Mae stared at the ceiling.
Vik sighed once more and squeezed her hand harder.
“Mae,” they said again. “I know you’re so used to it, giving so much of your energy away, but…you do know that living your owndream is queer resistance, too, right? Letting yourself be happy, doing what feels right foryou, is queer joy. And queer joy is always a revolution.”
Mae knew they were right. The community center had always been Jesus’s dream. Their fearless leader. She had been along for the ride, had felt purpose along with all the hard parts, but…it wasn’t the same, without him singing in the office next to hers. It never would be.
And she knew. That Jesus had specifically told her to be selfish.
“What I need to implore,”Jesus had said, voice growing ever hoarser,“Mae, my darling, is that the money is for you. I’m choosing to give it to you, and dios mio, Mae, if you just give it back to the center, or donate it all away?—”
He had shaken a finger before dropping his hand back to the bed. His head lolled toward her, the tough guy act he’d been trying to enforce fading away. Replaced by a warm, tired look of only love that Mae wanted to both run away from and treasure in her heart forever. She wished she could’ve saved it in a locket, a physical thing she could return to, over and over, until her own last days.
I want you to trust the world again.
“Yeah,” she whispered now. “I know.”
“And anyway,” Vik continued, “We know you’re going to stock that bookstore to the gills with queer shit, which is its own kind of social work in and of itself, really.”
Mae laughed through the pressure in her sinuses.
“I was thinking of putting a huge trans flag right in the window. Just really putting it all out there for any passersby.”
“The mid-Oregon coast won’t know what hit it.”
“I’m sure there are other storefronts on the coast with trans flags, though,” Mae added after a minute. “Even if I don’t know where they all are, yet.”
Vik nudged Mae’s foot with their own.
“Yeah,” they said softly. “But having another one never hurts.”
Mae finally turned away from the ceiling, rolling her neck to smile at Vik.
“Yeah,” she said, equally as soft. “That’s true.”
Vik’s mouth morphed into a grim line.
“And you’re sure this Dell person isn’t going to screw you over?”
Mae broke eye contact to stare back at the pothos, using all of her concentration on not letting heat flare up her neck.
Dell still refused to sell Mae the building outright. But he’d begrudgingly agreed to lease it to her, for a time.
A compromise.
A compromise that, if she let herself think on it too long, still pissed her off.
“Yeah,” Mae said, and she couldn’t tell if it was a lie or forced optimism. “It’ll be okay.”
She should be grateful he had compromised at all. That she was still going to be able to move into 12 Main Street. That this perhaps unhinged plan still had legs.
It was simply that Mae had never had the opportunity before toownsomething. She had spent most of the last two decades alternately dreaming about owning a house and making jokes with her fellow forever-renter friends about how they would never be able to actually accomplish such a thing.
Unless a loved one died, and unexpectedly left you three-quarters of a million dollars.
And maybe Maeshouldfinally buy a fucking house. Tell Dell to go fuck himself. She could keep working at the community center she loved, and grow the garden she’d always dreamed of. It was hard, on her days of doubt, to understand why the hell shewasn’tdoing that.
Yet…
