He sighed and rolled over, thinking maybe if he wasn’tstaringat the ceiling, he’d stop pretending he could see through it, only to find the light on his phone blinking.
Aubrey, with his first check-in.
Nate debated only for a second—using his phone in bed always made sleeping more difficult afterward—but then he snatched it up. He wasn’t going to be sleeping any time soon at this rate anyway.
Made it to Lincoln, the text read. It was dated seven minutes previously.Fun fact, the state flag of Nebraska kind of looks like a big white dong.
Nate googled it, found he did not disagree, and navigated back to the text thread to say so, only to find another message.Nebraska, the Moby Dick State.
The corn fields are just a metaphor for the ocean, Nate replied, vaguely impressed with himself for remembering what a metaphor was. Tenth-grade English was a long time ago.Weather hold out?
As though he hadn’t checked it three times since Aubrey left.
Nothing but a few flurries, he confirmed.Think I’m going to hit the hay, though. Another 11 hours tomorrow.
Drive safe, Nate wrote back.
I will.Then, a few seconds later—I love you.
Nate smiled, stupidly tracing his thumb over the words as though he could feel their warmth.Love you too.
He was tired but too keyed up to sleep, so to distract himself, he flipped over to Instagram and scrolled through his private feed. His friends’ kids were growing up before his eyes. The dogs too, and Kaden’s cat.
And then he scrolled past an ad, blinked, and scrolled back up.
Huh.
Seized by a sudden wild hair, Nate clicked the ad. Aubrey had left a copy of his rental agreement just in case. He could get the address from that.
When he finally put his phone back on the nightstand a few minutes later, he had no problem falling asleep.
THERE WASa box on Aubrey’s front step.
Not just any box either. It was four-and-a-half feet high and maybe twenty-two inches square. It had a cheerful red-and-yellow DHL sticker and a fat customs form taped to it. When he picked it up, it weighed a ton.
Had he ordered something and forgotten? He hadn’t been sleeping well the past few nights. He was used to Nate’s deviated-septum breathing at night, and now he needed a white-noise machine or something. He’d been meaning to order one online. Maybe the lack of sleep had caused him to do some late-night impulse shopping, but he didn’t remember it.
Weird.
He took the box inside.
Finding a knife that was actually sharp took some doing. Aubrey hadn’t done a lot of unpacking, and the knives provided in furnished rentals had notoriously dull blades. But finally he managed to get something that would cut through the thick tape.
The box had layers, like an onion. Slice by slice, his living room became a cardboard graveyard. Inside the two exterior boxes was an actual honest-to-God wooden crate that said FRAGILE THIS WAY UP in Italian. Aubrey didn’t have a crowbar, so he carefully pried off the lid with a butter knife. Well, two butter knives; the first one bent. Then there were packing peanuts. Then bubble wrap.
He was starting to doubt there was anything actuallyinsidethe box when he found the semi-sharp knife back in the pile of packing material and sliced through the tape holding the bubble wrap.
It fell away slowly, dreamily, leaving behind a four-foot-tall mustard and puce glass sculpture that looked… that looked….
It looked like a giant whale penis with a really nasty skin infection. Just looking at it, Aubrey knew it must have cost several thousand dollars, never mind the cost to get it to the States. It was the kind of color that would only appear in nature if nature were very ill. There was no hope that it would ever match Aubrey’s décor, because Aubrey was not a cave-dwelling gremlin who’d had his taste surgically removed.
What the fuck.It looked just like the hideous vase they shattered at Nate’s apartment, only larger and orders of magnitude more hideous.
It had to be from Nate. No one else would spend that kind of money on something so singularly unattractive. But what kind of message was it supposed to send? Aubrey didn’t think it was a callback, intentional or not, to Nate’s relationship with Marty. Nate was definitively over that. It seemed like an unsubtle reminder of what had happened to the first vase.
The shape was right, anyway.
The kicker of it was, Aubrey didn’t want to get rid of it. Sure, it was ugly, but it was hilarious.
