“Yeah?” Mae’s voice was so feather soft he almost wasn’t sure he actually heard it, or if he was just making things up. Maybe he was making this all up. Maybe he’d lost his whole entire mind.
“Yeah. Never stop.”
He couldn’t quite say if she followed the instruction. Because somewhere in the next sixty seconds or so, Dell fell the fuck asleep.
thirteen
As it turned out,falling asleep on a hard floor barely cushioned by a thin rug hadn’t been the best of ideas for two forty-somethings. Both Mae and Dell hobbled to their vehicles early the next morning with matching scowls, returning to Dell’s home on the hill as the sun was rising, the morning mist rising off the beach. Later, Mae would laugh at the memory of the two of them stumbling out of the bookstore in the dark, grumpy as hell and in pain, but at the time, all Mae wanted was a hot shower and the soft comfort of a bed.
Dell’s truck had left the gravel drive again sometime later, but Mae stayed holed up in the ADU for the rest of the day. Once she was more awake, she opened her laptop, placed more orders for the shop. Finished an assignment for class, did her required check-in on the message board. When her brain was done with working, she sat at the tiny kitchen table, sipping tea out of one of Lauren’s mugs. Staring out into Dell’s landscaping, the trees beyond, the ocean she knew lay beyond that.
And she thought about Dell’s dark eyes, boring into her own as they looked at each other across the floor. How his voice turned even deeper, even scrapier, when he was tired. The warmth of his scalp under her fingertips.
Shit.
Mae covered her face with her hands and breathed in, deep and slow. Her back still ached, but her headache had finally fully receded. She knew champagne always gave her wicked hangovers, especially cheap stuff that shouldn’t even be called champagne, but…it had felt like a good idea, at the time.
Dell had talked about making dumbass decisions in your twenties, but the more her irrefutable crush on her landlord solidified, Mae couldn’t help but think that maybe dumbass decisions never truly went away.
Part of her itched to get back to the shop and work away this distraction until she could fully compartmentalize. Tuck whatever fantasies she had about Dell McCleary neatly away.
The other part of her…it was immature, but she couldn’t stop thinking about how this was exactlythe kind of hot dish that Jesus Herrera-Baptiste would have absolutely shivered with delight to learn all about. She wished he was here. She wished he could make her laugh. About Dell. About how proud he was of her. About all of it. God, Jesus would love Olive.
It occurred to her, though, after a while, that there was someone else who would love to gossip about Dell, too. Mae just hadn’t talked to him in what felt like a long time.
Mae grabbed her phone off the table, searching for Theo’s name in her messages.
They had never conversed much in one-on-one texting, even before Mae left Portland; Theo was the kind of friend you connected with in person when you were together, so instantly and importantly that it somehow sustained all the stretches of silence in between. She contemplated sending him one of the pictures of Dell she’d surreptitiously taken over the past few weeks: at the lumberyard; working on the bookshelves. She was positive Theo would have things! to! say, honey!
I miss you, she ended up typing instead.
Something healed in her when it only took Theo, a notorious erratic texter, five minutes to reply.Mae Bae ??
miss you too
when can we come see your store?
Mae bit her lip, heart warming even more at the fact that he wanted to come. That he wasn’t still mad at her for leaving.
She tried to not think about it, the idea of her friends here, in Greyfin Bay. She wanted it too badly. It felt foolish, somehow, wanting it. Like she was failing Liv. Proving Dell right.
Soon ??, she texted back.
While she had her screen up, she navigated to Instagram to check on Bay Books’s account. She frowned at a spattering of new comments on her most recent post from yesterday. It was a simple post, Dell’s installed bookshelf to the right, the trans flag in the front window visible to the left.It is ON, she’d typed in the caption.
For some reason, this had inspired her fellow humans and/or bots to say:
Go back to Epstein Island
Greyfin Bay needs to remain safe for our children
k*ll yrself
And for half a second, as happened every time, Mae almost deleted the whole post. She almost deleted the whole account. She almost planned what she’d say to Dell as she packed her bags and forgot this entire fucking venture.
But then the half second passed, and she deleted the comments. Blocked the users. Tossed her phone back on the table and stood, grabbing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s from the freezer. She breathed out a sigh of relief when the first bite hit her tongue.
Her phone buzzed.
