roast chicken Niko had ever tasted, skin golden-brown and perfectly crisped, the potatoes underneath salty and rich from the drippings. Merritt had to playfully slap his hand away before he ate too many of them straight from the roasting pan.
They used the leftover chicken to makehisfavorite comfort food, avgolemono, Merritt whisking the eggs and lemon together as he slowly poured a few cups of the boiling broth into the mixture, tempering it so the eggs wouldn’t scramble in the soup.
“Ohhh my god,” Merritt groaned when she took her first spoonful, her eyes practically rolling back in her head. “I think this might be the best thing I’ve eaten in my entire life.”
Later, in his room, when he made her eyes roll back in her head for a different reason, he wasn’t sure which one he was prouder of.
Since he was finished with everything big in the house, he spent most of his working hours in his garage or on her mural, both activities where it was easy to get lost for hours in a meditative groove. When he was done for the day, he’d come upstairs or go inside to find Merritt, who was never far.
She’d moved her keyboard into her house, and for several days straight, she sat there with her headphones on, working with terrifying focus on her song for the silent auction winner.He’d asked her to write something about his recently deceased cat, Shrimp, whom he’d had from kittenhood through age twenty-one. The final product was a stirring, ambitious, seven-minute tribute to the small but significant life of Shrimp, leaving them both in tears when she was done playing it through for the first time.
“Good,” she said through her sniffles. “That’s exactly what I was going for.”
Mostly, though, she was occupied with moving in everything she owned and figuring out where to buy whatever she didn’t. He’d go over to kiss her, and she’d look up from her laptop, turning it around to ask him whether he thought this listing of eighteenth-century silverware on eBay was haunted. (The answer was obviously yes.)
They went back to the monthly flea market in Silverton, strolling through hand in hand, Merritt filling the back of his truck with her purchases this time. She took a day trip to Boulder, too, with Daniela, to visit her favorite hidden-gem antique stores, and she spent all day sending him photos—a pinup-girl lamp, an art deco bar cart, a three-hundred-year-old Dutch architect’s table—before, unsurprisingly, returning home with all of them. She ordered some things new, boxes piling up in front of the house faster than she could unpack them, but it was clear she most loved hunting down that one-of-a-kind find she didn’t even know she needed.
They drove out to Denver for a weekend, planning to do the same thing there. On Simon’s recommendation, Niko had made a surprise reservation at a pop-up restaurant run by a famous chef Simon followed on Instagram.
If he was being honest with himself, he wanted to impress her. Show her that he wasn’t just the playing-video-games, smoking-late-night-joints, napping-in-the-hammock guy. He could be thesophisticated, expensive-tasting-menu-at-an-exclusive-restaurant guy, too.
He wasn’t sure why he cared this much, since their relationship was ending in a few weeks no matterwhatkind of guy she thought he was, but he was trying not to think too hard about that part.
However, his bubble was popped as soon as they were seated, handed their menus, and informed that the chef had recently begun specializing in THC-infused cuisine.
“Do you want to leave?” he whispered to her, once the waiter was out of earshot. “Sorry, I guess I didn’t read it carefully enough when I made the reservation.”
She bit her lip. “I don’t have the best track record with edibles. But I’m starving, and this menu looks amazing. I’m sure they’re small portions, and they’ll probably be conservative with the dosing, right?”
After that, the last thing he remembered was being served the first course, a tiny spoonful of caviar on top of a crispy rice cake the size of a quarter, popping it into his mouth all at once while Merritt nibbled on hers delicately.
They woke up the next morning—the next afternoon, technically—in a groggy daze, Merritt somehow wearing nothing but Niko’s underwear. They did their best to piece together the events of the night before, the three pizza boxes on the counter all the evidence Niko needed to determine that the tasting menu had ultimately been just a very expensive appetizer.
When he took off his shirt to get into the shower, they both burst out laughing to discover a smudged face drawn on his torso in lipstick. By the time he got out, Merritt had found a video on her phone neither of them remembered taking, his disembodied torso-face crunching up and down to make the mouth around his navel move, singing “Hot Stuff” in a Muppetvoice as Merritt, behind the camera, laughed so hard that only her choked wheezes were audible.
They were too lethargic to stick to their original plan of spending all day antiquing, so after taking long, hot showers, they spent the rest of the day in bed, napping and fooling around lazily and watching bad reality TV, emerging only once the sun had set and the leftover pizza was gone to grab tacos at the counter-service place around the corner.
Even though nothing about the trip had gone according to plan, they both agreed, as they embarked on the four-hour drive home the next morning, it had been a perfect weekend.
Things weren’t all perfect, though. He tried his best to clear the air with Dev, grabbing lunch with him the next time they played pickup basketball, but Dev didn’t seem interested in talking about it, brushing it off with a vague “It’s none of my business” and “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” Even though that was the response Niko had originally hoped for, it didn’t sound especially genuine.
From what Merritt told him, her attempt to talk to Olivia had been met with similar stonewalling. The fact that the two of them were now barely speaking also complicated the baby shower planning.
One afternoon, Merritt’s sandal had broken while they were walking back from town, and Niko immediately hoisted her onto his back, both of them laughing like idiots as he carried her down the sidewalk. She’d been in the middle of trying to share her cinnamon-cayenne-honey ice-cream cone over his shoulder, which he complained made him feel like a horse, making them laugh even harder, when Olivia and Dev had come out of the grocery store. The look of distress on Olivia’s face had drained the amusement right out of them.
After that, Merritt quietly asked him to put her down, andthey’d been silent the rest of the way back apart from theslap-slap-slapof her sandal.
But even with all the movement she’d made on her house, she seemed reluctant to fully move out of Olivia and Dev’s.
“It feels passive-aggressive, doing it while things are still weird between us,” she said, loading the dishwasher later that night. “I’m just going to wait.”
Niko was silent, scrubbing the pan he’d used to deep-fry paper-thin slices of battered eggplant served with squeezes of lemon and a dollop of yogurt.
Even though she didn’t say what she was waiting for, it was obvious what she meant: after he left, after this ended, after he’d started his new life, where he definitely wouldn’t spend every day reliving every stolen, sun-drenched moment of this summer.
