Page 33 of Never Been Shipped

Micah ordered practicallyone of everything, because she was famished and assumed John must be, too. She also realized she didn’t know as much as she once had, about his likes and dislikes—whether he still picked the pickles off his burgers, if he still preferred to dip his fries into honey mustard if they had it.

“Oh, and do you have pineapple and ham for the pizza?” she asked before she got off the phone. “A couple slices of that, please.”

The food arrived before he did, and for a minute Micah had a panicked feeling that he’d changed his mind, that he wouldn’t show after all. She even checked her phone for a text before remembering that she’d changed her number in the intervening years, and he wouldn’t have her new one. She didn’t know why this was feeling somewhat like adate, but she had to shove that out of her head. He’d given no indication that he thought of this as a date.

And if it had been one, it would’ve been unconventional.She’d thought about changing into another outfit after her shower, but she actually hadn’t brought that many with her, and she felt like being as comfortable as possible. So instead she’d changed into her pajamas, which consisted of a spaghetti-strap tank top and boy shorts underwear. But then when she’d glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror, it looked a littletoorevealing—the amount of leg on display, the way her nipples pebbled against the thin fabric of the tank.

There was a soft knock at her door, which jerked her out of her thoughts.

“Just a minute!” she called, rifling through her suitcase until she found an oversized shirt. She’d pulled it over her head and was still twisting it to lie straight when she opened the door to John.

“Hey,” she said.

His gaze flickered down her body, and for a minute she thought he could see all of it—her nipples still straining against the fabric, the heat that suddenly pooled at the bottom of her stomach just from having his eyes on her, having him standing so close. But then he just cleared his throat, gesturing toward her shirt.

“Why am I not surprised,” he said.

She glanced down. It was one of her favorite comfort items of clothing, faded black and washed to premium softness, a black-and-white image of Elvis singing into a microphone emblazoned across the chest, the screen printing worn away in places. She’d cut out part of the neck, because she hated shirts that felt too tight around there, and it hung loose and long enough to hit her midthigh like a dress.

“Come on in,” she said. “The food’s getting cold.”

She’d opened the sliding glass door to the balcony, which probably hadn’t helped, although the weather had warmed up considerably over the course of the day. She wondered where they were now—they were supposed to make their port stop tomorrow at the cruise company’s private Bahamian island, so she didn’t know if they were still actively sailing or if maybe they’d stopped, only miles away from land. It was weird, not knowing. It also felt kind of nice, like maybe this was some in-between state where she could exist for a while without having to think about any parts of her real life.

They shifted food around until they could make up their own plates of random bits of all of it, like they were at a buffet. She noticed that John did place one of the cups of honey mustard next to his fries, which made her oddly proud, like she’d accurately guessed a difficult question at trivia.

“Thanks for ordering all this,” he said once they were sitting on the balcony chairs, their plates on their laps.

“It was fun,” Micah said. “I know this will sound random, but it felt like being Macaulay Culkin in that secondHome Alonemovie, you know what I’m talking about? Like having the ability to order whatever over-the-top thing you wanted and they’d just bring it to you.”

“I knowexactlywhat you mean,” John said. “Asa is obsessed with those movies. He makes us watch them every year. Sometimes twice, if he gets it in his head to do a Christmas-in-July-type thing.”

Micah smiled. She liked hearing him talk about his housemates. She liked the way she could tell there was obvious caring there, that these were people who were important to his life. She liked the way he’d dropped the descriptorhousematefrom infront of their names when talking to her, as if he already included her enough in his life to assume she’d know who he was talking about.

And she couldn’t deny it—she liked knowing that these were the people he went home to, rather than a wife or girlfriend or whatever else she might’ve assumed when she first heard him on the phone that time.

“How long have you lived there?”

John looked up, like he was thinking about the answer, but also giving himself time to swallow the bite of pizza he’d just taken. “A few years,” he said. “I stayed in Orlando, after the band…I had an apartment but broke the lease early when I had to move back to Ohio for a few months. I guess I could’ve gotten another apartment when I came back, but the experience soured me on the whole corporate landlord thing, and so when I saw an ad for a house looking for an extra housemate, it just seemed like, okay. Let’s try this out.”

There was so much in between those details, questions that Micah had and then things that she could assume. From the timing, she could figure that he’d returned to Ohio because his dad got sick. She also felt like she heard a little bit of loneliness behind the words—like his decision to live with other people had less to do with corporate landlords and more to do with wanting to not bealoneanymore.

But maybe she was projecting.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I have an apartment in Silver Lake,” she said. “Mostly so I can walk around the reservoir.”

“By yourself?”

She knew he was asking more about the apartment than thewalking, but it didn’t matter, since the answer was the same. She also wondered if that was his way of asking if she was seeing anyone, if that was the kind of thing he’d care about.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s the converted upstairs of a house, and this old man lives underneath me. He’s a riot, to be honest. Like for a while I thought he hated me, because he’d always be out walking his dog and if he caught me coming or going he’d just stop and glare at me, like I was doing something wrong. I racked my brain—like had he seen me with a woman and he was homophobic? But I barely brought anyone back to my apartment. Was he still mad about the time I overfilled the garbage can and it tipped over? Because I was pretty sure I’d cleaned everything up from that.”

John was watching her face, the ghost of a smile around the corner of his mouth. “So what was it?”

“It was my hair!” Micah smiled herself, just remembering. “He said he couldn’t figure it out. What color it was supposed to be, if it was even real. He sounded legitimately upset by it, like it was new technology he couldn’t quite get.”

John’s gaze went then to her hair, still wet from the shower and plaited into a simple braid. It had been resting on her shoulder, and she realized that the tip had dripped a damp circle on her shirt over her left breast. The fabric was a slightly deeper shade of black there, and the water made the outline of her nipple clearer even through the double layers she was wearing. She flipped her braid back, sliding down in the chair to rest her feet against the balcony railing.

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