CHAPTER 4
Gabi hadn’t planned on calling Arlowe or looking at the house, but after yet another apartment application had gone nowhere, she’d had no other option.
Well, she could stay with Chase and Mark until she found something, but their spare bedroom was Mark’s office because he worked from home, which meant that she’d be on the couch and wouldn’t have any privacy.
She didn’t think that would bother her for a night or two, but with no other prospects in sight, she had no idea how long she’d have to be there.
She could always come back to this hotel or stay in another one, but she had no desire to move an extra time or two after already moving herself from her old town to this one and having to put most of her stuff in storage.
She thought about everything she had in a storage unit and what she would have to do with it if she ended up living with a roommate or roommates.
She’d had an apartment all to herself before, so she had a lot of furniture that she would have to sell, donate, store, or toss out should she decide not to keep looking for a place of her own.
It wasn’t living with other people that bothered her, she supposed.
It was mostly that she had lived by herself before and hadn’t thought that she’d have a roommate ever again because the next time she’d live with someone, she’d be in a relationship with them.
At twenty-nine years old, she was ready to settle down in a house or an apartment with someone she loved and not live with three other people.
Before she had to leave the hotel to go check out the house, she decided to pull up roommate listings, which she hadn’t done before, so there might be another option for her where she’d only have to live with one roommate.
She could do that for a year if she had to.
Gabi scrolled until she found a few, starred them, and kept looking until she found a few more.
Then, she went back to review her options and narrowed them down to two.
The other ones all had their faults, but the two she’d chosen seemed fine.
One had a male roommate, and one would be with a woman who was a lawyer, and according to the ad, hardly ever home, which stuck out to her.
Gabi sent that possible roommate an email and decided to hold off on the other one.
Then, she got dressed and headed over to Sarai’s house.
As she drove, she thought about how she viewed that house.
Even though Arlowe had been the one to invite her to take a look tonight, she still thought of it as Sarai’s house.
She smiled, thinking about her first night in Amsterdam all those years ago.
Sarai had taken her to a bar, and Gabi had been embarrassed because they’d actually checked her ID to make sure that she was eighteen.
Sarai hadn’t said anything, but Gabi had seen her eyes.
After that, they’d spent the next few hours drinking and hanging out with Sarai’s friends and Arlowe’s girlfriend, Eline.
Gabi had had a great time, but the best part of the whole night for her had been after that.
She’d booked two nights in a hostel initially, but when her dad had found out, he’d called someone who had called Sarai’s parents, and suddenly, the hostel had been canceled, and she’d been told to stay with Sarai.
With only one bed in the room, Gabi had slept on a thin mattress on the floor that Sarai had asked the dorm people to lend her for the weekend, and they’d stayed up until six in the morning, talking.
They’d lain there, both of them staring up at the ceiling, just talking about anything and everything, and to this day, it was still one of the best nights of Gabi’s life.
She’d set her alarm the next morning for nine so that she wouldn’t miss anything that she wanted to see in her short time there, and she could still remember Sarai’s grumble.
“I am not a morning person,” Sarai said.
“Come on. I want to get breakfast before the museum, and we have to get there right when it opens, or I won’t have time for the canal boat on-off tour before the Anne Frank house,” Gabi replied, sitting up to look at Sarai, who still had her eyes closed.
“Are you made of endless energy like this all the time?”
Sarai pulled her blanket over her head, and Gabi laughed and yanked it back down.
Sarai’s eyes were open then. They stared at one another, and Gabi, who’d just come out of the closet to her family and a few of her friends, had been very close to taking a chance, leaning in, and kissing Sarai.
Her shyness took over, though, and she looked away instead.
“I’m going to hop in the shower,” she said.
“Have fun,” Sarai replied and pulled the blanket back over her head.
“Do you want me to just go by myself? We can meet up for lunch or something. You’re not my chaperone or anything, Sarai. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
The blanket was pulled back quickly then, and Gabi was met with an unreadable expression.
“I want to go with you,” Sarai said softly after a moment, and it warmed Gabi more than any shower ever could. “We were just up really late last night.”
“I know. We should have gone to sleep when we got back from the bar.”
“No, I like… I like that we talked. It was nice.”
“It was?” she risked and leaned over Sarai’s bed a little.
“Yeah. I don’t get to talk like that much here. Or ever, really.”
“Why not?”
“Here, it’s all work, work, work. I mean, I get to have a little fun, too, and I’ve made friends, which is nice, but the marketing program is under the business main program, and it’s hard to keep up, so I have to study a lot.
Violet doesn’t seem to need to study as much as I do, but she’s got some weird competition going on with another person in her program, so we study together sometimes.
Enya and Arlowe are both geniuses, so they don’t seem to study much at all, but when we are all hanging out, we’re talking about school or what we’re doing next weekend.
You and I were talking about, I don’t know, philosophical life things. ”
“Yeah, we were.” Gabi smiled. “We also talked about how you need to go to Paris once before you go home.”
Sarai laughed and said, “I don’t know when I can. The semester is almost over, and with school being so hard, I need to be here to study. Besides, my friends are all here, and we’re about to go home and spread back out again, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them after this.”
“But when will you be this close to Paris again?”
“You told me yesterday that it’s just a regular city.”
Sarai rolled onto her side to face her.
“Well, I’m there, and you could stay with me and my parents, and I could show you around. We’d have a lot of fun.”
“I don’t know, Gabi. Maybe. Is that okay? A maybe?”
“Yeah, sure,” she replied with a forced smile, feeling a little more disappointed than she’d like to admit.
They hadn’t talked about it again, but Gabi still wondered why Sarai hadn’t taken her up on her offer to visit Paris and have free room and board plus a friend who would take her anywhere she wanted to go in a car with diplomatic plates and the privileges that came along with that.
She’d thought about that weekend a lot over the years, but when her life had taken a pretty big, terrible turn, she’d been more focused on recovering from losing her dad at a young age, and then, on completely adjusting her life plan because she and her mom could no longer stay in Paris since it reminded them both of the man they’d lost.
◆◆◆
“Hi. Come on in,” Arlowe said.
“Thanks. I hope this is okay. I know it’s late.”
“Oh, it’s not. We just finished dinner, so it’s perfect timing, and I’m a night owl, anyway. Not a loud one, though,” Arlowe added. “In case you were worried about that.” She motioned for Gabi to come into the house. “I mainly stick to the garage or my bedroom after midnight.”
“You work that late?”
“Engineer,” Arlowe explained, pointing to herself.
“Oh. Me too,” Gabi shared.
“You’re a coder?”
“Well, I prefer hardware, but–”
“You prefer making hardware to coding?” Arlowe asked, seemingly in disbelief.
“Yes. But I wanted a new job, and my friend Chase works where I do now, and they only had a software role.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“MIT.”
“You went to MIT?” Arlowe asked as Sarai walked out into the living room from the hallway.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was in mechanical engineering with a focus on product development, but I couldn’t get a job in it right away, so I’ve been in software for a while now.”
“We should talk about preferred languages sometime,” Arlowe suggested.
“You know multiple languages?” Enya asked, emerging from the kitchen while wiping her hands on a rag.
“I know French and Spanish, but I’m better at French because I lived there until I was twenty.”
“Awesome,” Enya said. “If you move in, we could talk in either of those, and these two wouldn’t have a clue what we were saying to one another.”
“Twenty?” Sarai asked.
“What?”
“You only lived in Paris until you were twenty?”
“Um… Yeah.”
“I thought you went to college there. That was your plan. I couldn’t remember what your major was or the name of the school, though.”
“The plan was a gap year, start school there at nineteen, graduate at twenty-three, and find a job there, but… My dad died right after my freshman year, and my mom and I didn’t want to stay there anymore. So, I applied to MIT as a transfer, and we moved back to the US.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarai said. “I didn’t know.”
“Why would you?” she replied. “And it’s okay. It was a while ago.”
“Well, do you want to see the bedroom that used to be mine but will be yours if you decide to move in with us?” Arlowe asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
Enya then went back into the kitchen without saying anything else, and Sarai stood in the living room, looking at Gabi curiously for some reason. Arlowe took her down the hall and pushed open a door.
“So, it’s just a square with a closet. Nothing fancy, but I lived in this room for nine years, and it treated me right.
” Arlowe pointed across the hall. “Bathroom is right there, which you already know. Bathtub, two sinks, which is helpful because three of us share it, and we try to have a shower schedule just to keep things civil, but it’s not a hard and fast rule that you shower at a certain time or anything.
The water pressure is good, and the water heater holds strong when Enya takes thirty-minute showers, and I need to hop in for five. ”
Gabi walked into the room and pictured her old apartment that was nine hundred square feet and all hers. She did know she’d have to adjust her expectations if she only rented a room in a house with other people.
“Can I still check out the bathroom?”
“Sure. And Enya and Sarai’s doors are open right now, so I’d say their rooms are fair game.
You might want to know if we’re slobs who attract ants or something.
You can see my room, too, if you want. I’m not done with it, and I kept some of Vi’s old furniture because she didn’t need it, but I’m pretty thrilled about having more space and my own bathroom. ”
“Okay.”
“So, you mentioned before that you moved here on your own, but you have a friend in town or something,” Arlowe said as Gabi took a look at the bathroom, which was slightly larger than she’d expected and well-kept.
“Chase, yeah. He recommended me for the job. He’s a friend from college.”
“I don’t think I asked, but… You’re okay with all three of us being gay, right?”
“Did Sarai not tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That I’m gay,” she said.
Arlowe squinted and replied, “Will she be in trouble if she did?”
“What? No.” Gabi laughed a little.
“Then, yes, she told us back then. But I didn’t know if you were okay with us knowing, so I pretended not to know just now.”
“I’m out everywhere, so I’m fine with people knowing. And, obviously, it doesn’t bother me that you three are. It actually makes it better.”
“Yeah?” Arlowe asked, lifting an eyebrow at her, and if Gabi didn’t know any better, she’d think that Arlowe might be flirting with her.
“Can I see the rest of the place?”
“No problem.”
Arlowe let her leave the room first, and she glanced into what was undoubtedly Enya’s room, because there was a wall covered with note cards.
Then, she looked into what had to be Sarai’s room, and she found herself smiling.
It was nice. It was somehow reminiscent of Sarai’s dorm room, with her choice of colors, but a much more grown-up version.
It felt like it would be a comfortable place to hang out, and she liked the thought of that, but Sarai was still acting strangely around her.
Gabi wondered if maybe the Sarai she’d known so briefly back then was still around.
So much had changed for both of them since they’d met, though, that it was possible that Sarai was really a different person altogether now.
“So, this is the garage,” Arlowe said. “Sarai, get out of my chair.”
“It’s comfortable, and you’re not sitting in–” Sarai paused when she noticed her with Arlowe. “Hey. I thought you left.”
“Nope. Still on the tour.”
“What do you think so far?” Arlowe asked.
“It’s great,” she said. “I have a place I’m looking into, though, so can I let you know still?”
“Oh. Yeah. I thought you gave up on finding an apartment.”
“I have one more shot before I throw in the towel,” she said, looking at Sarai, who had moved from Arlowe’s chair to, Gabi guessed, her own.
“Well, yeah, let me know.”
“I should know tonight or tomorrow. Can I call you?”
“Call whenever. If you want, you can hang out now. I was going to watch something in my room. I bought a big-screen TV since I have the space now. I can’t believe I get to lie in bed, watch a giant TV, and block out the fact that I’m thirty-three years old, living with someone who keeps trying to steal my chair,” Arlowe said as she glared playfully at Sarai.
Sarai, for her part, looked up at Gabi, who swallowed.
“I can’t, actually. I have plans with that friend I mentioned before. I’m going over to his place to have a late dinner with him and his husband, so another time maybe.”
“Okay. Sure. Want to see more?”
“I think I’m good. If the other place doesn’t work out, can we talk rent and whatever rules there are?”
“Rules?” Sarai asked.
“Yeah, like food in the fridge, guests, overnight or otherwise, parking, that kind of thing.”
“I can make you a list if you want,” Enya offered from behind them in the kitchen.
Gabi wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, but she was sitting at the table, looking down at her phone.
“That would be great. Thank you. I should get going.”
“Okay. I’ll walk you out,” Arlowe replied.
Gabi looked back at Sarai and said, “I’ll see you later?”
Sarai nodded.