And Dell truly should move. He shouldn’t care about the exhaustion hiding behind the steel in her voice.
“Where are you going to go?”
“I’ll find a hotel. I’m not completely incompetent. Please, get out of my way.”
Dell frowned.
She was a tenant. A tenant who had just promised, out loud, to be a pain in his ass. She’d be gone in a few months anyway, disappointed and disillusioned, the money she’d inherited from her friend wasted on a town that couldn’t bring her a profit.
Also: the only lodging that might actually have vacancy was The Fin Inn, a dilapidated motel next to a weed store on the northern edge of town.
He grabbed a bag from Mae’s hand.
“You’re staying with me.”
“What?” Her incredulous voice asked the question to his back, as he was already turned toward the door.
“Not withme, technically,” he clarified from the porch, motioning her outside. “But on my property. I have an ADU. An accessory dwelling unit. It’s fully furnished.”
She only stared at him, jaw slightly dropped. Her pink hair glowed under the light from the chandelier.
“It’s a private space,” he said, voice now as exhausted as hers. He had no idea why he was trying to sell this to her. “You can pretend I’m not even there.”
Mae didn’t move.
“It’s late,” he said.
Finally, she shook her head, muttering under her breath as she adjusted the tote bags on her shoulder.
“It’s late,” she echoed as she brushed past him. “That’s the only reason I’m agreeing to this. I’ll find another place tomorrow.”
He remained silent as he clicked off the light and locked the door.
When he turned, his eyes caught on the flags in the window. As they had when he’d walked up. Being that they were impossible to miss: a trans flag and a progress pride, both huge. Even now, with the internal lights off, the haze from the streetlamp outside Freddy’s next door caught their colors through the glass.
Mae was glaring at him, arms crossed over her chest again—daring him to say something—when he tore his eyes from the window. He held up his hands.
“I’m not saying shit,” he said. Even if his chest had filled with a barrage of complicated things when he’d first seen them. Even if he actually had a lot to say about those flags, here. Put up by Mae Kellerman her first night in town.
And when she finally turned, walking down the porch, Dell found himself, as he had from the start around Mae, immediately breaking his own promises.
“I like them,” he said to her back, his voice quiet as they walked through the chill of an early Greyfin Bay September evening, toward her car and his truck, and the place in the hills he called home.
* * *
Mae gripped the steering wheel as she followed Dell’s truck up a steep, narrow gravel lane.Dumb.Dumb, dumb, dumb. It was dumb she hadn’t thought about plumbing. She’d thought about heating and cooling, electrical, wifi, all things she could work out the first week. But somehow she hadn’t thought about plumbing, and of course Dell McCleary had to show upjustto point it out to her.
It was even dumber that she was currently following his truck up this obvious murder lane in the dark. But fully furnished, free lodging was, unfortunately, a highly logical option to accept. Even as she hated that, less than one day into the first truly solo adventure of her life, she was already leaning on someone else for support.
And that someone else wasDell.
She squinted into the dark as they rounded a curve.
She rarely drove at night in Portland these days; if she met friends in the evening she preferred to take public transit or a rideshare. Although more often than not, especially since the split with Eden, she was simply at home once the sky turned dark, reading a romance novel and tending to her plants.
But as she followed her headlights under the canopy of firs that lined Dell’s road, a deep, visceral memory began to slash away her frustration and embarrassment. Replaced instead by the feeling of driving among the pine trees of the Carolinas past sundown, screaming along to mix CDs. Speeding below the maples and ashes of Madison with Becks a few years later. Blood humming with pent-up dreams, Becks’s foot always just a little too heavy on the gas.
Dell’s truck swung a right, his brake lights haloing in Mae’s retinas as he came to a stop. She pulled up next to him, trying to blink away the nostalgia: the remembrance of a sensation she’d forgotten she loved.
