Page 12 of Derivation

“She what?”

“I guess she really can’t find a place. She went to apply for another apartment that she found just yesterday, and it’s already been rented, so she’s giving up, I think. This whole area has blown up overnight. They can’t build the apartments fast enough. I am so glad we’ve been able to renew here so many times.”

“Yeah…” Sarai said while she contemplated. “She just wants to see the house?”

“The room specifically, yeah. She saw the kitchen, living room, and, I guess, the bathroom when she was here. I told her that it was fine because I’d offered, and I didn’t want to be rude, but you, me, and Enya can talk about it if she’s actually interested. It has to be unanimous, so if you don’t want her here or a fourth roommate, period, I’ll give her the bad news myself since I started the whole thing.”

“But that’s all she wanted?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason,” she lied.

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.”