"Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat." Anthony's face lit up.
An orange tabby with a white muzzle, a white ruff and white socks came trotting up to Sören, Anthony, and Nicholas to sniff; Anthony stooped immediately to begin petting the cat.
"His name is Eugène," Yeyette said.
Sören smiled as the cat rubbed against his legs. "Ah, this is the kitty you keep mentioning. He's even cuter than the pictures!"
Anthony nodded as he stood back up. "I love cats. I grew up with cats."
"You don't have a cat?" Yeyette frowned a little. "Sören would have mentioned something about it..."
Anthony and Nicholas exchanged an awkward glance, then looked at Sören, who nodded, knowing what they were about to say - it was a bit of a sore spot. Nicholas cleared his throat and said, "I had a cat, named Virgatus, who passed on just under four years ago. He was very old for a cat, he lived to be twenty-eight."
"Wow." Yeyette's eyes widened.
"In the time between moving out of my parents' place and getting together with Nicholas, I didn't have a cat even though I wanted one," Anthony said. "Going on digs from country to country... it's hard to travel with pets, especially in places that have strict animal quarantine laws. I at least got a few years with Virgatus before he died."
"I never got to meet him," Sören said, "but I saw photos. He was a brown tabby."
"Hence his name," Nicholas said. "Latin for 'striped'."
Anthony and Sören each took one of Nicholas's hands and squeezed; Sören knew Virgatus had been like Nicholas's child, and Nicholas was still grieving four years later. "It had felt a bit soon to get another cat until more recently," Nicholas said. "We've been talking about adopting a cat, or perhaps a pair of cats, when we return to London."
Yeyette gave a sympathetic little smile. "In the meantime, feel free to spoil Eugène here."
"Twist my arm," Anthony said dryly.
"Let me show you to your room," Yeyette said.
Carrying their luggage, they climbed steps to the top floor. Sören was a little out of breath at the top step - he had asthma - but it wasn't too bad. As they walked down the hall, Sören glanced over at Nicholas, more concerned for Nicholas's arthritis, but Nicholas looked over at him and spoke into his mind, I'm all right, dearest.
I hope so. Sören flashed him a teasing grin. Don't want you to be too sore to...
"There you are," Yeyette said, gesturing.
The bedroom was huge - at least twice the size of the bedroom in their flat in London. They had a California King four-poster bed that would be a comfortable fit for the three tall men, one short but wide wooden dresser, and two tall dressers. All the furniture matched, wooden, stained cherry. "Solid oak," Yeyette said, observing Sören noticing.
"Nice," Anthony said.
The bedspread and curtains had a teal and grey knotwork pattern on a white background. The pillowcases were solid navy. Sören smiled at the print of Van Gogh's Starry Night - his favorite painting - in a cherry oak frame that matched the furniture. In one of the corners of the room there was a beige scratching post, and on top of one of the tall dressers was a bouquet of fireflower roses in a teal blue ceramic vase with cracks lined with gold, in the Japanese kintsugi style, that Sören had made for Yeyette when they were at university together, and roommates. Sören's eyes misted at the sight of the vase.
You still have it.
Yeyette gently nudged him. Of course. A sigh. We couldn't bring a lot with us when we came from France, but... I insisted on bringing that.
Sören swallowed hard, deeply touched that the vase had survived when other things hadn't. He patted Yeyette's shoulder. He was also even more curious now about how Yeyette ended up in Indiana, or more precisely, why. He knew from his own firsthand experience that moving to another country usually involved some downsizing, but it also usually didn't involve getting rid of almost everything. That, combined with the fact that Paris to Terre Haute was a very strange move, suggested something was going on. But now didn't seem like the right time to press it. Soon... but not now.
Sören, Nicholas, and Anthony set their luggage down and Yeyette took them down the hall. "There's the bathroom," she said - it was done in cream tile, and had a walk-in-shower with glass doors. "There's another guest bedroom that way..." Sören peeked down and saw another fully furnished, but unused, bedroom, with a smaller bed, two dressers instead of three, and the bedspread and curtains were solid navy blue. "And this is a sort of common area, like your own personal living room." There was a third guest bedroom that, instead of a bed and dressers, had a navy loveseat and a teal armchair, two leather ottomans, a black bookshelf along one wall, and a black desk with a leather office chair a few feet away from a large window that gave an impressive view of the farmland and some of the town. There was also a three-story cat tree by the window, and a cat-sized drinking fountain in the corner. Anthony smiled at it.
"Eugène likes to roam the house," Yeyette explained, "so we make sure he gets enough water. I'll be in to change the filter every so often."
"Oh, I can do it while we're here," Anthony offered, "or one of us can." Sören and Nicholas nodded. "Does he have a catbox up here too?" Anthony raised an eyebrow.
"Er, no," Yeyette said, in a way that suggested the talk of catboxes made her somewhat uncomfortable. That, too, was strange - Sören knew Yeyette was a toxicologist and that wasn't exactly a job for the squeamish. But maybe it was just her not wanting guests to feel like they had to do the catbox. Sören wasn't going to ask about that now, either.
They followed Yeyette back downstairs so she could show them the living room - Sören smiled at the real fireplace, thinking that must be nice and cozy in the winter - and the kitchen, which had a rustic feel with wood finish. "You have free access to the kitchen," Yeyette said. "It's open twenty-four hours. You can share our food, you're also welcome to keep any of your own food here, we won't steal it." She smirked. "I can't promise the cat won't, though."
Nicholas chuckled. "Is Eugène a rapscallion?"
Anthony and Sören laughed - Sören loved it when Nicholas used old-fashioned words. Yeyette laughed too. "He can be," she said; Eugène trilled softly and climbed up into her arms, giving them a look as if to protest his innocence. "Huh?"
"Prrrp?" Eugène headbutted her face.
Yeyette made coffee - an opportunity to show them where the coffee maker was, and the coffee, and the sugar and other fixings. When the coffee was ready, as they let it cool, DeKalb looked at the grandfather clock by the stairwell and back at Sören and his partners. "I feel bad for asking this when I know you guys had a long flight and probably want to just kick back for awhile, but if you guys wouldn't mind coming along grocery shopping, I'd like to get there before it starts to get real busy," DeKalb said.
"We would have asked you in advance for a list of preferences with food and snacks, but I thought things might be different enough here it's better to see in-person," Yeyette said.
"I don't mind," Sören said.
"I don't mind either," Anthony said.
"Nicholas, if you want to stay behind, I can show you the exercise setup in the basement, which is mostly DeKalb's," Victor said. "But I have a space for fencing."
Nicholas's eyes widened and then he chuckled with an approving nod. "Yes, thank you. I belong to a fencing club in London, but as you know we're not there currently, so... it would be nice to have regular practice with someone close to my own skill level." Then Nicholas's brow furrowed. "I didn't bring my rapier..."
"There is a spare," Victor said.
Sören smiled and rubbed Nicholas's shoulder. Sören thought Nicholas and Anthony had both been good sports about this whole thing - while Nicholas and Victor were old acquaintances, that in and of itself did not warrant going to Indiana for three months. They were indulging him, and Sören was glad that Nicholas, at least, would get an outlet for one of his hobbies while he was here.
Sören couldn't feel too bad for Anthony either - now Eugène was perched on the arm of the couch and Anthony was skritching him, talking singsong baby talk as the cat purred loudly, leaning into Anthony's touch. "Yes, you're a good boy. Yes you are. You're such a sweet baby. Such a sweet widdle baby boy, such a big purr for such a widdle baby. Look at your widdle ruff and your widdle sockses, your widdle feetsies are so cute..." Eugène wrapped a paw around Anthony's wrist and Anthony's smile got bigger as he said, "Awww, wook at your widdle toe beans..."
Nicholas's lips quirked and he shook with silent laughter as he took a sip of his coffee. Sören's laughter was less silent. Anthony realized he was going a bit overboard and he stopped, cheeks pink. "Er," Anthony said.
Sören patted his head. "Don't stop on our accounts."
Anthony quickly finished his coffee. "Right, shall we get going to the store?"
This time Yeyette was driving, with DeKalb in the passenger's seat. The store was in the opposite direction of the way they'd come into the neighborhood from the airport. Sören's jaw dropped as he saw their next-door neighbors' house, white, two stories, which boasted an enormous American flag on a pole, an equally enormous wooden cross on the front lawn, a TRUMP PENCE lawn sign, and what appeared to be a broken refrigerator on the front porch, and a rusted, beat-up red Mustang up on cinder blocks on the lawn a few meters away from the cross and the flag.
Anthony's eyes were huge. "What..."
"That's the Busch clan," DeKalb said, and then he explained, "No, not related to the former president, and Busch with a C."
"C for Christian," Yeyette said. "If you ever run into them, they'll talk your ear off trying to convert you."
"C for Crap," DeKalb said. "They let their goddamn dog shit every damn where and don't pick up after it."
"C for Clown Car," Yeyette said, snickering.
DeKalb also chuckled. At Sören and Anthony's confused looks, DeKalb said, "They're that particular kind of fundamentalist called Quiverfull that believes God wants them to have a shitload of babies -"
"Hence my comment," Yeyette said. "A vagina is not a clown car."
DeKalb nodded, laughing harder, then he got more serious as he said, "They have seven kids." Anthony was staring out the window again in a bit of shock, and DeKalb gave Sören a pointed look. "What kind of whacko has seven kids? Seriously."
"I knew some pretty weird people in Florida," Sören said, "but this is weird even by Florida standards." He patted Anthony, who couldn't stop staring behind them at the eyesore of the neighbors' property, as if he were in disbelief of everything he was seeing and hearing.
"Welcome to Indiana," DeKalb said. "The only place more backwards than this is Texas. It's like stepping into some fucked-up alternate dimension."
"So how did you end up here?" Sören couldn't resist asking now.
DeKalb and Yeyette looked at each other and after a pause they nodded. "We'll tell you later," Yeyette said. "It's a bit of a story."
_
"Those aren't chips." Anthony looked aghast as Sören pulled a bag of Ruffles cheddar-and-sour-cream potato chips off the shelf. "They're crisps."
Yeyette pursed her lips and shook her head. "Oh no, what you call chips, are called fries here. And what you call crisps, the Americans call chips."
Anthony narrowed his eyes. "Why."
"Because this is Murrika," DeKalb quipped.
Anthony made a face like he'd just sucked a lemon. Sören couldn't help laughing a little.
DeKalb pushed the cart along. "Just be glad we're back to calling them French fries and not, yanno, freedom fries."
"Freedom to do what, butcher the Queen's English?"
"Don't worry, it gets worse," Sören said, patting him. He'd gone to university in the States and worked at Boston Medical Center before he lived in Florida for two, almost three years, and though he was an immigrant he had also become familiar enough with American words for things that it had been a bit of an adjustment in London; he imagined that would also be true for Anthony and Nicholas here in the States.
DeKalb turned and they entered the beverages aisle. Yeyette and DeKalb put bottled water in the cart; there were bottles and cases of Coke and Pepsi and other soft drinks which could be found all over the world, so that wasn't a strange sight to Anthony. But Anthony was still musing on the culture shock. "Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering why Americans call the liquid they put in their cars 'gas'."
DeKalb cleared his throat. "Speaking of liquid, I hear y'all like tea over there." He gestured to jugs of sweet tea.
Anthony's jaw dropped and for a moment he couldn't make words. Then just strangled sounds came out. Sören covered his mouth, trying not to laugh too hard, but a snort escaped and Anthony glared. Sören batted his eyes innocently.
Finally Anthony found his words. "You know, suddenly it makes much more sense to me why your country is the way it is, when I see the barbaric way you lot treat tea. Your country was founded dumping perfectly good tea in a harbor... now this."
DeKalb guffawed. "The veep's in town, you might not want to let the administration hear any of this or Trump'll be on Twitter... 'England's not sending us their best people'..."
Anthony rolled his eyes. "He could build the bloody wall out of this..." He picked up a jug of sweet tea. "It would be quite effective at keeping us out."
Sören quietly took the jug of sweet tea out of Anthony's hands and put it in the cart. Then he grinned as he saw a case of small bottles of peach tea, which he'd developed a taste for at university. "Peach! My favorite." He put the case in the cart.
They got perishables last - cheese, milk, ice cream and popsicles, meat. "We were thinking of having a cookout tonight to welcome you guys," DeKalb said, looking at an assortment of different flavors of bratwurst. "Burgers, brats... or do you prefer hot dogs?"
"I like both," Sören said.
"Either is fine." Anthony nodded. Then he looked at Sören and quipped, "You eating a brat seems cannibalistic."
"It's settled then, let's have brats," Sören said, snickering. He took down a package of jalapeno bratwurst - he'd also developed a taste for hot-and-spicy food during his years in the States. DeKalb nodded and put it in the cart. He added a package of regular brats as well.
"Oh boy, that's one thing I can get now that I'm back in the States," Sören said, realizing.
"What?" There was an unspoken here we go again at the end of Anthony's sentence.
"Corn dogs," Sören said. "It feels like forever since I had a corn dog."
Yeyette's laughter rang out. "You and your corn dogs."
Anthony looked like he had no idea what Sören was on about.
"Listen, it's one of the things I appreciate about American culture," Sören said. He was curious now. "What kind of foods are particular to Indiana? I like to try regional stuff when I live somewhere, though I never had gator when I lived in Florida."
"Uh..." DeKalb said, "well, off the top of my head... pork tenderloin sandwich. If you like pork, and you like fried and breaded or battered stuff, you'd like that, probably."
"Probably. It's my guilty pleasure as a doctor, but what good is life expectancy if you're living on rabbit food?" Sören chuckled. "Where do you get, ah, pork tenderloin sandwich?"
"Some restaurants around here likely have them but I couldn't tell you which ones. I've heard, though, that the best ones come from carnivals. The corn dogs are better at carnivals, too. There's a carnival in Terre Haute this summer, we were thinking about taking you while you're here."
Sören's ex Juniper used to work at a carnival, which was how they met - he'd been in Florida on vacation after a breakup and went to Disney World and to a few other tourist traps, including the carnival; he'd ended up transferring to a hospital in Orlando a couple of months later, moving to Florida to be with her. Reminders of Juniper still made him a bit touchy, but he hated that something fun had been tainted by association and he had lamented to Yeyette in e-mail once that he wished he could reclaim some of those old things as fun again.
"Sounds like a plan," Sören said. "My quest for the pork tenderloin sandwich. And corn dogs."
Yeyette cackled.
When they got to the checkout, Sören and Anthony both tried to get DeKalb and Yeyette to accept money for the groceries - Sören knew they weren't poor, but it was still the principle, since he knew they were having to buy more food to accommodate guests. DeKalb seemed proud and unwilling to accept their credit cards, but finally he said to Sören, "If you insist on paying us for your board, Yeyette says you're an artist. Maybe you can paint or sculpt something for the living room."
"You haven't seen my work, have you, apart from the vase?" Sören folded his arms. "You don't even know if you like it."
"I like the vase, and as far as anything else goes... Yeyette says you're damn good, and she wouldn't say something like that just to be nice."
Sören snorted. No, she wouldn't. Yeyette was opinionated, and a bit unrestrained in those opinions... but that was one of the things he liked about her, even if others found it offputting. He didn't like social games and having to guess if people were being sincere or not; he never had to worry about that with Yeyette.
Just as Sören put his wallet back in his pocket, his phone began to vibrate. Sören stopped himself from using the Force to slip the phone out without touching it - that was a very bad idea in public. He reached for the phone and saw it was a text from Serena.
hi sweetie just wanted to make sure u landed safe :)
"Sorry, I have to take this," Sören said, stepping aside to fire back a reply. Hi, sorry for not texting back sooner. Yes, we're fine.
A few seconds later, Serena sent back a few heart emojis.
Sören laughed, face on fire. He also sent heart emojis. Then he asked So do you know what your schedule looks like? Will you get some time soon for us to finally meet?
The reply took a bit longer. were really understaffed right now so im not gonna have time for few weeks yet, the only day off each week ill have to nap and catch up on chores sorry
Sören's heart sank a little, and he wondered for a moment if he was being ghosted - if now that meeting each other in-person was possible instead of just a dream, Serena had lost interest - but then she sent back an additional reply. i still want to meet u bb! itll just be later in august or maybe even early september.
OK. Sören felt himself nodding as he replied. I'm at the store, but we'll talk soon?
we will. A heart emoji.
Sören walked back over. "That was Serena," he explained to Anthony, and to Yeyette.
Yeyette's jaw set. DeKalb looked confused - Sören took it Yeyette hadn't clued him in about everything. "Serena?" DeKalb asked.
Before Sören could respond, Yeyette said, "The other reason he's in Indiana. That's his, ah, long-distance girlfriend."
Sören nodded. "This visit kills two birds with one stone. I get to see my best friend for the first time in ages and catch up, and meet my girlfriend."
"So you guys met online or something?" DeKalb asked.
Sören nodded again. "Yeah, we met on a game we both play." Sören felt a little like he was on trial... but more from Yeyette than DeKalb, even though Yeyette already knew. He could practically see smoke coming out her ears. "I know you worry," Sören said, reaching out to put a hand on Yeyette's arm, patting. "But she's not Juniper. This is a very different situation than Juniper. And I mean, I met Nicholas and Anthony online and you see how that turned out -"
"I know I'm probably just being paranoid, yes," Yeyette said, scowling. "But after what happened with Juniper I think I have a right to worry."
"You do," Sören said - Juniper had been a nightmare and she didn't even know the half of it.
They began checking out. As Yeyette put items on the belt she asked, "When are you and Serena going to meet each other face-to-face, anyway?"
"That was part of what we just talked about," Sören said. "She's not going to get much time off for the next few weeks. I know her job keeps her really busy, she said they're understaffed, so she spends her one day off a week doing chores and catching up on sleep. She said we'll likely be meeting in late August or early September."
"That doesn't seem a little fishy to you?" Yeyette asked.
"Well, no," Sören said, though he thought again about the worry that she was ghosting him. "I mean, your hours get crazy sometimes, and you know my hours could get crazy too..."
"She's not a doctor," Yeyette said, her eyes locked with Sören's.
Sören appreciated her concern, but he also felt like she was mothering him just a little, and they were the same age. He raised an eyebrow, and Yeyette raised one back, and then Yeyette resumed putting items on the belt, not saying anything more, as if she knew to back off, but Sören had a feeling it wouldn't be the last time she'd express concern. And he knew she wasn't wrong for doing so - she had with Juniper and he hadn't listened and of course that had turned into a shitshow - but he had been more careful this time. He really wanted to believe things would work out.
Thinking about Juniper again put him on edge, and on the ride back home he opened up the bag of cheddar-and-sour-cream potato chips and started eating, and that helped a little - especially when Anthony, despite his protests that they were crisps and not chips, put his hand in the bag to share and their fingers brushed. But Sören still felt a bit uneasy, and he hoped this was just Yeyette worrying and not her bullshit detector going off. He didn't want another repeat of the Juniper experience or something even worse.
At least he had Nicholas and Anthony looking out for him. He stopped eating, rolled up the bag, and rested his head on Anthony's shoulder. They had done the best job they could with picking up the broken pieces when he came out to London almost two years ago; that had gone right, and Sören was grateful for them. Anthony put an arm around Sören and began to pet his curls.