Joe looked at Trevor. “I'll do you one better.”
Trevor frowned. “How?”
“Darla,” he said softly. “What if we buy a house here in Peters.”
Trevor's jaw dropped.
“A house?” I gasped. “You – you want to move here? Live here?”
“Not quite. What if we bought a place and made it ours when we visit? We could decorate it how we want. Leave clothes here. Instruments and sound equipment. Make it a second home. Not a vacation home – a second home,” he stressed.
“We can't afford that! We don't even have a permanent home in Boston!”
“That's because houses are ridiculously expensive there,” he explained. “But here? We could buy a cheap house. The mortgage would be less than an AirBnB rental over time.”
Trevor blinked rapidly, stroking his chin, playing with the thickening hair of his beard. “That's not a half bad idea.”
“I'll buy it,” Joe announced. “Just me. You guys don't have to pitch in.”
“WHAT?” me and Trevor gasped.
“I have the trust fund money. I'm allowed to ask for a portion of the principal for extraordinary expenses. My parents will think it's a smart investment. If money ever gets tight, we can rent it out when we're not in town.”
“You're serious,” I said, looking at him in the moonlight, the edges of him etched by a grey glow.
“I am.”
I let that sink in.
“A small house here in Peters. One we could come to whenever. With all our stuff, so we wouldn't have to pack. Just show up. Nothing fancy,” I said, pointing at him. “Too fancy and you upset the balance of being here. Can't be nicer than Calvin's house.”
“Okay.”
“It needs to be... enough. Good enough. But not more than that.”
“I'm fine with that,” Joe said, looking at Trevor. “How about you?”
Trev held his palms out in surrender. “I'm along for the ride on this. Whatever you two want is fine.”
“We can talk to a real estate agent when we come back for the christening. Or even look at foreclosures. Buy a cheap place. Make it ours,” Joe said, emphasizing the last word.
Ours.
“And when we have gigs in Cleveland, Columbus, or Pittsburgh, we have a place to come back to, nice and easy,” I said, getting excited by the idea.
Trevor grinned at Joe. “This is pretty brilliant. You definitely win, man.”
“Of course I do. Because I'm smarter than you.”
Trevor's eyebrow cocked. “You had to ruin the moment, didn't you?”
Air suddenly felt more plentiful, my lungs taking advantage of the change. Joe was right – shattering the walls that felt so impenetrable, the ones that made my world feel like I had only two choices, gave me so much more room. My chest rose, expanding as I took in all the love I could, endlessly able to breathe, filling myself to the brim.
If despair made my world feel small, love made it feel infinite.
Standing, I followed my heart, walking to the purple shed, finding the door on the other side. I yanked it open, surprised to find it empty, save one thing:
No one had changed the paint on the inside.
“Look,” I whispered, pointing up. Back when Trevor and I had spent the night in there, when furniture and electricity made it a true little haven, I'd had Christmas lights strung all over, casting light.
They'd obscured the glowing stars.
I sat my big ass on the ground, tucked my knees under my arms, ankles crossed, and stared at a tangible reminder of who I'd been.
A girl who stuck glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling of an old potting shed so she could dream.
“I'm that same girl,” I whispered to the past, the present, the future, to Trevor and Joe, to my memory. “I wanted to leave, and I did.”
“You left, and everything got better. Your life, your mama's life – all better. And now your baby brother gets a better life, too.”
He turned, shifting awkwardly on the wood floor as we crammed our three bodies into less than sixty-four square feet of space. But between the ethereal glow of the sticker stars, the moon peeking in to see what was going on, and the ramshackle remnants of my hopes and dreams so long ago, we fit everything in that needed to be here.
Joe was next to me, looking up, sharing space, just being with me. I turned to him and our lips met, the kiss sweet and soulful, Trevor's hands moving to my shoulders. When the three of us were intimate together, this is how it worked. If I was kissing one, stroking one, sucking one, the other touched me.
We completed some kind of love circuit that way, the current running strong.
“Remember the last time we were in here?” I whispered to them both. “How you came and claimed me after I broke up with you? How we decided right then and there that it was more important to be together and maybe lose people for being different than to deny who we were?”
Four arms squeezed me.
“Yes,” they both said, gruff and thick.
“And now we're saying goodbye to this piece of me. People are moving on. Lives are changing. And we have spent years together since that last time we made love in my little shed living life. Living our life, exactly how we wanted, mistakes and all. Judgment and all.”
“I wouldn't change a thing,” Trevor said.
“Same,” Joe echoed.
“But it's all changing now. And my only constant is you two.”
Magic. The moment was pure magic, hands and mouths on me, our bodies finding so many beautiful ways to say I love you in a piece of my history that was about to become landfill.
And then the rat ran right over my hand.
“What's that?” Joe screamed, jumping up so fast and so high he looked like a skateboarder doing a maneuver, only there was no skateboard under his feet.
“Is that an animal?” Trevor bellowed, as something soft with a long tail hit my hand again.
“BETTER NOT BE A CHICKEN!” I shrieked.
I shot up so fast I pitched into Trevor, tipping him into Joe, all of us slamming into the not-quite-latched door, which crashed under our weight, the hinges held in place by rust flakes and inertia.
BAM!
The rodent found my foot, crawled up my knee, then crested Mount Darlabreast, only avoiding my face because I screamed, “EAT JOE INSTEAD!” before rolling hard to the right, pitching my face into Trevor's ribcage.
By the time we were all disentangled and on our feet, the damn beast was long gone, the only sign of where it had fled the rustle of dead leaves on top of a pile of rusted out fencing.
“EAT JOE INSTEAD?” Joe screamed at me. “What the hell, Darla! That's an asshole move!”
“You're not allowed on my zombie apocalypse compound,” Trevor said, glaring at me. “You're the type to trip someone so the zombies get them first.”
“Am not! I was just... rats.” I shuddered.
We stared at each other in horror.
“Besides, if you really loved me, you'd let the damn rat nibble on you so I could escape.”
“You're really killing the mood, Darla,” Joe snapped, hand through his hair.
He was right.
“I'm sorry. I just... rats.”