Chapter 30 #2
The words might have sounded like a double entendre from anyone else, but this woman’s firm expression made him feel like he was about to be waterboarded.
Still, he followed her up in the elevator and walked into Mo’s apartment for the first time.
Probably, he mourned, for the last time.
He should have come here when she invited him, but Wes had been too comfortable in his own sphere and space.
This shouldn’t have been the first time he’d met her friends, her roommates that she had told him about on more than one occasion.
The woman who let him up introduced herself as Sloan, making the other woman Mackenzie, a curvy, pretty blonde who must have tacked up the musical theater posters that lined the walls.
Sloan sat next to Mackenzie, unlacing her black sneakers and undoing her long black hair from its braid.
It coiled around her shoulder, making her look a little bit Medusa, a little bit model.
Mackenzie looked friendlier, smiling as she pointed to a spot on the pink chair opposite to sit on.
Wes moved a fluffy yellow robe to make room.
“What are your intentions with our friend?” Sloan asked without further introduction.
Wes stammered, and before he could manage a response, Mackenzie added, “Take your time.” He realized that she was holding something small on her lap—a hedgehog.
“Oh, that must be Perkins,” Wes said, gesturing at the hedgehog.
Mackenzie gazed down at the little animal. “You can feed him a mealworm if you want.”
“No, I’m okay.”
She raised her eyebrows like this was obviously the wrong answer. Wes was failing this interrogation, even with the good cop of the pair.
“I really like Maureen,” Wes said. Understatement wasn’t usually his forte, and true to form, the phrase felt heavy and unexplored in his mouth.
He wanted to unpack his adjectives like in that old Schoolhouse Rock!
song. Mo was incredible, electric, brilliant, hot, inventive, and hilarious.
He had never felt so much like himself as he did with her, as if the Wes he was with her was the Wes he wanted to be all the time.
Except the lying parts. Those parts he would change.
“But this is about more than my feelings toward her. It’s about her book. ”
“Is it good?” Sloan asked. “She hasn’t let us read it.”
“She hasn’t even let me read it,” Mackenzie said, then she added, “I’m a librarian,” in the same proud tone of ownership that people used when saying they were from the Bronx originally, not transplants.
“It’s really good,” he said. Again, the weight of the understatement shook him.
He was dying to say more—about how they would get to read it, soon, but he didn’t want to share that news with them first. “But more than that, she’s good.
She’s amazing. I’m obsessed with her—her brains and her talent and her ridiculous sense of humor and her love of Ents. ”
“She is such a secret Lord of the Rings dork, and she does not show that side to everyone,” Sloan agreed.
Mackenzie snapped her fingers like she had solved something. She looked sideways at Sloan. “Sam Gamgee. He has a total Sam Gamgee thing going on. With a beard, though.”
“Oh, a hundred percent.”
“Pretty sure that’s why she likes you,” Mackenzie said with an air of finality.
He knew he was blushing at the sideways compliment.
“Thanks?” But that Mo liked him—that she had told her roommates that she did—was confirmation enough that Wes wasn’t completely on the wrong path.
“I don’t want to wait to tell her, because I think waiting would ruin her weekend, but I don’t know where she is. ”
Mackenzie smiled and turned to her roommate. “Oh, this boy wants to romantic-gesture our friend, Sloan.”
“But should we let him?” Sloan looked thoughtful. She reached over and pulled the hedgehog into her lap. Finally, after a long second, she gave Wes a serious look. “Did she ever tell you about our ratports?”
He had thought Sloan’s looks before were serious, but they were nothing compared to the death stare directed at him. The small animal on her lap only added to the Bond villain air of the moment. “What?” Wes was sure his mouth gaped open, but he didn’t know how else to arrange his face. “Your—”
“Ratports. Every week, the three of us talk about rats we’ve seen. Around the city.”
“So many rats,” Mackenzie agreed. “And we started to talk about it because, well, if we talked about it and made it part of our lives, it would at least make us laugh. Or acknowledge how gross but normal it is. Life is gross and weird and normal and funny. Rats are a part of that.”
“Okay.” Wes could not see where this was going.
“And we just want to make sure you’re not one,” Mackenzie concluded.
Wes choked.
“That’s not to say that rats don’t have their charm!
” Sloan said. “I don’t hold the bubonic plague against them.
That was really fleas. They get a bad rap.
But, honestly, our friend deserves a better class of rodent.
At least a hedgehog.” Perkins, as if knowing he was being mentioned, curled tighter.
“I’m not a rat,” Wes said. “Or at least, if I am, I promise to be better.”
A glance passed between Mackenzie and Sloan, then Sloan replied, “Okay, but if you hurt her—”
“You’ll have to kill me?” he helpfully supplied.
Mackenzie smiled sweetly. “Slowly and painfully.”
Unpacking the adverbs this time, Wes noted.
He didn’t tell them that the upcoming airplane ride would feel both slow and painful, not even mentioning the apologies he had to concoct, but it was a price he was willing to pay to begin to set things right again with Mo.
He only hoped he could get there in time to see her.