MAYBE THINGS ARE complicated, but they’re also good.
Julia decides to stick around a bit longer, and the apartment is never empty, rarely quiet. Miles drops off chai for me at the library on his way into work. Ashleigh tells me about school drop-off drama over smoothies at a juice bar. One night, she, Julia, and I hit up Cherry Hill and watch Miles dazzle his customers at the bar’s far end. Every time he looks over, it’s like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, and I do my best to feel content, to be just another person at the edge of his glow.
On Thursday, he, Julia, and I go to Traverse City for the Fourth of July parade, then sit in a row on grass so cool it feels damp, to watch the fireworks pop and sparkle out over the bay. It’s the kind of perfect summer night I can’t remember having since I was a kid, not even this time last year, when Peter and I went to his parents’ annual barbecue.
Because there, in their gorgeous, lightning bug–filled garden, with all of their longtime friends tipsy and flushed and happy in rattan patio chairs, a part of me had still ached.
Could feel that I was standing outside of things, waiting for the moment I would finally become a part of it.
Here, tonight, though, I’m in the center of everything. This moment, though fleeting, belongs to me too.
On Sunday, we go back to Traverse City with Ashleigh, for the end of the Cherry Festival. We wander the aisles of pop-up tents and food trucks, gorging ourselves on tarts and hand pies late into the night, and every time the Daphne Moan sneaks out, Miles’s eyes and mine seek each other out, the quirk of his mouth my own personal lightning rod.
And then I look away, because this is good. We are friends.
When we can’t stomach another bite, Julia demolishes us in a basketball carnival game, then talks us into riding the Spinning Cherries, from which we depart violently nauseous, cursing the cherry slushies we piled on top of everything else in our stomachs before boarding.
I check for job postings occasionally, but only for jobs I really think I might like now. Other children’s librarian or programmer positions in cities I’m at least interested in.
Julia decides to stay another week, and we use our Sunday for an elaborate farmers’ market shopping trip followed by a visit to an arcade bar, where once again she heartily and gleefully annihilates us, this time at Ms. Pac-Man.
Every night that week, we cook together—or Miles cooks, while Jules sits on the counter, curating a country playlist and singing along at top volume into whatever utensil her brother has most recently set down. I chop whatever he puts in front of me, wash whichever dishes he’s done with.
Most nights we eat on the floor around the coffee table, all the windows thrown open, the buzz of crickets and cicadas around us and the smell of fir wafting in, but sometimes we sit in a row on the couch, eating while we watch a spy movie or one about a heist, my veins humming every time Miles leans across me to grab a handful of popcorn or the remote, my heart clenching whenever our eyes catch in the dark.
Sometimes at night, from the other room, he texts me live updates as he listens to the audiobook of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, things like i want to live w the beavers and wat is turkish delight and edmund needs 2 chill. Sometimes we text for an hour straight, like our doors aren’t ten feet apart.
We’re basically always together, but we’re almost never alone, aside from once when he accidentally locked his keys in the truck and I had to bring his spare up to the winery.
I’m already in my pajamas, so he comes out to meet me in the lot, with a grin and a hug that smells like campfire and feels like a hook in my heart.
On Friday the nineteenth, I find out about the children’s librarian job in Worcester County, Maryland.
A quick online search tells me the Ocean City Library is twenty minutes from my mother and looks like an adorable lighthouse filled with books.
I almost text my mom, but something holds me back. It seems too good to be true. There will probably be dozens of applications, and there’s no point in getting my or her hopes up before I’ve even gotten an interview.
Still, I email them my cover letter and résumé on my lunch break, and check my email obsessively for the rest of my shift.
When I get home, I know Julia isn’t there.
I feel it like a barometric shift. Probably because I typically hear Julia before I see her. Less clear is how my nervous system knows Miles is here, even though his Crocs aren’t sitting next to the shoe rack, as is his custom, and it’s Friday night, when he usually works.
I hang my bags on the hooks by the door, kick my loafers onto the rack, and round the corner into the kitchen. He’s standing beside the stove, reading something on his phone with a divot between his brows as he waits for water to boil.
“So you finally shut your sister in the pantry,” I say.
He looks up, breaking into a smile. “She’s bringing up packages from the lobby.”
I lean back to peer out of the kitchen, toward the living room. Three large cardboard boxes already sit stacked beside the coffee table.
I feel a flurry of panic that I might’ve forgotten to cancel some expensive order for the wedding, and thus Peter has forwarded it here. A life-size marble statue of us embracing, maybe.
No recollection of ordering that, but who knows? I was in a wedding fugue state.
The water in the pot starts to burble, and Miles dumps hand-rolled trofie noodles into it. In the food processor beside him, I see what appears to be fresh-made pesto, and my salivary glands kick into high gear. “You hungry?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re drooling,” he teases.
“Is there enough?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says.
“Don’t you work tonight?” I call over my shoulder as I wander out of the kitchen toward the packages.
“Heading in right after this is done,” he calls back.
I scan the mishmash of shipping labels and find the sender’s name: Julia Nowak. An address in Chicago.
Then the receiver’s name: Julia Nowak, but with our address.
I pad back into the kitchen. “What are all these boxes?”
“No idea,” Miles says.
On cue, the front door flings open, and Julia crashes into the room with more packages. “Hey, Daph,” she says, bustling past.
I follow her into the living room, and she sets the boxes down with a huff. “What you got there?” I ask.
She passes me on her way back to the kitchen. “Just the essentials.”
I peek my head back in as she’s grabbing a sparkling water from the fridge.
“Essential what?” Miles asks.
She’s already squeezing between us to leave the room again, her voice growing fainter as she retreats to the cardboard treasure trove at the far end of the apartment.
“Whatever I can’t live without,” she calls. “Paid my roommate to box it up. Once I find a place, I’ll go back for the rest.”
Miles’s head snaps up from the pasta pot.
Our eyes lock. He shakes his head, a general I have no idea pantomime.
“It’s okay,” I say under my breath.
He shakes his head, calls loud and clear, “Jules? Come here for a sec.”
She pops her head back into the kitchen. “Yeah?”
“Quick question,” he says. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
With doe-eyed innocence, she asks, “What do you mean?”
“Why do you need more stuff,” he says. “Your stuff is already swallowing the apartment.”
“I told you I was thinking about sticking around longer,” she replies.
“Thinking about staying another week,” he says. “That’s what you said. A week ago.”
“Exactly. I’m going to stay for another few days. Then fly back to Chicago to pack up the rest of my stuff and drive it out here. But I needed my good clothes for job interviews, so I had Riley mail some stuff.”
“Job interviews,” he says.
“I’ll need a new job,” she says. “I can’t live with you forever.”
He runs a hand down his face. “When did you decide all this?”
“When I got here and realized you were in total denial about what you’ve just been through and you obviously need me.”
“Julia, I’m—”
“—fine,” she finishes with an eye roll. “You’re always fine.”
“I’m going to just . . . go in the other room,” I say, creeping away.
“No, don’t,” Julia says cheerily, already backing toward the front door. “Ashleigh’s actually double-parked downstairs waiting for me, so I have to run!”
She whirls out the same way she whirled in.
After a beat of silence, Miles and I look at each other.
“I’ll get her a hotel,” he says. “Or I’ll get you a hotel.”
“First of all, any hotel that will have a summer vacancy this last minute is not one I’m going to stay in,” I say. “And second of all, I can handle one more week of flat irons in the sink and bronzer on the floor.”
His brow lifts. “You sure?”
“Positive,” I say. “But how do you feel?”
He clears his throat and turns back to the noodles, scooping one out with a fork to test it before carrying the pot to the strainer in the sink. “I don’t know,” he says. “She’s still acting like everything’s normal, but I know my sister. She’s hiding from something, and she doesn’t usually hide.”
“Maybe she really is just worried about you,” I tell him.
He dumps the noodles back into the pot. “Why should she be worried about me?”
I stare at him.
“It was three and a half months ago,” he points out. “What does she need me to do to prove I’m okay? Get a tattoo that says HAPPILY SINGLE on my forehead?”
“That would scream ‘I’m okay,’ ” I say.
“You know what I mean.” He dumps the pesto in with the noodles and swirls the pot around. “I’m thirteen years older than her. I’ve been on my own since she was a kid. I don’t need my barely grown sister worrying about me. Especially when worrying about me mostly just consists of leaving her dirty clothes on the hallway floor, and setting her phone alarm to top volume, then snoozing it five hundred times.”
I get down a couple of bowls and some forks, and pass them to him to start dishing it up. “Do you want me to kick her out?”
He eyes me briefly, then goes back to scooping pasta into the bowls. “I can’t,” he says. “Not when I don’t know what’s going on.”
He adds a couple whole basil leaves to each bowl and passes me one.
I set mine aside and touch his shoulders, ease them down. “If you ever need to vent,” I say, “text me. You know I love complaining, and it’s no fun to be the only one.”
His jaw softens. He sets his pasta aside too and pulls me into a hug that makes my bones liquefy, his breath warm against my neck. I close my eyes and breathe him in, and it’s not complicated: I want him, I like him, and I care about him enough to push those first two thoughts aside.
The front door flings open, Ashleigh’s and Julia’s laughs competing for Most Likely to Piss Off Mr. Dorner, and we peel apart as they bound inside, loaded with Target totes.
“Smells like heaven,” Ashleigh says, whizzing past. Miles and I exchange a look, both apparently sensing some kind of mischief afoot.
We pick up our bowls and follow them to the living room, where they empty their totes onto the rug. An air mattress, a pump, a couple of vacuum-sealed pillows, a blue blazer, a gold chenille blanket, and two mini desktop fans fall out, followed by some toiletries and a belt.
“Are you planning a very specific heist?” I ask.
“I thought about buying a pullout to replace this garbage sofa,” Julia says, “but I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
“Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t want to be presumptuous,” Miles deadpans.
“Hey, be nice,” Julia says. “It’s temporary. As soon as I get a job, I’ll start apartment hunting.”
He rubs his brow. “I have to get to work. We’ll talk later.”
“You know where to find me,” she says, leaning over the couch to gather her laundry.
Miles turns, shaking his head and still forking pesto into his mouth as he heads toward the front door.
I set my own bowl down on the coffee table. “Do you need help with that?”
“Nope,” Julia says. “Just looking for somewhere else to put this stuff. The living room’s getting a bit unwieldy.”
Ashleigh snorts. “A bit.”
Julia’s moving toward the closet. The closet. Where I keep the dress.
My heart rattles against my rib cage like one of those New Year’s Eve clappers. She reaches for the pocket doors, seemingly in slow motion.
“No, wait—” I lunge for her.
I don’t make it in time.
Not even close.
For the first time since the day Miles helped me haul my stuff over here, the closet door slides all the way open—from the wrong side. The side packed so Tetris-tight that the absence of the door triggers an avalanche of white, cream, ivory, blush.
Gift bags. Boxes of taper candles. Tea lights. A crate of biodegradable cutlery. Palm leaf plates. Organza, an ungodly amount of organza. The amount you’d need to film a monster movie where the town predator was a sentient wedding dress, hell-bent on swallowing women whole.
Me. I am the woman who was supposed to be swallowed by that dress, and now it’s cascading directly into Julia’s face, a raging waterfall of my mistakes.
It takes several seconds, during which she’s utterly frozen, for everything to come tumbling out. It’s like something out of I Love Lucy, or The Dick Van Dyke show.
When it’s finally over, we’re all left staring.
“Oh, honey,” Ashleigh says. “Tell me you didn’t keep the dress.”
