Page 78 of Never Been Shipped

“Do you still think about the cruise?” she asked at one point, where what she meant wasDo you ever think about being with me? Do you think about it as much as I do?

“I think about all of it,” he said. “I think about it every night.”

“Just at night?”

She could hear him smile over the phone. “Sometimes in the morning.”

“I—” She knew they were talking under something, over it, around it. They were tracking on multiple channels, and she wanted to turn certain ones up in the mix but she didn’t know how, or maybe she was just incapable. “I really miss you.”

John’s long exhale was audible. “I miss you, too.”

She swallowed, was trying to gather her courage to say more, to say whatever it was that had felt like a weight on her chest since she’d gotten back from the cruise, that wasn’t going away no matter how many lighthearted text exchanges she had with John.

On the other end, she could hear rustling, like he was moving around, and when his voice came it sounded a little far away at first before landing close to her ear again. “It’s late,” he said. “I should probably get to bed.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

“Good night, Micah.”

After that conversation, she’d wanted to go to sleep, hadn’t wanted to risk falling back into her old insomniac patterns. But she’d found it difficult to settle down, and so something had made her dig out a copy ofSo Much Promiseshe kept in a box under her bed. It wasn’t like she couldn’t have listened to the album any time she felt like it—it was available on streaming platforms, there were music videos on YouTube, there were no shortages of ways she could’ve revisited the album. She’d just never wanted to.

But now she put it on, sitting in the middle of her living room holding the Discman she’d bought just so she could listento John’s mix CDs, letting the music wash over her through her headphones. In a way, it didn’t sound like her. She could almost appreciate it like ithadbeen someone else, could better hear the places where the music was pretty good, actually. In another way, she could hear every bit of pain and sadness in her voice, melancholic artifacts in even the most upbeat, dance-y songs. Maybe that was why the album hadn’t taken off, maybe it had been too strange. But she was proud of that aspect of the record now. It felt like the most honest part.

She fell asleep on her couch and woke up to black-and-white reruns playing on her TV, the Discman discarded on the floor next to her, popped open to show the CD inside. She didn’t even bother to pick it up before going to her closet to retrieve the guitar case that John had given her when they’d left the cruise. Itsmelledlike him, somehow, which didn’t make any sense—it probably just smelled like wood and strings and guitar polish. He’d always taken exceptional care of his instruments. Truly, she was glad he’d had custody of this one as long as he had.

There were still a bunch of the suggestive guitar picks hidden away in one zippered pocket, and she smiled when she saw the one she pulled out.Give Me a Lick.She used it to strum down the strings, which were woefully out of tune.

She ended up getting so involved in what she was doing that she was jolted by a knock at the door. It was just past noon—well within her sanctioned hours with Mr. Li downstairs, and she’d been playing the guitar without an amp—so she didn’t think it could be him. Then she remembered, and set the guitar down on the floor, wincing at the thud and buzz from the vibrating strings.

“Shit,” she said. “Sorry, sorry, I’m coming.”

She opened the door to see Tatiana Rivera standing on the other side of it, a pair of giant sunglasses on her face.

“I tried to text you,” Tatiana said, holding up her phone. “We’re still doing lunch, right?”

Sometimes Micah thought that her rediscovered closeness with John was the most surprising thing that had come out of the cruise, but then that didn’t feel right. In many ways it didn’t feel like a surprise at all. It felt almost fated, like ofcoursethat was why they’d been on the cruise in the first place, of course they were going to find their way back to each other.

In which case, maybe the most surprising outcome of the cruise was her newfound friendship with Tatiana Rivera. It had all started when Micah had reached out to her on social media, worried that she’d somehow been so distracted by her insecurities and jealousies on the cruise that she’d come off as rude. But Tatiana—true to form—couldn’t have been kinder about the whole thing, and said she was hopeful that they could hang out before she had to leave for a film shoot next month. Since then, they’d gotten together a couple times, and Micah found that it was really nice, having a reason to get out of the apartment, sitting across from someone way more famous than she was in a public space where Micah could realize it didn’t have to be that big a deal, actually, if people recognized them or came up to talk to them.

“Come in,” Micah said. “I just need a couple minutes.”

Tatiana seemed to take in the whole scene—the guitar lying in the middle of the floor, the stereo, the notebook of scribbled lyrics. “We can reschedule,” she said.

Micah didn’t want to do that when she knew Tatiana would be out of town for so long. But at the same time, she truly didfeel like she was in the middle of something magical, and she was afraid that if she stepped away she’d lose it. “I can take a break,” she said. “But would you mind if we just got something to eat here?”

They ordered burritos from Micah’s favorite local place, and while they waited for the delivery to arrive Micah played Tatiana a tiny bit of the song she’d been working on, too shy to share any more of it. When Tatiana indicated toward the notebook, obviously asking for permission to take a peek, Micah pushed it toward her, chewing on her thumbnail while Tatiana read over the words.

“My handwriting’s terrible,” Micah said.

“It’s fine,” Tatiana said. “Your handwriting, I mean. The song is really good. Have you shown it to John yet?”

Micah was still debating whether she wanted to let John hear it at all. Of course she did—it was the entire reason she’d written it in the first place. But it had also been so long since she’d written any music, and the idea of sharingthisfelt almost painfully vulnerable. She was worried her lyrics were stupid and obvious. She worried they weren’t obvious enough, when she had so much that she wanted to say.

“He told me he was in love with me,” Micah said. “On the cruise. He told me that he’d loved me since we were kids.”

Tatiana didn’t look surprised. If anything, she looked…oddlypleased, like she’d had something to do with it. “And? What did you say?”

“I said…” Micah thought back to that moment between them. She’d thought about it a lot, in the weeks since. She thought about the intimacy of that darkness, the way she’d been extra conscious of the heat of John’s body, the sound of his breath,every single nerve ending where he touched her. She thought about everything he’d said, how he seemed to see her in a way that she worried wasn’t true, that shewantedto be true in the worst possible way. She thought about that overpowering, overwhelming orgasm—she could still get herself close thinking about it, even now. She thought about how, afterward, she’d broken down and cried, too overcome by emotion to do anything else.

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