CHAPTER 8
Sarai Kaplan: Did you read it?
Gabi laughed and closed her laptop.
“Are you heading out?” Chase asked as he approached her desk.
“Yeah. I need to get more of my stuff over to the new place. I think I’m going to get rid of my couch and a couple of other things.
Do you and Mark want dibs? You can have whatever.
They’re not new, but they’re not exactly old, either.
I don’t want to have to pay another month on the storage unit.
I think everything else has a place to go. ”
“I’ll ask Mark if he wants anything, but do you have pictures? You know how he is.”
Gabi smiled up at her friend and stuffed her computer into her bag.
“I’ll take some tomorrow when I go over there.”
“I thought you were going over there tonight,” he said.
“No, I have stuff in my trunk that I’m dropping off tonight. I picked it up on my way in this morning. When I tell you how happy I’ll be to finally not have to be moving somewhere…”
“How’s it going, by the way? I thought you’d ask us to help you move.”
“It’s fine. I have most of my boxes over there already, just sitting in my new room.
I’ll unload more tonight and then unpack what’s there as much as I can.
I hired a truck for tomorrow with two cheap movers to get the few pieces of furniture I’m keeping.
The rest are either going to be sold, donated, or given away.
I can take pictures of all of it, and if you want anything else that I’m not keeping, all you have to do is get it out of the storage unit. ”
“That could work. We didn’t get everything on our wedding registry as we’d hoped.”
“You only asked for money,” she reminded before she stood up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and picked up her phone with the waiting text message from Sarai on it, sliding it into her sweater pocket.
“I know. We didn’t get as much as we hoped.”
“I thought you got your honeymoon paid for.”
“Yes, which was priority number one since we’ve been living together for a while, we own our own home, and we didn’t need much.”
“Then, what was the problem, Chase?”
“We didn’t need much, but we wanted much.”
Gabi laughed.
“We wanted some new things for around the house, but I don’t mind some used-but-new-to-us things. Mark will be the one who takes convincing.”
“He’ll need convincing after you tell him it’s all free?”
“He is a very gay man.”
Gabi laughed again and said, “I have to go. I want to get there early, drop off, unpack, and head to the hotel for one last night before midnight.”
“Okay. Well, have a good weekend. Call us if you need any help.”
“I will. And thank you.”
The reality was that she didn’t need to stop by the house tonight.
She had two small boxes in her trunk that she’d forgotten to unload the previous night, but that could’ve waited until tomorrow.
She just wanted to stop by the house tonight.
Gabi had been surprised to discover that she’d been feeling a little lonely lately.
Because she was an engineer and worked from home sometimes, she hadn’t made many new friends at work, and she didn’t get out much to begin with.
It had been one of the reasons, which she was only realizing now, that she’d decided to take the job at Chase’s company: she’d have a friend and someone to maybe make some plans with occasionally.
Having roommates might actually be good for her, but having these particular roommates might be great for her.
Gabi Durand: Not yet, no. I’ve been a little busy, and you loaned the book to me two days ago.
She set her phone down in the cup holder, started her car, but before she could back out of her parking spot, she had a reply, and she couldn’t wait to check it.
Sarai Kaplan: So, not a speed reader, huh? Are you coming over tonight to move in more stuff?
Gabi Durand: On my way now. And, no, I’m not a speed reader. I read at a normal pace to actually enjoy the story. Is that offensive to speed readers? I don’t know.
Gabi stared down at the phone for a few seconds, but when a response didn’t come right away, she put her phone back down and pulled out of her spot.
She’d told Sarai that she was on her way over, so that was probably why she hadn’t replied.
They hadn’t texted a lot, but that was because Gabi had been over at the house every night this week, dropping things off and hanging out a little.
A few texts a day at most, but it had been nice for Gabi to have someone to text that wasn’t her gay male best friend, who didn’t exactly share any of her interests or hobbies outside of engineering.
Arlowe had been texting her, too. Fewer texts, and not at all about lesbian romance; her texts were more about coding languages or something new that she had added to their company website or the browser version of their software.
Gabi liked that as well because she wanted them to be friends, but she had to admit that she was enjoying Sarai’s texts a little more.
Enya hadn’t texted her at all, but they didn’t have much in common or to talk about – at least, not yet – so that made sense.
“Hey,” Arlowe greeted her when she walked into the house using her new key.
“Oh, hi,” she replied. “I’m just stopping by to drop off some stuff.”
“You don’t have to explain why you’re here. You live here, Gabi.”
“Not officially until tomorrow, when my lease starts.”
“Sure. Whatever. I was about to go out to the bar. Want to come? I can wait for you.”
“Oh, no. I need to unpack some stuff. I have all my coat hangers here now, so I want to get everything hung up that I brought over yesterday, and I need to go through whatever is in the two boxes I have in my trunk because I don’t remember what I packed in them.
I only labeled the box as belonging in the bedroom, which was clearly a mistake. ”
“Well, if you change your mind, just text me, and I’ll let you know how much longer I’m hanging out.”
“Will do,” she said. “Is… Sarai here? Or Enya?”
“Enya went out already. She said she wanted to go immerse herself in a language; whatever that means.”
Arlowe grabbed her phone off the coffee table before stuffing it into her jacket pocket.
“It means she went to the French restaurant in the city. Then, she’ll go to the Italian gelato place for dessert because it’s owned by actual Italians,” Violet explained as she walked into the living room from the kitchen.
“She does that sometimes. It gives her a chance to speak different languages with people who understand them. Whenever a new restaurant in town opens, she looks it up to see if it’s owned by people who are actually from wherever the food is from, too.
We’re not allowed to order Indian for delivery anymore because she goes and picks it up since the owners just moved to the US five years ago and speak fluent Hindi. ”
“She’s a little quirky, yeah?” Gabi guessed.
“A little. Comes with the genius,” Violet said. “And I was about to head home. Stella and I are cooking dinner together tonight.”
“Fine. Fine. Brag about how great it is to have a live-in girlfriend to the rest of us every chance you get,” Arlowe teased.
“I will. Maybe you should try looking for one, since you seem to be jealous of mine, and stop meeting random women at bars, Arlowe.”
They walked toward the door together, so Gabi moved out of the way to let them by.
“Everyone seems random until they’re not. How else am I supposed to meet a woman and fall in love if she’s not a stranger first?” Arlowe suggested.
When the two of them left the house, Gabi wondered if that was what it was like, having best friends whom they’d known forever.
It was like they never really finished a conversation but somehow still managed to finish it at the same time.
She waited for them to back out of the driveway before she went outside and carried in her boxes one by one, and as she was dropping them off in her bedroom, she had a thought.
Earlier, she’d asked about Sarai and Enya, not expecting Violet to still be there, but she’d gotten distracted, so she didn’t know if Sarai was there or if she was alone in the house.
Then, she heard something from the kitchen.
“Shit!”
“Yeah, that’s her,” she said to herself with a little smile.
Gabi walked down the hall, turned left, and saw Sarai staring down at what looked to be a TV dinner on the kitchen table.
“Hey,” she said.
“Oh.” Sarai looked up. “I didn’t know you were here already.”
“I got here a few minutes ago. What’s going on?” she asked as she walked over.
“I burned it. It said five to seven minutes.”
“And how long was it in the microwave for?”
“I think I might have put fifteen minutes on it by mistake. I went out to the garage and forgot about it.”
Gabi stared down at a completely and totally burned-to-a-crisp lasagna and said, “Well, you can try to remove the top, really bad part.”
“And probably end up with hard-as-a-rock noodles and burned cheese beneath it? Nope. Total waste. I was working on an idea and just spaced until the microwave yelled at me to come and get this mess.”
Sarai motioned to the offending microwave with her open hand.
“Do you have a backup plan?”
“For dinner? No. Who makes backup dinner plans?”
“I’m guessing someone like Violet.”
Sarai laughed, which made Gabi smile.
“You know her so well already,” Sarai joked. “And no, I don’t have a backup plan. I need to go grocery shopping, which was why I grabbed this out of the freezer. It’s not even mine. I stole it from Enya.”
“Want to order something? I haven’t eaten, either, and have no food of my own here yet.”
“I guess so,” Sarai said. “Let me see if Enya is hanging out tonight. I think Arlowe left already.”
“She did. Violet’s gone, too, and Enya went out to dinner to immerse herself in–”
“She went to the French place?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“And Italian for dessert. She might even go by the Armenian convenience store to talk to the woman who owns it. She loves the flat bread there, but she really goes to talk to the woman. She’s alone in there most of the time, and no one speaks to her in Armenian, so she loves it when Enya stops by.”
“So, it would just be you and me,” Gabi said. “For dinner, I mean.”
“What are you in the mood for?” Sarai asked.
Gabi swallowed and said, “Well, I have a lot of unpacking to do before the big move tomorrow, so maybe something that can get here fast.”
“Tacos?”
“Sure. From where?”
“The place down the street. They have pretty much everything. I’ll pull up the app on my phone, and you can order whatever you want. Shit… My phone is in the garage,” Sarai said when she realized it.
They walked out to the garage, and Gabi looked at the blank dry-erase board while Sarai pulled the app up on her phone.
“I thought you had an idea you were working on.”
“I did. It was garbage, so I erased it. Here you go.”
Sarai handed Gabi her phone.
“Is it possible that your idea wasn’t actually garbage, but that you’re being too hard on yourself?” she asked, scrolling through the menu to select what she wanted.
“Nope. Literal garbage. I even thought about throwing the entire dry-erase board away, but it wouldn’t fit in the trash bin.”
“That seems dramatic,” Gabi replied before she handed the phone back to Sarai.
“Well, I’m in marketing, so…”
Sarai looked down at her phone, added her food to the cart, and placed the order.
“Can I know what the idea was?” Gabi asked.
“I wanted to get a few influencers from other countries to help beef up downloads in our other markets, along with one or two who live here but are from another place initially; so, someone who moved here and had to learn English as a second language. I wanted them all to post about the app.”
“Sarai, that’s not garbage. That’s a good idea.”
“I don’t know. It feels off somehow.”
“Off somehow is not garbage. It just needs more work. May I?” Gabi asked, nodding to the rolling board behind her.
“Sure.”
Gabi picked up Sarai’s red marker, wrote ‘Influencers’ on the board, and set the marker down on the rack before she turned around to Sarai.
“I don’t know what you had written up here before – I’m sure it was way more than that – but you shouldn’t throw out an idea just because it needs work.”
“I know I’m in marketing, but I kind of hate influencer culture. That’s the real problem.”
Gabi chuckled and asked, “You do?”
“Yeah, can’t stand it. It bugs me that I have to send Instagram DMs to people or emails to their agents asking them for a post or a video of them talking about the app while they’re putting on their makeup or something. I get it; it’s a whole thing now. But I’m not a fan.”
“Me neither,” she shared as she sat down at a desk chair next to Sarai, who was leaning back against her desk. “But if you put those thoughts away, do you have a list of possible influencers who could work or be interested?”
“I’ve got about ten to narrow down further because we can’t afford all of them. I think it could move some needles, but not by much, which is another reason I wasn’t going to do it. I need something bigger; something that’s still affordable and that would move all the needles, you know?”
“Do you want to run some other ideas by me? I’m happy to be a fresh set of eyes or ears,” she offered.
“I need some more time with this, but thanks. After dinner, do you want some help unpacking? I could use a break from this.”
“I’d love that. Maybe you could ruin the ending of another book for me while we do it.”
“I thought you’d read it already. You said you’d read the book,” Sarai defended.
“Two books with the same title… Who knew?”
“Just read the book anyway. You’ll like it.”
“I will,” she said. “Once I’m moved in, I’ll have more time.”
“I will refrain from talking about any other books until you do, but I have a box of them in my closet that I haven’t read in years, so let me know if you want to borrow another one.”
“You’ve got a box of lesbian romance novels in your closet?”
“Yeah, yeah. I get the joke, Gabi.”
Sarai patted her on the shoulder as she laughed.