And then she stood on the front walkway, in full view of Main Street, and poured out her cheerful paint once more.
* * *
Hours later, Mae rubbed her eyes as the computer screen started to go blurry.
Dell had left an hour ago to feed the dogs. He had installed two of the floating shelves before he left, just offset from each other in the brief wallspace between the counter and the window on the left side of the building. Mae’s eyes kept drifting toward them, the shine of the varnish Dell had lacquered over the reclaimed wood they’d purchased together. A relief, a gift, to keep her eyes distracted from the cheap plywood that now constituted her beautiful picture window.
Mae gave herself a shake before focusing again on the order form in front of her.
She knew she should head home, too, or at least, back to the ADU—go home—but somehow she couldn’t make herself leave the shop. As if her mere presence could stop anything else from happening. She didn’t think anything else would, really; cowards were typically not super persistent. They had done their job. And it had been effective.
Still, Mae lingered.
Maybe something in her body knew. Maybe she knew she was waiting.
The knock on the door made her jump, but for the first time all day, she didn’t feel scared.
“Everyone else wanted to come,” Vik said, bag dropping off their shoulder onto the floor. They didn’t look at the window, didn’t glance at the rest of the shop. They only had eyes for Mae. “But I told them no. Since you said you didn’t even want me to come, I thought it’d be too much. Is that okay?”
Mae let herself be wrapped in Vik’s arms.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, this is okay. This is perfect.”
“Well,” Vik added, into Mae’s hair, “I would’ve let Jackson come. But he has to watch his sourdough.”
And Mae laughed, before she finally started to cry.
fifteen
“It’s beena while since I’ve slept this close to someone,” Mae said to the back of Vik’s head three hours later, as they spooned under the Pendleton blanket in the ADU. “I apologize in advance if I end up humping you.”
After Mae had gotten ahold of herself and shown Vik everything that existed of Bae Books thus far, she’d given them a tour of the town. Which took about ten minutes—and Liv hadn’t even been at the IGA, making the whole venture a bit of a bust—so then they’d gone to the beach. Where Mae got weepy again, over Jesus, over the fact that she didn’t visit the beach as much as she’d thought she would, over the fact that such a beautiful place that spoke to her so deeply could also be so cruel and complicated.
Finally, she’d brought Vik here. Vik had fallen in love immediately, video calling Jackson to show him the tiny space. Jackson, in turn, showed Mae his breadmaking station, and Mae’s chest hurt, seeing his and Vik’s home again, even if it was through the jerky, pixelated view of Greyfin Bay Wi-Fi.
Vik let out a half asleep snort.
“No one since Eden, huh?”
“Nope.” Mae popped thepinto Vik’s curls. Her mind was barely functioning, but still, she tried to do some mental calculation. It must have been at least a year now, since it all blew up with Eden. Felt longer, though.
Some years felt short. The ones where you lost someone, though. Those felt like forever.
After a moment, she added, deep in the reflective haze a surprising, exhausting day thrusts upon a person, “You know, I think Jesus partly gave me all this money because he was so horrified by what she did. Like he worried I was so heartbroken by it. But…”
Vik shifted, blinking open their eyes to look at her.
That day in the hospital with Jesus had receded in Mae’s mind, faded in the loud hum of her new life. But it was always there, every word he’d said, whenever Mae was strong enough to retrieve them.I know that woman hurt you.
I want you to trust the world again.
“The honest truth is…I’ve hardly thought about her. I know what she did was fucked up.”
And maybe it was weird, that Mae had been able to get over it so easily. Finding out that Eden had actually been married the whole five months they’d dated. With a kid, no less. It had hurt like hell at the time, of course. One of the most appalling things that had ever happened to her. But when Mae thought of Eden now, she simply felt…nothing.
“The only people I actually keep thinking about, since I’ve been out here? Are Jesus and Becks. The first girl I fell in love with, like, ages ago.” Mae huffed out a small laugh at herself. “Like all the shit that happened in my life in between Becks and Jesus’s death…”
Mae trailed off, wondering what she was actually trying to say.
