“Jesus!” He laughed, rubbing his arm. “Ow, Mae.”
“Oh, you arefine.I can’t believe you’re refusing to sell me this building because I moved here from the same fucking place you did!”
“It’s—” He shook his head, suddenly immensely tired, the way he felt whenever he thought about Portland. “For the record, I am notfromPortland. I’mfromthe UP. I only lived in Portland for a little while.” Or fifteen years. Whatever. Mae didn’t need to know every detail.
“Michigan?”
“Yeah. My mom’s still there.”
Mae released a smallhm, head dropping back to the rug.
“And I’m not refusing to sell you the building, I’m just giving myself some insurance. I compromised with you. I’m not the bogeyman here.”
Another, far more skepticalhm.
“Anyway.” Dell rolled his eyes. “Lauren was a good person. But…I left her after that thing that happened to me, before I moved to Greyfin Bay.”
“Oh.”
And Dell could feel it, that his head was clearer than it had been yesterday, when they’d first talked about this. It felt more embarrassing, childish now to keep using a vague euphemism—that thing that happened to me—instead of just fucking saying it. Why was he still holding it back from Mae, from anyone? He should be better. Able to use his words. They were there, right now, clear in his head. Why couldn’t he just say it?
A stranger broke into my house in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping. They took the randomest things. They had a gun. I was shot two times but somehow survived. Nobody caught them or knows why it happened. I can’t remember what they looked like.
But he’d already saidthat thing that happened to meinstead, so the moment had passed. Again.
Dell stretched his fingers over his belly, tried to keep himself from fidgeting.
“We were already starting to drift apart a bit. I think she’d been pissed for a while that we weren’t living together. I couldn’t tell you why we weren’t, other than me being stubborn, but anyway. I just felt like a different person, after. Needed to get away. And Lauren loved her job in the city with the parks department; it was meaningful to her. I couldn’t take her away from that. But…”
He winced. God, he really did rarely think about Lauren. He didn’t have a lot of guilt about it, how easy it’d been to leave Portland behind. How much of that portion of his life simply became a blur. Bringing Lauren back up hurt, though. Lauren hadn’t deserved the home invasion—the effects of it—any more than he had.
“I know it was shitty. Not letting her help me through it. It was probably rough for her, just a really shitty way to leave someone, but what’s done is done. I think she and Georgia kept in touch, though, at least for a while. I felt a little better, knowing that.”
“Georgia?”
“My mom.”
“Oh.”
“My mom was an artist and an art teacher her whole life; she always dabbled in whatever medium she could get her hands on to try, but she loved pottery and sculpture the most, and Lauren did, too. Lauren had a wheel in her basement, made some beautiful stuff. The mugs in the ADU were made by her. And the mug I, uh, threw at you.”
“Those are from her? Dang. Those are beautiful. And you broke one of them! I’m so sorry, Dell.”
Dell huffed. “Considering I almost gave you a concussion with that mug, I don’t think you have much to be sorry about, Mae.”
“Well. I still am.”
“Anyway.” Dell lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes we hurt people.”
“Yeah,” Mae said, quiet. She sighed, just as soft. “Sometimes we do.”
An old Caamp song shuffled onto Mae’s playlist next. Dell smiled. This playlist had been so different from the one she played most often at the shop, the one full of Destiny’s Child and reggaeton. He wondered which playlist was actually most Mae.
And then it came to him.
“That playlist you’re playing all the time in here. Is that Jesus’s?”
“Yeah,” she answered without questioning the swift change in topic. “His death party playlist. So Georgia still lives in the UP?”
