Vik looked down, shifting on their feet right alongside her. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But I felt…okay. Being sad with him.”
Vik glanced up at her.
“You really have to find out more about this fuck buddy.”
Mae sighed. “I know. Anyway, your hike was good?”
“Yeah. It was great.”
Mae and Dell had already been to Mae’s storage unit, filling up half of Dell’s truckbed before she got overwhelmed. She had forgotten, somehow, about half of the things she owned. How much she had missed those things.
And how she had no idea, aside from the things she wanted to use for the shop, where she was going to put them.
She should have thought through this trip so much more. About how it would make her face the fact that she couldn’t live in Dell’s mother’s ADU forever. About how being in Portland again would make her feel, a Portland where she no longer had her own home: a confusing, overwhelming combination of comforted and hollow.
It had simply seemed like a good idea, back in the warmth of Vik’s surprise visit to Greyfin Bay. A way to not have to say goodbye to Vik. To not have to deal with the plywood in Bae Books’s window.
Dell had taken it in stride when Mae had to stop only a third of the way through the storage unit without being able to fully explain why. “We’ll have plenty of time to come back tomorrow, right?” he’d said with a smile that made her want to kiss him, and they’d gotten a late lunch at one of Mae’s old favorite sandwich shops, where Mae consumed a sandwich that tasted so good she’d almost cried.
“We’re not both supposed to sleep on that, are we?”
Mae turned at Dell’s voice. He stood in the doorway, casting a skeptical glance at the foldaway.
“Oh, no,” Vik said. “I figured you’d take the couch in the living room.”
“The couch is good,” Dell said, a second before Jackson appeared behind his shoulder.
“Or,” Jackson said with a smile, eyes sparking at Vik, “You could join us in our?—”
“Let’s show you that couch next.” Vik plowed through both Dell and Jackson at the doorway, giving Jackson a smack on the hip as they passed.
Dell stopped short as they entered Jackson and Vik’s light-filled living room.
“There are…a lot of plants in here,” Dell observed. Mae held a hand to her heart. She hadmissedthis house.
Jackson laughed.
“It’s these two.” He tilted his head toward Mae and Vik. “They’re like a they/them gardening platoon.”
“Aplatoon?” Vik asked incredulously as they walked toward their army of monsteras. “That’s the best word you could come up with?”
“I like it,” Mae said. “It sounds like…a cute fat duck or something.”
Vik shook their head. “Never tell that to the armed forces.”
“Oh, these are lookinggreat.” Mae leaned closer to take a look at the African violets, the Christmas cactus, the numerous jades.
“Yeah. The sun’s been kind to us this fall.”
A vision hit Mae of Dell in his safety goggles, leaning over his work bench on the back porch of the shop, a ray of light slashed across his hair.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
And then she turned to look back at Jackson and Dell, standing a few feet away, together in a pool of light from the wide window. And?—
Mae stared at them a moment more, suddenly agog.
