Chapter 14
Ipush through the front door of Sleigh Queen, expecting the usual chaos—Patti on the mic, the familiar thump of whatever pop anthem Felix has decided to overplay and ruin this week. What I get instead is the equivalent of a glitter bomb detonating directly in my face.
Confetti cannons go off from both sides of the doorway.
Not little party poppers…full-sized, industrial-grade confetti launchers that shoot enough metallic streamers into the air to choke a small mammal.
Christmas lights, strung along every rafter and wall, blaze to life all at once, red and gold and blinding, and the bass drops so hard the ice rattles in every drink on the bar.
The sound hits me like a physical wall, some remix of something I vaguely recognize pitched up to stadium volume, and the floor is vibrating under my boots so intensely I can feel it in my molars.
The club is packed. Not weeknight packed.
Not even Saturday-night packed. We’re talking wall-to-wall bodies, shoulder to shoulder, every square inch of floor occupied by someone I know.
Roz and Dev are by the bar, already three sheets to the wind if their matching grins are anything to go by.
Anson’s waving a drink above the crowd like he’s flagging down a rescue helicopter.
The entire garden club has colonized the booth in the back, Mrs. Pelletier and her crew of silver-haired busy-bodies lifting their glasses in unison.
Half the drag roster is in full regalia of sequins, feathers, the works, and Patti is front and center with a half-empty glass, already hollering something that sounds suspiciously like “Sweep my chimney, baby!” to the general delight of everyone within earshot.
I freeze in the doorway. My mouth opens.
Closes. Opens again. A streamer of gold confetti has caught in my bun, dangling over my right ear like some kind of sad, celebratory antenna.
I’m still wearing my canvas jacket, the one with the torn pocket and the permanent smell of cedar, and my boots are caked with the day’s soot because I came straight from a chimney clean on Maple without bothering to change.
I look, in other words, exactly like someone who did not get the memo.
“SURPRISE!” The word comes from approximately seventy different throats at once, none of them in sync, which makes it sound like the world’s most enthusiastic car crash.
I stare, my brain doing that thing where it tries to process too much information at once and just gives up, leaving me standing there with my hand still on the door and my heart doing something complicated behind my ribs.
Then the lights shift, the music cuts, and May takes the stage.
May, in full Mary Poppins chimney sweep regalia. Top hat, soot-smudged cheeks, and a broom that’s been bedazzled within an inch of its life. She plants one foot on the edge of the stage, strikes a pose that would make Julie Andrews proud, and launches into “Chim Chim Cher-ee”.
The crowd loses its collective mind. I lose mine right along with them, because three more queens hit the stage in matching chimney sweep outfits, brooms held aloft, and the number slides seamlessly into “Step In Time” with a choreography so tight and so ridiculous I’m howling before the first chorus.
They tap-dance. They actually tap-dance, brooms clicking against the stage in perfect unison, top hats bobbing, and the whole room is screaming the lyrics back at them like we’ve been rehearsing for weeks.
I am screaming right along, hands in the air, voice completely shot, because what the actual fuck, my job is being turned into a Broadway production and it is the greatest thing I have ever witnessed.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder mid-chorus.
I turn, still laughing, and Carlisle is there—tall, steady Carlisle with his insane muscles and the permanent look of a man who has seen everything and is still somehow surprised by humanity.
He doesn’t say anything, he just wraps both arms around me and holds on.
Not a bro-hug. Not a quick back-pat. A real hug, both arms, his chin on my shoulder, and he holds it for a beat longer than casual, long enough that the noise of the club sort of fades around the edges, and it’s just the two of us standing there in the middle of all this chaos.
When he pulls back, his eyes are doing that thing. That Carlisle thing, where they’re steady and a little sad and completely certain.
“Drew would be happy,” he says. Quiet. Just for me.
My throat closes and all I can manage is to nod once, tight, because if I try to speak right now, something is going to break, and I am not having my emotional collapse in the middle of a drag queen chimney sweep extravaganza, thank you very much.
Carlisle squeezes my shoulder, one firm press, and melts back into the crowd without another word. The music swells again, May is high-kicking like her life depends on it, and I’m standing there with confetti in my hair and Carlisle’s words sitting in my chest, warm and heavy and true.
That’s when I see her.
Maddie. A few feet away, leaning against the edge of the bar, a drink in one hand and her eyes on me.
She’s wearing a floral dress, bright against the club’s low light, and her hair is loose around her shoulders in a way that makes my chest do something I’m quickly getting used to.
But it’s her face that stops me cold—steady, warm, watching every micro-reaction cross my face like she’s cataloging them, storing them away.
She did this. Of course she did. This is Maddie Weiz operating at full capacity, and the sight of her standing there, calm amid the chaos she orchestrated, is almost enough to knock me flat.
Our eyes lock across the room. The bass is still pounding, the queens are still dancing, confetti is still drifting from the rafters like slow-motion snow, and Maddie is looking at me like I’m the answer to a question she’s been asking for years.
I hold her gaze and let the noise wash over me, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Maddie tips her chin toward the stairs, and I follow without thinking, the way I’ve been following her since the first time she handed me a paintbrush and told me to stop overthinking the trim.
The stairs behind the stage are narrow enough that our shoulders brush as we climb, Christmas lights strung floor to ceiling in dense, careless loops, casting everything in warm gold and red.
Above us, the rafters pulse with each bass hit from the main floor, the sound muffled but present, a steady heartbeat through the walls.
The upstairs lounge is quieter and empty except for us, the room dark, a single string of lights over the mirror providing just enough illumination to see by. Maddie leans against the bar, both hands flat on the counter behind her, and faces me directly.
“I’m staying,” she says, no qualifiers, no hedging, no “I think” or “I’ve decided” or any of the scaffolding she usually builds around her big declarations.
Just: I’m staying. “Not because you convinced me. Not because of Drew, or the store, or Melvin’s bracket system.
” A hint of a smile there, quick and genuine.
“Because Sleighbell Springs is my home too. Has been for a while. I just needed to say it out loud to make it real.”
She lets it sit. The words hang between us, simple and enormous, and my breath goes shallow in a way that has nothing to do with the climb upstairs.
Before I can respond—and let’s be honest, my response capacity is currently operating at roughly the level of a stunned goldfish—Maddie keeps going.
“And I want you with me.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “Officially. No hiding, no half-steps, no ‘we’ll see.’ I want you, Jordan Vale, in my life, in my bed, in my extremely chaotic hardware store, and I am done pretending that’s up for debate.”
The pause that follows is long enough to measure in heartbeats. My brain, which is usually pretty good at producing words on demand, produces exactly nothing. My throat works as I exhale, and the word comes out rougher than I mean it to.
“Yes.”
Maddie’s mouth curves. Not a full smile yet, but the beginning of one, the kind that starts at the corners and works its way inward like sunlight spreading across a floor.
Then she keeps going, because Maddie Weiz, once she’s started, is basically unstoppable.
“One more thing.” She pushes off the bar, takes half a step closer.
“I want you at the store. Not as a favor. Not as charity. Because the store needs you, and because I want to build something with your name on it alongside mine. Repair and workshop manager. Community whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it. A partnership. For real.”
The reaction lands in my body before it reaches my face.
A stillness, complete and total, like someone hit pause on every muscle at once.
My fingers curl once at my sides, nails pressing into my palms. My back finds the wall behind me, pressing against it as if I need its solidity, need something to hold me upright while my insides rearrange themselves.
This is it. This is the thing I’ve wanted and never said, not out loud, not even to myself in the dark at three in the morning when the want was loud enough to keep me awake.
A place. A role. Something that belongs to me, with my name on it, built alongside someone who sees me, actually sees me, and wants me there anyway.
Another beat of silence, longer this time. The bass from downstairs thrums through the wall against my shoulder blades, steady as a pulse.
“Yes.”
The word comes out steadier than the first one. Then, quieter, like it costs me something to say it—which it does, it costs everything, every scrap of armor I’ve built over years of keeping my wants small and portable—I add: “I love you.”
Maddie’s composure cracks. Not a little crack, not a hairline fracture, the whole damn thing goes, and what replaces it is a smile so wide, so unguarded, so completely Maddie that it nearly knocks the wind out of me.
The kind of smile she doesn’t usually let people see, raw and bright and entirely without her usual careful calibration.
“I love you too,” she says, and there’s no hesitation in it, no pause, just the words out in the open where they belong, warm and certain as her hand finding mine.
I close the distance between us. One hand comes up to cup her jaw, thumb brushing the edge of her cheekbone where a faint smudge of blue paint still lingers from God knows when, and I kiss her.
It’s not gentle, it’s not careful. It’s the kind of kiss that has three years of want behind it, three years of almosts and not-quites, and Maddie meets me with equal force, her hands fisting in the front of my jacket, pulling me closer like she’s afraid I might remember how to breathe and change my mind.
The club roars on the other side of the wall, bass still dropping, crowd still screaming, and it feels like they’re cheering for us, like the whole damn town is downstairs throwing confetti at the exact moment our mouths find each other in a poorly lit lounge above a drag bar, and I cannot think of a single place I would rather be.
I pull back just enough to speak, my forehead resting against hers, our breath mingling in the narrow space between us.
“Take me home,” I say, voice low, rough at the edges.
Maddie’s smile is answer enough.