We wove through suburban streets, out along the main road, and then off down a side street lined with shops. A butcher, a baker, a smoke shop. We parked in a spot labelled as a loading zone, right in front of a small shop with big italic lettering spelling out CJ Antiques above the front window.

We got out of the truck and Cameron stood by, holding the door to the shop open, while me and Justin unloaded the shelf. I was fucking terrified as we eased the heavy, bulky piece of furniture through the doorway, past the extremely-made-of-glass door, and once we were inside things only got worse. Everything was expensive, and a lot of it looked fragile. If I’d been the one going backwards, we would have obliterated half the store. It was some kind of miracle that we managed to navigate the narrow space between stock and ease the shelf into an empty corner without breaking anything.

Justin and Cameron immediately started in on a serious business discussion about how they should price the shelf. After standing there awkwardly for a few seconds, wondering if I should pretend I had any place in that conversation, I decided nope and quietly slipped away to have a look around the rest of the shop.

It was a beautiful mix of stuff, furniture and knick knacks and a garden statue as tall as I was tumbling with cherubs, all kind of cluttered together wherever it would fit. My fingers brushed over the curve of a vase, feeling out the thick outlines of the bright flowers painted onto it.

“Flynn,” Justin called, and I jerked my hand back, then had to quickly grab for the vase again when it was left teetering from my hasty retreat.

I eased my hand back again, a guilty half-smile on my lips as I looked up.

Justin met my gaze, held it for a long moment. “Want a coffee?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, thanks!”

He left without telling me off for touching the goods, so I figured that’d be Cameron’s job. He was making his way over to me.

But instead what he said was, “Thanks again for helping us out. I can’t believe I have back pain at twenty-five.”

“Well, you hurt it, right? You can do that at any age. I sprained my ankle when I was, like… eight or something.”

“True, true,” he said. “These past few years have just felt so long that it feels like I must be at least forty by now. When I was your age, me and Justin were living the easy life, going out and hitting the clubs—doing what young people do. Sometimes I miss that.”

“Well, you can still go to clubs, y’know? I go sometimes, and there are plenty of guys over twenty-five. That’s not super old.”

Cameron pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Nostalgia doesn’t really work like that. There is no going back, because it’s not the thing you miss, it’s being the age you were and living the life you were living. I guess that’s ironic, coming from someone who sells antiques, but most of this stuff was made long before I was born. It’s not about nostalgia—it’s about art, in all its forms.”

“Yeah, this is pretty cool stuff,” I said, glancing around at the shelves that sat on either side of us. I was kinda lowkey terrified I’d get distracted and gesture too dramatically and take out that vase for real this time. “Bit out of my price range, but I can see the appeal.”

“Antiques are just our niche, really. Good for turning a profit, but they’re not the only beautiful things. You can get some seriously nice quality goods for not that much second hand if you know what to look for.”

I nodded and gestured down at the tank I was wearing. “Got this shirt second hand.” Which maybe wasn’t a great supporting point for his whole thing about art or quality or whatever. I didn’t even know what brand this shit was and it probably wouldn’t mean a whole lot to me if I did. Also, it didn’t fit me very well.

“Right? You get it.”—wasn’t sure I did—“It’s great for furniture. Solid wood will last you a lifetime.”

“Yeah? I’ll keep that in mind when I need to get some. I’ve never bought furniture before.”

“Well, how about you keep my number, and I’ll help deliver your first piece for free. Or I’ll help you move your old furniture from your parents’ house—I’m not just trying to push my hobby onto you. Being injured has just reminded me what a privilege it is to have two strong men and a van big enough to move furniture. Not everyone has that.”

“Yeah, for sure, thanks,” I said. “I don’t really have anything in terms of, like, parents’ house furniture, but maybe I’ll buy something.”

“Not even your old bed?”

“My last proper thing was foster care, and then I was staying with, uh—a friend. Then my first place on my own was furnished.” Though I hadn’t actually used any of the furniture. “So, nope, nothing.” I smiled. That felt like punctuation sometimes, like adding a smiley face at the end of a text to let the other person know that all was chill.

“And your grandmother—I’m so sorry, Flynn.”

I didn’t know what he was expecting from me. Probably not for me to just keep on smiling like I was. I tried a shrug. 

“You know, Justin stayed with my family on and off all through high school, and he spent his last year with us full time,” Cameron said. “We’ve been best friends since we were kids.”

“Cool! So it’s kind of like you’re brothers?”

He laughed. “Kind of. Are you still close with the friend you stayed with?”

“Oh, uh, nah.” I ruffled a hand through my hair, making it fall into a new array of random directions. “Turned out I probably should have just stuck with foster care, but it was my second time through, and y’know…” I shrugged as I let myself trail off. I was oversharing again. I had a bad habit of that. Sometimes I’d just open my mouth and all of my thoughts would fall out, and I had a lot of thoughts about certain things that rattled a good bit harder than others.

Though it wasn’t like the real tough parts, the core of what was making all the noise, ever actually came pouring out. It was like it was too big to fit through my mouth hole, but all the bits of fluff and gunk that fell off it were a different story.

“Yeah,” Cameron said, nodding. He was wincing a little. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or at me. The bell on the door jingled and he turned as a woman wandered in. “I didn’t mean for the shop to be open, but Justin left the door unlocked, so I guess now we are. Excuse me.”

I nodded to myself as he walked away, tucking my hands behind my back and focussing all of my attention on not breaking anything. That’d been the one perk of living in a house full of roaches and mold. There’d been nothing of value to break. I’d left a pretty gnarly gouge in one of the walls once moving around a ladder that was way too big for the job to change a lightbulb, and I still wasn’t sure if anyone had even noticed.

I did shit like that a lot. Not, like, intentionally. I really did try not to. That was the problem, though—it took trying, and a whole lot of it, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t the same game most people were playing. 

Anyway, I did manage not to break anything, but by the time Justin got back with the coffees, I was holding an intricately detailed wooden carving of a nude ballerina balancing on the point of her toe and twisting it to look between her legs to see if they’d put a pussy on that thing.

They hadn’t. 

Justin didn’t comment as I returned it to its spot on the shelf, though he did adjust its position after he’d handed me one of the coffees and a paper bag containing something soft and sweet smelling. When I pulled down the paper, I discovered a caramel slice, and a second later I had it far enough down my throat to activate my gag reflexes. Which was, like, much further than a polite bite of caramel slice, but not that far if we were talking about other things because honestly my throat game was pretty weak.

Then, to make things even worse, a little chunk of biscuit fell off the bottom of the tart and hit the ground loud enough to hear. I crouched down and picked it up, almost sloshing my coffee everywhere in the process.

So, that was how these things just kind of happened to me. My brain went yum, down the hatch and then before I knew it, I looked fucking insane.

“Let’s eat outside,” Justin suggested. 

“Yeah, probably a good idea,” I said, and then before my brain could catch up with what my body was doing, I had eaten the floor crumb and Justin had definitely seen me do it.

I’d kind of expected Justin to lead me out the front door so that I could chug down my coffee and finish deep throating my caramel slice and then he could shoo me away quickly. Instead, he took me through a door at the back, out into a little walled-in patio area. They had a table and chairs on the stone pavers out there, all made of metal that was shaped into a flower design. The chair I sat on was hard and uncomfortable and I had to be careful where I put my coffee because the surface of the table had all kinds of holes in it, but it looked fancy.

About ten seconds later, I was back on my feet with a mouth full of caramel slice because a cluster of fancy porcelain pots in one of the corners of the patio area had caught my attention. They were painted with intricate flower designs and shiny gold accents. The plants in them were pretty fucking dead, though, all thinned out and leggy-stemmed and sad looking.

“Damn,” Justin commented between sips of his coffee. “Nobody was meant to witness our plant murder. Cam was going to replace those with nice pretty living ones soon and we’d start the cycle all over again.”

“My friend who I work at the nursery with is really good at plants,” I told him. “Could I take some pics and see if he can figure out why they keep dying?”

“If you want. Cam’s pretty sure we’ve either been watering them too much or not enough.”

“I’ve been there,” I admitted as I snapped a quick picture and sent it to the group chat I had with Ethan and Rue. On the surface, having a group chat with two other people seemed like a party party friendship kinda deal, but mostly it was because Ethan wanted to be able to ignore me, like, ninety percent of the time. Even when I asked Ethan something, Rue would sometimes be the one who actually sent the response.

It was Ethan who replied this time, though, and within just a few seconds.

Ethan: Nice pots
Ethan: Your plants are dead

“Ethan says he likes your pots,” I said to Justin over my shoulder as I crouched next to the plants. He started saying something about how they’d bought them at an estate auction, but I missed most of it because I was busy tapping out a reply to Ethan.

Flynn: there not my plants there a friends or like a guy i met
Flynn: do u know why there dying??
Ethan: Wider shot

It took me a second to figure out what Ethan meant, but then it clicked—I stood up, took a few steps back, and snapped a picture showing the plants and the area around them. It felt like a lot of the time Ethan just really hated words, so he’d be super efficient with them if you could get him to talk at all. But not always. Sometimes we’d just chat, and it’d be normal and fine. I used to think that if we were dating, if he liked me enough, he’d be that open version of himself all the time. Now I’d seen him with Rue, I knew that wasn’t true. The real difference there was that Rue was real good at being okay with whatever version of himself Ethan was offering.

Ethan: Too shady

Oh, duh. Yeah, I could have figured that one out if I’d thought about it for like two seconds. Going by the leaves, I was pretty sure they were Marigolds, and those needed full sun, not a shady corner.

I tucked my phone back in my pocket. “So, plants need sunlight.”

It felt like a victory when Justin let out an amused huff, a smile tugging at his lips. “Oh, yeah?”

“These ones need more sun than they’d get in that corner, anyway. Most flowers like sun, but there are some that do great in shade. I’m working tomorrow, so maybe I could text Cam some recommendations?”

“Go ahead. We can’t go on like this.”

I was out of excuses to flutter about, so I sat back down, stretching my long legs out as I took a sip of my coffee. “Oh, by the way, thanks for the coffee and caramel slice. I don’t think I said that…”

“You’re welcome. If I’d known you had such a healthy appetite, I’d have bought you two. We get a pretty steep discount from the cafe next door as thanks for helping them with their repairs.”

I offered him an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. I’ve been told sometimes I eat a bit like a dog who just grabbed a dropped sausage at a barbeque.”

His lips curved as he tilted his head. “Accurate. Have you been eating enough?”

“Do I look like I haven’t?”

“No,” Justin said as his eyes swept down my body. “You don’t.”

“Just one of those annoying things about me, I guess. Sometimes my body moves faster than my brain. Which is impressive, because it feels like my brain is zooming. But I’ve got to work on, like… a lot of things. Sometimes I grab things other people are holding without asking, and it’s not great, you know? It’s rude. And I don’t mean to be rude, like, ever, but I feel like I am just constantly.”

“A little bit, but you make it charming.”

Charming. Nobody’d ever called me that before. I’d had a friend in high school who’d told me you’re lucky you’re hot so many times it’d practically become a catch phrase. Mostly when I’d done something stupid or annoying. But charming… charming was new.

“I’m a whole lot of something, that’s for sure,” I said with a grin. 

“Well, you’ve been a whole lot of helpful today, so thanks for that,” Justin said. “Are you sure I can’t give you a ride anywhere?”

“Oh, nah, I’m good,” I said, the last word coming out half cough as I almost drowned myself when talking and finishing up my coffee got all tangled up. The second my brain had registered being dismissed, time to go I’d tried to execute every step of that at the same time. 

But hey, I’d actually noticed he wanted me to fuck off. I wasn’t always too great at that, though maybe part of that was because it was usually Ethan wanting me to fuck off and he could be kind of subtle about it. He went both ways with it, too. He didn’t like to look at people when he talked to them, so he always kinda seemed closed off even when he was being willingly social.

Cam was still talking to the customer as I headed out, so all I got to give to him was a quick wave goodbye. That was fine. I didn’t have anything in particular to say to him anyway.

Overall, that’d gone pretty well. It’d gotten me zero percent closer to having a place to live, for many reasons, but I’d hung out with two hot guys, helped lift heavy things, seen some cool junk, and enjoyed some free coffee and a caramel slice. All in all, a pretty awesome way to blow an hour or two.