“Oh my god, Dell,” Mae burst out. “We totally fucked on your mom’s future kitchen counter.”
Dell looked at her, mouth open for a solid ten seconds before he snapped it shut.
“I am choosing to maintain a solid cognitive dissonance about that for the rest of my days.”
Mae nodded. “Good call.”
“Anyway.” Dell cleared his throat, picking up a mug from the counter and stepping out from behind the kitchen island. “Then we have the living room…”
Mae followed him into the high ceilinged, straight-out-of-a-magazine living room and gasped, interrupting whatever he’d been saying.
“Hey!” She smacked him in the arm. “I have that same exact poster in my office! The Joshua Tree National Park one.”
“I know.” He cleared his throat. “You also have…” And he walked a few steps further into the hallway, switched on a light. “This one.”
She gasped and smacked his arm again. “Hot diggity dog!”
Dell’s lip twitched; he covered his mouth with a hand as if to hide it.
“I also…” He dropped the hand and cleared his throat again. “I’m also pretty sure I went to that same Decemberists show, at Edgefield. The one you have a poster of.”
Mae turned her gaze from the Olympic National Park poster to Dell’s face.
“No shit,” she said.
“Yeah.” Dell laughed a little, looking away. “Anyway. I usually work on the computer in here…” He walked through the hall, back toward the kitchen, and Mae followed, a sense of awe infused in every single thing that was happening just then.
The matching posters.
The way Dell seemed almost nervous, showing her around the details of his clearly beloved house, scratching his beard every ten seconds, clearing his throat every thirty.
Mae could only watch him until the awe filled her lungs, her throat, the corners of her eyes. She wanted to grab his hands every time he gestured to something, every time he ran them over a piece of furniture, and kiss every fingertip.
They were in Dell’s laundry room when she thought,here I am again.
Each time her heart had been broken, whether through someone else’s actions or her own—from Decree in the sixth grade, the first crush that had truly consumed her, to Becks, to Eden, and all the aches that had come in between—she always told herself she was done. She was her own best love; she didn’t need any more of this mess. She’d never felt it as strongly as after Eden. She wasold. Who needed it.
And then someone new showed up. Some new surprise. And she found herself here again.
As Dell pointed out random corners of his house, as they stood in each other’s way in the bathroom and laughed, mostly breathless, like awkward kids, Mae thought maybe this realization should concern her. What had she just asked Vik the other day? Was she simply too susceptible to throwing around her heart? Did she attract heartbreak?
But as she examined every grain of wood in Dell’s walls, as she studied the crinkles of his eyes every time he glanced back at her, she only felt…grateful. To be here again. To feel this glow again.
How many times did one fall in love, over the course of a lifetime?
Maybe there wasn’t only one answer.
Maybe there was no limit.
twenty-four
“And then,well, you’ve seen this one before?—”
Dell had barely opened the door to his bedroom before Mae was on him.
He stumbled back at the force of her, a hand reaching for the wall to steady themselves, a laugh tumbling from his mouth into hers.
“Hi,” she said, before swallowing his laughter down, commanding his lips with her own, swimming her tongue inside his mouth, her hands underneath his T-shirt.
