TWENTY-NINE
Finn
I hit Pause on my mic, then reach over and press the same button on Maeve’s. The cameras are still rolling, but there’s no more audio. Because I want this moment to exist only for us, now, for real. Maeve is looking at me, her eyes wet, but no tears actually falling. But the gray bed sheets are spattered with flecks of dark, like rain drops, from my own fallen tears. Once everything is off I stare at her, waiting. Say it again , my eyes are begging her.
“I love you,” Maeve whispers. “And I loved you then too.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say softly. And I am. I’ve never regretted anything as much as trying to move on from Maeve. Not just because it wasn’t possible. But because I hurt her, and told myself I was giving her what she wanted. I was insecure and Cassidy was the easier choice because I knew exactly where I stood with her. But I regret not doing the bold thing and putting my heart on the line.
“Why did you say all those things?”
I don’t ask what. Because I know. “Because I felt rejected. I acted like the worst version of myself. I’m so sorry, Maeve.”
The silence is heavy. I’m afraid that despite all the push and pull and tentative progress of the last few months, Maeve will turn away from me again. Kick me out. And if she did, I would understand. I felt rejected and acted out of fear. But I actually did reject her first. After claiming to love her.
Maeve puts her mic down and takes my free hand. “I forgive you. Let’s try to put it behind us.”
This must be what winning the lottery feels like. My heart is soaring and I can barely believe that I could be this lucky. I put down my mic and clasp both of her hands in mine. “Thank you. And Maeve, now I get to say it. I love you too. Not as a friend. Not like family. Well, kind of like family, because you are family. To me, you are my whole world. You sometimes act like you’re a supporting character that got pulled up to the main spot. But that’s not true. You’re the sun and I’m just happy to be in your orbit.”
Maeve smiles as she wipes her eyes and nose on her sweatshirt. “You’re lucky the mic’s off. Because that was so cheesy.”
“I don’t care. For you, I’m cheesy.” I scooch closer to her on the bed, where we’re still sitting cross-legged facing each other. Scooching is not romantic. But it doesn’t matter. There’s something pretty magical about the person that you helped puke in a dorm-room stall freshman year of college being the person that years later you still love. Because I think I may have loved her since the beginning. I threw out every rule I had about being in the spotlight and working in entertainment in an instant to spend more time with her. And I never made a move on her all those years. Because Maeve was too perfect, too smart, too amazing to make a move on and risk losing if the nineteen-year-old version of me screwed it up. Although … I still managed to do that now. But I’m glad that I didn’t fall for a girl that I met now, because I’ve loved getting to know Maeve before she figured out how she likes to do her hair, back when ultra-low-rise jeans were in and everyone looked irreversibly cringe. I love her through the trends and fads. I just want to be by her side as we watch everything come and go.
“Can I kiss you now?” Guys always write in to the show saying how cheesy it is to say that. But I think they’re wrong. Waiting with bated breath for her answer is something I want to cherish. That feeling, knowing in the back of my head that probably, hopefully, she will say yes. But that I can’t be sure of it.
The way my heart soars when she nods and reaches for me is everything. “Yes,” Maeve whispers.
She pulls me toward her, her hand on the back of my neck, and I run my fingers through her hair, tug her closer to me. Our lips connect, hard. We had our share of tentative kisses the first time around. Now I want her as close to me as possible. I pull Maeve into my lap and hold her tight. There should be something slightly ridiculous about making out in our matching sweat suits. Maeve’s is so oversized she’s swimming in it, the sleeves falling down her forearms now that her hands are laced in my hair. But while seeing her in her amazing gala and awards show dresses is so fucking hot, I love the intimacy of this moment at home.
I could keep kissing her forever. If this was all she ever let me do, I would still be happy. Because talking to her, laughing with her, that’s better than sex for me. And I know exactly how great our sex is. Maeve presses into me, and I grab her hips, grinding against her. She moans, and I slide my thumb up under her sweatshirt, run it over her stomach. She kisses me harder and I never want to let go of her.
And then she pulls back. Her lips are swollen from me biting and sucking on them, her chin red where my day-old stubble has grazed her face. I love seeing her cheeks flushed and knowing it’s from me. “Are you okay?” I ask immediately.
She kisses me once, softly, sweetly now. “I’m better than okay. I just … let’s wait.”
“We can wait. Whatever you want.” I kiss her again and squeeze her close, toppling us both over so we’re lying down, still intertwined.
“Today was just emotional. I want to take our time this time.”
“Of course. And Maeve, you never need to explain to me why you want to wait. You say wait, and I’m waiting. And I’ll never get tired of it.”
Maeve burrows her head deeper into my shoulder and I hold her tightly. She fits into me perfectly, and the feeling of her soft curves against me is incredible. Holding her is somehow both calming and also the hottest thing ever. Eventually she wriggles lightly away from me, and I release my grip for a moment. She takes a dramatic gulp of air. “You need to tell me if I’m crushing you!” I exclaim.
She latches back on to me. “I didn’t want you to let go yet.” We lie there cuddling for so long that I doze off, and when I wake up Maeve is gone, her side of the bed cold. For a moment I wonder if this was all a dream, but then I see the cameras trained on the bed, which is actually a bit creepy when you wake up to it, but I’m elated because it means that this is real . We’re good again.
I spring out of bed and head directly to Maeve’s editing bay. Sure enough, she’s there, cutting the episode together. She doesn’t hear me through her giant headphones, and so I touch her shoulder gently, not wanting to scare her. She turns toward me and when she smiles, it’s like everything I’ve ever worried about is gone. I really think this is what has been missing the past few months. With her I won’t have maybe I should try acting in the back of my mind as I fall asleep. I’ll just be content again, finally. I take her headphones off gently and lean down to kiss her.
She meets me and stands, still kissing me. “Sit,” she commands between kisses. I sit in the chair and she tucks herself onto my lap, then unplugs the headphones and hits play on the beginning of the episode we filmed in bed. It’s short, with no Questions of the Week, but at the end of our conversation she sped up the video of us talking privately and blurred it, then included the shot of us kissing, no longer blurred, at regular speed.
“Did we just make a sex tape?” I joke.
She hits Pause. “I wanted to see it, even if we don’t use it.”
I kiss her cheek. “It’s very honest. More honest than we’ve ever been. And slightly messy.” I’ve never cried on camera before, even though I’ve told our listeners countless times that men should be able to be vulnerable and emotional. “Well, pros and cons. Why should we put it out?”
“To beat The Paul Myers Show and make history, pro. We’re pretty close to the goal, and this is such good content that I think our agents could renegotiate the length of time we have to be number one if we put out something like this, which is basically guaranteed to go viral.”
“Like, if we break the streaming record by X amount, we cut off a month?”
“Exactly.” Maeve nods. I wrap my arms tighter around her. I’ll put out whatever episode she wants if I get to stay here with her. “Con, Paul Myers’s entire fan base will definitely tear apart our most delicate moment and say awful things. I think you’ll get the brunt of it.”
“Pro, we help redefine what’s appropriate for men to express on camera.”
“Con, you get cyberbullied and memeified.”
I tuck my face into her neck and inhale the scent of her shampoo and perfume. “We’ve dealt with that for the last two years. I can handle it. What are the other cons for you?”
“We lose an intimate moment. It becomes a part of the public narrative. I don’t know if it’s worth trading. Why do we have to be that honest now, just because we were before?”
“If you think it’ll be too hard or will affect your anxiety too much, let’s not do it.”
Maeve turns partway so she can see me. “Pro, we need the ratings. We slipped a bit last week. We only made number one by a few hundred downloads.”
I lean my forehead on hers so that our faces are only an inch apart and give her the softest whisper of a kiss before pulling back to respond. “It’s up to you. If you want to release it, let’s release it.”
Maeve takes a deep breath and kisses me once more, slowly, before speaking. “I mean, we recorded it for a reason, right?”
Within twenty-four hours it is the most downloaded episode in Streamify history. Maeve’s place and my parents’ house (according to the pictures my dad is texting me) are full of fruit baskets and flowers from our agents and advertisers. Streamify agreed that if we stay number one for just two more weeks, we can get the pay bump, and that this extra episode can count toward a missed week. And the numbers on this bonus episode just keep going up.
We’re floating in Maeve’s pool, our interlocked hands keeping the pool floats close enough together to kiss for each hundred thousand streams. Maeve downloaded a browser extension so that every time we pass a hundred thousand new views, a confetti cannon sound goes off. The celebratory pops are alarmingly close together, and as one goes off I swear Maeve flinches. It’s a weird feeling when you know that your success is also tied to scrutiny.
I tug on her hand and pull her closer to me. “Want to go to Disney?”
“What?”
“Let’s go to Disneyland. Leave our phones here. Forget about winning, and the ratings, and whatever awful stuff Paul Myers’s groupies are saying online.” I wonder if Paul Myers knows about the incentive in our contract. He’s always been vicious, so it’s hard to say if he knows or is just an asshole. This morning he brought up our episode during his morning live sesh and called me a variety of homophobic slurs because I cried, and he called Maeve ugly. So the same old.
Maeve slides off her float and wades up to mine, resting her arms on it and letting some water leak on. “That’s so random. Since when are you a Disney adult?”
I roll off the float and into the water, then pick her up and she wraps her legs around my waist. “You like rides. I like rides. We used to have a blast at Kennywood back in college, so let’s go to Disney and go on some roller coasters. Forget about the episode for a while.” Kennywood was the local amusement park in Pittsburgh that we used to go to all the time back in college with our friends.
“Would it be outrageous of us to fly to Pittsburgh and go to Kennywood instead? I could see my family, and then there’s no lines. We can go just for a night.”
I walk us deeper into the water. “It’s what, four hours direct?”
Maeve nods. “Four and half. And the only airline that goes there direct is Spirit.”
“Want me to charter a jet?”
Maeve splashes me in the face. “Absolutely not. That is way too expensive. And the emissions!”
“We can afford it …” I counter.
“I know. I really do. But the thought of spending that much money makes me feel physically ill.”
“Just think of it as free money, because the interest your money is making will pay for it in like hours or whatever.” I wait, hoping she’ll change her mind. But she just grimaces and shakes her head. “Fine, we can do Spirit.”
It takes approximately three hours for me to realize exactly why I’ve never flown Spirit. From the moment we get to LAX there are problems. First off, they don’t let us use the special celebrity entrance, because we’re flying a budget airline. They turn us away at the door and we have to go in the regular entrance. Then I wait in line for an hour to spend more than the cost of the tickets on our bags, because I didn’t realize I was only allowed on the plane with my cell phone and wallet. I hand over my credit card with an eye roll, and Maeve giggles.
“What’s so funny? This is outrageous.” I put the tags on our carry-ons and we head over to security, where, thank god, they at least let us use PreCheck. Since we thought we were using the private entrance, we’re both in full Tell Me How You Really Feel sweat suits and horribly conspicuous. We’ve posed for at least five selfies, and I catch people recording us here and there.
“This is what budget airlines are like. How did you even get home from Pittsburgh all through college?”
“I flew private,” I mutter.
“What was that?” Maeve bumps my suitcase with hers. Rimowa sent us pink luggage sets after our Met Gala outfits made Vogue ’s roundup.
I glare at her. “You heard me! I’m not a man of the people, okay? I’m a fraud.”
Maeve throws her head back and laughs, and I crack a smile. We make it through security and I rush us to the airport lounge, since after that baggage line we only have forty-five minutes before boarding. From the safety of the lounge, Maeve calls her parents and tells them that we’ll be there tonight. I arranged for a car service to take us directly to Kennywood and hold our luggage while we go on the rides, and then we’ll head to Maeve’s and stay the night, leaving the next morning, after what Maeve has assured me with be a lengthy interrogation-style breakfast.
The lounge is a brief respite from the organized chaos that is Spirit Airlines. There isn’t an organized boarding system when we get to the gate, and when we finally get on the plane we’re rushed to the very last row, where the seats don’t recline. Or maybe none of the seats recline. To make matters worse, the seats are comically small. My legs are folded like pretzels in the tiny chair, and even Maeve has difficulty maneuvering into a comfortable position.
“If you told me how bad it would be, I would have gotten us a plane,” I whisper to her aggressively. “This looks like a flying soda can. I think I feel a breeze right now, and we could definitely combust and die.”
Maeve takes my hand and squeezes it. We didn’t do any PDA in the airport, to avoid photographs, but now that we’re on the plane she leans against me and I start to relax. “This is how us commoners fly, Finn. And you know what? This flight was only twenty-seven dollars. Does that mean nothing to you?”
“Plus a hundred fifty in bags.”
“We make eight figures. Relax on the bags.”
I must miss whatever passes for the safety announcement because suddenly the plane is moving. And I mean moving . We basically jump into the sky, no taxiing here, and the pressure drop has my ears popping over and over. “Do they give us water?” I ask Maeve. The lounge didn’t have any to-go bottles.
She shrugs. “Maybe if you bribe them. On this short a flight they may not even do the paid beverage service.”
“This flight is over four hours.”
Maeve nods gravely. “They were selling water for ten dollars at the gate, you know.”
I let my head drop back to the headrest in defeat, only to catapult forward with a jolt. “That’s just a patch of rough air,” the flight attendant says into the intercom.
“What a rebrand. ‘Rough air’ sounds so much nicer than ‘turbulence,’” Maeve muses.
“Yeah, and way nicer than you’re on a budget airline that can’t handle wind.”
“You’re being a diva,” Maeve chastises.
“We’re flying to Pittsburgh because you want to go to an amusement park with less lines. You’re the diva!” Maeve kisses me deeply. “Comment withdrawn,” I amend. “You have impeccable taste and spend your twenty-seven ninety-five with wisdom beyond your years.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I’m about to get up and try to secure bottles of water for each of us when a college-age girl pauses hesitantly in front of our seat. I look up and squeeze Maeve’s hand. So tightly that she can’t drop mine because, come on, we’re not doing this again.
Maeve sees the fan and drops her neck pillow. “Hi! Oh my god, how are you!” From her tone you’d think she and this girl were lifelong friends.
The girl lights up. “Ohmygodhi!” she says in a rush. “I am such a big fan. My friends and I are coming back from a bachelorette party and were wondering if we could take a TikTok with you? And give you some Questions of the Week?”
I glance at the SEATBELT sign above us, then crane my neck behind us and clock the flight attendant, who’s reading a book and sipping a Coke.
“Of course!” Maeve agrees readily. “Why don’t you all come back here! Or should we come to you?”
“I’ll go get them!”
Within moments there are eight women in full makeup and travel outfits, but also visibly hungover, clustered by the bathroom around us. I guess this is the one perk of sitting at the back of the plane. Plenty of room for fans. I switch places with Maeve and cram myself into the window seat, and for the next hour I participate when instructed, but mainly watch Maeve interact with these women. It’s clear they view her advice as invaluable, crucial, priceless. The way they act, it’s almost like they think she’s one of their best friends too. Maeve answers all of their questions, full of conspiratorial eyebrow raises and advice, and it’s not until half of them have returned to their seats that one of them finally mentions yesterday’s episode.
“I think it’s really cool that you released that episode of you two kind of fighting? Or getting back together? You’re so real to do that, and we’re really happy for you two.” The other girls nod in agreement.
“Thank you,” Maeve says quietly. She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “It wasn’t easy. But we owe everything to you all, and we wanted to be honest.”
By the time they leave we’re both exhausted. I put my arm around Maeve, and she leans into me, drifting off. I stay awake, ready to ward off fans while she sleeps, and she crashes for the rest of the flight, jolting awake only at our rough landing. She cuddles back into me, and we stay that way until everyone else has deplaned; then I grab our bags from the overhead and we exit.
We’d had to take our phones to the airport for the boarding passes, but once we made it on the plane we’d turned them off and stowed them in our carry-ons. I itch to check my phone to see if there are any tabloid photos of us at the airport or press coverage of our episode. But instead, I take Maeve’s hand and we stride through the airport and find the man waiting with my last name on a sign. If this was New York, that might be enough for someone to call paparazzi and would definitely be enough for random people to pull out their cell phones and film us. But in Pittsburgh, no one cares, and our ride to Kennywood is smooth sailing.
We get to the park in the late afternoon, and, per usual, it’s largely empty even though it’s a Saturday. The admission is the price of a drink at any other amusement park, and just like that we’re in business. Maeve and I walk through the winding entrance to the start of the rides, and Maeve throws her arms out wide. “Isn’t this better than Disney?”
I pick her up and spin her around until we’re dizzy and stumbling, then plant a giant kiss on her cheek. “Absolutely. Especially now that it’s not Fright Night.”
“I forgot about that,” she exclaims. “You were so scared!”
“Startled! I was slightly startled as anyone would be.” The first time we went to Kennywood with friends from CMU we were there in October for Fright Night, which meant that all over the park people dressed as monsters and ghouls were doing jump scares. It was never-ending. Some might call it torturous. But Maeve loved it.
“Eh, we can call it that, for your vanity.” Maeve takes my hand and leads me to her favorite ride, the Thunderbolt. It’s a wooden coaster, and not as big as the Steel Curtain, the premiere Steelers ride, but still large and fast enough to make your stomach drop out from under you.
Our first ride, we sprint up the steps, but by the third time in a row on the Thunderbolt our pace is more of a trudge. The amount of stairs at an amusement park is the kind of thing you only notice when there are no lines. Otherwise, it just feels like standing at different places on the stairs. But now we’re really getting a calf workout as we race up, eventually queuing behind the six other people in line. After riding that for the fourth time, Maeve turns to me. “Your pick!”
I lead her to the Steel Curtain, and we vault over and duck under the line barriers the park optimistically installed. Kennywood is an extremely robust amusement park. The rides are plentiful and big, the food options are great, and the parking is free. But it’s half an hour outside Pittsburgh, surrounded by tiny, middle-of-nowhere towns, and with tough competition in Ohio, so not many people actually come here as compared with a Six Flags or Disneyland. Which Maeve would argue makes it better, and I would say makes it at serious risk of becoming a ghost park.
“Why this one? I feel like you barely even feel it, too much centripetal force or whatever.”
I shrug. “It’s fun to ride the biggest fanciest ride without waiting in line.” Although, once we get up the stairs we see this one has a solid fourteen people in line, since it is the premiere ride. “And you say there’s no lines here,” I tease. “False advertising.”
Maeve leans over the railing and surveys the entire park. “How much do you think this would go for?”
I bracket my arms around her and kiss the side of her neck. “Kennywood?”
“Yeah. Like a hundred million or something?”
“Less. Maybe fifty mil? It’s hard to say. And it’s probably part of a parks group. I don’t know that they’d sell you just Kennywood.”
Maeve turns so that her back is against the railing. The line has shortened, but we haven’t moved. I press against her and kiss her. “After we beat The Paul Myers Show , you could buy it.”
“That would be crazy,” she argues between kisses.
“So let it be. It’s your money. You earned it. And after the therapy show you’ll have so much more between the residuals and the contract.” I kiss her, longer, until I feel her relax against me. “So if you want to buy an amusement park that no one goes to, do it. You’ll still have plenty of money to pay for all your sisters’ extracurriculars and go on vacations and renovate your creepy house and all that.”
“Next!” the teenager staffing the ride calls down to us.
Maeve breaks away with a giggle, and I chase her up the stairs. “Front or back?”
She’s ignoring what I said. I don’t think the whole being rich thing has hit her yet, because the only thing she’s really spent any money on is her house. But I let her ignore it right now. It’s not like she’s actually serious about buying this place; she’s way too responsible for that. She’d feel pressure to make it profitable and it would lose all its charm. “Front. And we’re riding with our eyes open.”
“You are,” Maeve says. “I’d like to keep my eyeballs.”
We ride three times, and I buy the plastic-framed photos of us on the ride each time. They’re horrendous, our faces pressed back by the force of the ride, Maeve’s eyes squeezed shut, my arms up and teeth bared because my lips are forced wide open. They’re incredible.
“What next?”
“I think we should do the jukebox,” Maeve exclaims decisively.
The sun is setting, and we stroll through the park to the Johnny Rockets. There are families with children eating dripping Millie’s ice cream cones, and a few groups of teenagers and college students. Inside, I order an outrageous amount of diner food, and Maeve sits at the counter and starts selecting songs. There are miniature free jukeboxes all over, and she flips through the catalogue, laser focused. After I order, I join her.
“What’d you pick?”
Maeve tilts her head, waiting for the current song to change. As the last few bars fade away, her pick starts and she jumps up and offers me a hand. I don’t recognize it at first. And then Elvis’s deep voice starts crooning. “I can’t help falling in love,” I echo softly, a smile creeping over my face. Normally I wouldn’t start dancing in a diner. Even a fake one like this, that’s made for a small town amusement park. I’m not a dancer and I don’t want videos of my horrendous moves on TMZ for the rest of time, accompanied by headlines like Is Finn Sutton Losing It and When Did Finn Sutton Start Using? because my dance moves are so atrocious. But now, I take her hand and let her lead me to the center of the room.
We start slow dancing, pressed tight together, and it feels like we’re the only people in the room. When the lyrics start, I spin Maeve gently and then pull her back into me, and we keep dancing slowly, tenderly, until the end of the song. We don’t break apart when it ends, and I stare into her eyes. “Maeve, you make me—” Suddenly, the next song cuts in. “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Maeve’s face twitches while she tries to suppress a laugh at the change in mood while I’m trying to be sentimental. “So happy,” I finish, before she starts to giggle.
The server further interrupts things by aggressively dinging the bell by our seat as he leaves our food, but Maeve grabs my arm when I move to sit. “One more.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I mean, it is ABBA.”
Maeve silently holds up three fingers, dropping to two, then one. And then we start dancing, as though we’re in the tiny closet of a bedroom back in New York and no one is watching. And it just might be the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.