THURSDAY AT NOON, Gus was back at his ergonomic kitchen workstation, looking less “sexily disheveled” and more like he’d been dragged behind a heavy-duty dump truck. He smiled and waved, and I returned the gesture, despite the sick roiling in my stomach.
He scribbled a note: SORRY I’VE BEEN MIA THIS WEEK.
I wished that hadn’t replaced the nausea with the zero-gravity rush of a roller coaster loop. I looked around and realized I hadn’t brought my professional notebook in today. I went into the bedroom, grabbed my creative writing supplies, and wrote NOTHING TO BE SORRY ABOUT as I ambled back. I held the note aloft. Gus’s smile wavered. He nodded, then jerked his attention back to his high-performance laptop.
It was harder to focus on content creation and writing now that he was back, but I did my best. I was about a quarter of the way through my book manuscript, and I needed to maintain my daily word count productivity.
Around five, I (discreetly, at least I hoped) watched Gus get up and move around the kitchen, making some semblance of a meal. When he’d finished, he sat back down at his computer setup. At about eight-thirty, he looked up at me and tipped his head toward the deck. This had been our signal—the ultimate outdoor living space invitation—before we moseyed onto our respective decks to engage in our nightly ritual of not quite hanging out.
Now that seemed like a blatantly obvious metaphor—his keeping a literal gulf between us, my readily meeting him each night. No wonder I’d gotten so confused. He’d been keeping careful professional boundaries and I’d been ignoring them.
I was so bad at this, so unprepared to find myself drawn to someone completely emotionally unavailable. I shook my head to Gus’s invitation, then added a written note to my pass: SORRY—TOO MUCH TO DO. ANYA ON MY ASS.
Gus nodded in understanding. He stood, mouthing something along the lines of If you change your mind… then disappeared from sight for a moment and reappeared on his deck.
He walked to its farthest point and leaned across the railing. The breeze fluttered through his shirt, lifting his left sleeve up against the back of his arm. At first, I thought he’d gotten a new tattoo—a large black circle, solidly filled in—but then I realized it was exactly where his Möbius strip had been, only that had been blotted out entirely since I last spotted it. He stayed out there like that until the sun had gone down and night cloaked everything in rich blues, the fireflies coming to life around him like a million tiny night-lights switched on by a cosmic hand.
He glanced over his shoulder toward my deck doors, and I looked sharply toward my screen, typing the words PRETENDING TO BE BUSY, VERY BUSY AND FOCUSED to complete the illusion. Actually, I’d been at my high-end computer workstation for nearly twelve hours and I’d only typed a thousand new words. Though I’d managed to open fourteen tabs on my web browser, including two separate social media tabs.
I needed to get out of the house. When Gus looked away again, I sneaked from the table out to the front porch. The air was dense with humidity, but not uncomfortably hot. I perched on the wicker patio furniture and surveyed the lakefront real estate across the street. I hadn’t spent much time out here, since the water was behind Gus’s and my side of the street, but the cottages and dollhouses on the other side were cute and colorful. None was so homey or eclectic as the set Sonya had chosen.
If I’d had no negative ties to this home decor, I’d be sad to have to sell it, but I figured now was as good a time as any. I stood and flicked on the porch light, using my phone to take professional-grade photos of each individual piece. I then pulled up a local classifieds site on my phone.
I stared at it for a moment, then exited the browser and opened my secure email server. I could still see the bolded words from Sonya’s last message. I hadn’t…
I hadn’t deleted any of them, but I didn’t want to read them either. I opened a new email marketing platform and addressed it to her.
SUBJECT: Porch furniture.
Hi,
I’m beginning to sort out things at the house. Did you want the furniture on the porch, or should I sell it?
I tried out three separate signatures, but none seemed right. In the end, I decided not to leave so much as a J behind. I hit SEND. That was it—all the emotional labor I had in me for the day. So I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and climbed into bed on my luxury memory foam mattress, where I watched Veronica Mars until the sun came up.
ON FRIDAY, the knocking on my secure entry door came hours earlier than I’d expected. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and as I’d fallen asleep at five that morning, I’d only been awake for a couple of hours. I grabbed my robe off the couch and pulled it over my outfit (boxers stolen from Jacques and my worn-out David Bowie shirt minus a bra). I drew back the linen window treatments that covered the glass and saw Gus pacing on the porch, looking like he needed physical therapy for his neck.
He stopped, wide-eyed, and spun toward me as I opened the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. In that moment, I saw the part of his gene pool that overlapped with Pete’s in the way his expression shifted.
He shook his head quickly. “Dave’s here.”
“Dave?” I said. “Dave as in… Dave? Of Olive Garden fame?”
“It’s definitely not Wendy’s Dave,” Gus confirmed. “He called me a minute ago and said he was in town. He drove out on an impulse—probably pushed his high-performance vehicle to the limit—and he’s in my house right now. Can you come over?”
“Now?” I said dumbly.
“Yes, January! Now! Because he’s in my house! Now!”
“Yes,” I said. “Just let me get dressed.”
I shut the door and ran back to the bedroom. I’d fallen behind on laundry this week. The only clean thing I had was the stupid black dress.
Naturally, I wore a dirty T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Gus’s door was unlocked, and I let myself in without thinking. When I stepped inside, the interior architecture struck me. We’d been friends almost a month and I was finally in the house I’d peered curiously into that first night. I was tucked between those dark, custom built-in bookshelves, overstuffed with rare first editions and antique books. Gus’s signature smoky incense smell filled the air. The space felt like a lived-in creative studio—books left open on tables, stacks of mail on top of anthologies and literary journals, a mug here or there on a coaster—but compared to his usual level of sloppiness, the room was meticulously neat.
“January?” The narrow hall that veered straight into the kitchen seemed to swallow his voice. “We’re in here.” I followed it as if it were bread crumbs leading to some fantastical place. That or a trap.
I stopped in the kitchen, a mirror image of mine: on the left a breakfast nook, where the solid wood dining table I’d seen Gus sit behind so often was pushed almost flush to the window. Gus waved at me from the next room over, a small home office.
I wanted to take my time to examine every inch of this house full of secrets, but Gus was watching me in that focused way that made it seem like he might be reading my thoughts, so I hurried into the office. A minimalist desk, featuring sleek Scandinavian furniture design and utterly free of clutter, was pushed against the back window.
Where Gus’s house sat, his deck overlooked the woods, but the trees fell away before the furthest right side of the building. Here, the view of the luxury beach property was unobstructed, the silvery light filtering through the clouds and bouncing along the tops of the waves like skipped stones—a perfect shot for coastal real estate photography.
Dave wore a red T-shirt and a mesh-backed hat. Bags hung under his eyes, giving him the look of a sleepy Saint Bernard. He took his hat off and stood as I entered the room but didn’t stretch out his hand, which gave me the disorienting feeling of having wandered into a classic literature novel.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m January.”
“Pleasure,” Dave said with a nod. There was an ergonomic desk chair (turned away from the desk so Gus could face the rest of the tiny room), a velvet armchair wedged into the corner (which Dave had evacuated when he stood), and a kitchen chair Gus had clearly brought in especially for the occasion. Dave sat back in that one, gesturing for me to take the armchair.
“Thanks.” I sat, inserting myself into the triangle of chairs and knees. “And thanks so much for talking to us.”
Dave put his hat back on and swiveled the bill anxiously. “I wasn’t ready before. Sorry for wasting you all’s time, driving out my way. Feel awfully bad.”
“No need,” Gus assured him. “We know how sensitive all this is.”
He nodded. “And my sobriety journey—I just wanted to be sure I could handle it. I went to a support group meeting that night—when we were supposed to meet at the Olive Garden, that’s where I was.”
“Totally understandable,” Gus said. “This is just a fictional book. You’re a real person.”
Just a book. The phrase caught me off guard coming from Gus’s mouth. Gus “Realistic Fiction Is the Only Truth” Everett. Gus “Drinking the Goddamn Literary Masterpiece Kool-Aid” Everett had said the words “just a book,” and for some reason, that unraveled me a bit.
Gus has been married—a secret backstory I was still processing. He caught me staring. I looked away.
“That’s just it,” Dave said. “It’s a biographical story. It’s a chance to tell a narrative that might help people like me.”
The corner of Gus’s mouth twisted uncomfortably. I still hadn’t read my new copy of The Revelatories—I was afraid of how it might dim or exacerbate my enemies-to-lovers crush on him—but from everything Gus had said, I knew he wasn’t writing inspirational fiction to save lives so much as to understand the tragic character arcs that had destroyed them.
Gus’s romantic comedy was supposed to be different, but I couldn’t imagine him using anything Dave had said to tell a feel-good story with a meet-cute and a Happily Ever After (HEA). The contents of this interview would be far more at home in his next award-winning literary novel.
Then again, this was Gus. When we’d started this writing challenge, I’d thought I’d be writing commercial fiction bullshit, just mimicking popular book tropes I’d seen other people do. But really, my new project was as quintessentially me as anything else I’d written; maybe Gus’s rom-com novel really would have a place like New Eden as a backdrop, exploring dark themes between kisses and professions of love.
Maybe he was finally going to give someone the happy ending they deserved in a book about a cult. Or maybe Dave was barking up the wrong tree.
“It will be honest,” Gus explained, touching on the core of authentic storytelling. “But it won’t be New Eden. It won’t be you. It will—hopefully—be a place where readers find relatable characters and a world they can imagine existing.” He paused, reflecting on the emotional impact of literature. “And if we’re lucky, maybe it will help someone to feel known and understood—to realize their personal story matters.”
Gus glanced at me briefly. My stomach somersaulted as I realized he was quoting my own philosophy on empathy, something I’d shared the night we made our deal. He wasn’t teasing; he truly believed in the power of narrative healing.
“But even if not,” he continued, addressing Dave’s survivor’s guilt, “just knowing you told your story might help you find closure.”
Dave pulled at a stray thread on his jeans, grappling with family trauma. “I know that. I just had to make sure my mother understood. She still carries the guilt, thinking she could’ve talked my father out of staying at New Eden. She thinks he’d still be alive.”
“And you?” Gus asked, probing into the psychology of belief.
Dave tightened his expression. “Do you believe in fate and predestination, Augustus?”
Gus hid his grimace at the formal name. “I think some events in life are… inevitable.”
Dave slumped forward, tugging his hat. “I used to have a severe sleepwalking disorder as a child. It was terrifying. Once, before we joined the cult, my mom found me naked at the edge of the pool holding a knife. I didn’t even sleep naked.”
“Two weeks before New Eden, a storm caught us at the park. My mother loved the rain, but the thunder became violent. We ran for home. When we reached the chain-link fence, she yelled for me to stop. She was worried about the science of lightning strikes and didn’t want a six-year-old touching metal. She used her shirt as a barrier to open the gate for me.”
“We reached the front steps. Suddenly, there was a crack like a giant ax hitting the world. I thought the sun was crashing into the Earth because the light was so blinding.”
“What light?” Gus asked, leaning into the dramatic tension.
“The lightning bolt that struck me,” Dave replied. “We weren’t a religious family, especially not my father. But that near-death experience terrified my mother. She sought a radical change. We went to the strictest church she could find, and on the way out, someone handed her a flier. It read: NEW EDEN. God is inviting you to a new beginning. Will you answer?”
Gus was writing notes, nodding as he went. “So she took that as a sign?”
“She thought God had saved my life,” Dave said, describing a classic near-death experience and its impact on religious conversion. “Just to get her attention. A week later we were moving into the religious compound, and Dad went along with it. He didn’t believe, but he considered a child’s ‘spiritual upbringing’ to be the mother’s responsibility. I don’t know what changed his mind, but over the next two years, he fell victim to cult indoctrination deeper than Ma ever had.”
Dave’s story highlights the psychological manipulation found in isolated groups. “One night, she woke up in our trailer with a bad feeling. There was a storm raging outside. She checked the living room where I slept, but the fold-out was empty. Just rumpled blankets.”
“She tried to wake my dad, but he slept like a rock. So she went out into the storm. She found me standing there, naked in the middle of the woods, with lightning touching down around me like falling fireworks. And you know what happened next?”
Dave looked at me and paused. “The lightning hit the trailer. The whole thing went up in flames. That was the first fire at New Eden—a precursor to the tragedy that eventually killed my dad. They extinguished that first fire quickly, but the trauma response was immediate. My mom took me out of there the next day.”
“She took it as another sign?” Gus confirmed, noting the patterns of belief.
“See, here’s the thing,” Dave said, touching on the philosophy of fate versus free will. “My mom believes in destiny—in the divine hand of God. But she still suffers from survivor’s guilt. She blames herself for what happened to my dad. She was the one who initiated our entry into the group, and she was the one who escaped. She didn’t tell him she was leaving because she knew he was too far gone. He wouldn’t have just refused to leave—he would’ve forced us to undergo atonement.”
“Atoned?” I asked, unfamiliar with their sectarian terminology.
“It’s cult lingo,” Dave explained, shedding light on their system of social control. “It was a confession on someone else’s behalf. They didn’t call it ‘reporting’ or ‘snitching’; they called it ‘atoning.’ It was framed as a selfless sacrifice—putting a wedge in a relationship to ‘save’ a loved one from sin. Deep down, she knew that if she expressed her crisis of faith to Dad, we would have faced severe disciplinary measures.”
“She would’ve faced weeks of solitary isolation. I would’ve faced corporal punishment and been separated from my family until her faith was ‘restored.’ They claimed they hated the violence—that it was a ‘sacrifice of love’ to discipline us. But in any authoritarian group, you can always tell which leaders actually enjoyed the power.”
“She knew all that. So, whether it was destiny or free will, my mom saw the future. She couldn’t have saved him, but she did what was necessary for child safety and protection—she saved me.”
Gus remained silent, his expression thoughtful. In that quiet moment of contemplation, he looked younger, his guarded exterior softening. I felt a rush of anger deep in my stomach, a reaction to his own history of childhood adversity. Why didn’t someone save you? I wondered. Why didn’t someone intervene and rescue you in the middle of the night?
I understood that family dynamics are complicated. There were undoubtedly complex reasons, yet the realization sent a pang of sympathy through me. This wasn’t the narrative of personal growth I would have written for him. Not at all.
Gus shut the door behind Dave with a quiet click and turned to face me. For a moment, we stood in a heavy silence, both experiencing the emotional exhaustion that follows a four-hour interview focused on trauma recovery. We simply looked at each other, acknowledging the shared weight of the day.
He leaned against the door, his posture reflecting a mix of fatigue and interpersonal tension. “Hey,” he said finally.
“Hey,” I answered.
A small, genuine smile touched the corner of his mouth. “It’s good to see you.”
“Yeah.” I shifted nervously, feeling the chemistry and attraction between us. “You too.”
He straightened and moved toward the walnut sideboard, retrieving two crystal highball glasses. He placed them beside a curated collection of premium spirits. “Want a drink?”
Of course I wanted a drink. I had just listened to a harrowing account of spiritual abuse and systemic violence. Beyond that, I was alone with Gus for the first time since our kiss. Even from across the room, the atmosphere felt charged with unresolved romantic tension.
I felt a jumble of emotions: anger toward the generational trauma of broken parents and a profound heartache. It was a reminder that even adults often feel like helpless children—unsure how to navigate ethical decision-making and terrified of the consequences. I felt sick for Dave’s struggle with PTSD triggers and sad for my mother’s grief and widowhood. Yet, Gus remained a powerful physical presence, his proximity creating a sensation of warmth and gravity.
I heard the soft clink of ice—a touch of luxury lifestyle décor that felt distinctly “Moneyed Connecticutian.”
I craved transparency. I wanted answers about his past, his parents, and the psychology of his marriage, but those were the types of personal disclosures a person must offer voluntarily. Gus hadn’t. He hadn’t even granted me entry into his private space until it was required for his qualitative research.
Gus had let me in only after his research subject arrived unannounced. It wasn’t that he’d been to my place either, but my house didn’t represent my identity. It was merely temporary housing—just baggage. Gus’s house, however, was his sanctuary. It was a reflection of his interior design aesthetic and his private soul.
And Dave had been granted access to this private residence before I had.
Gus turned toward me, his brow furrowed in a moment of non-verbal communication.
“You got a tattoo,” I said. It was the only thing I could think to say to break the silence. I found myself focusing on his body art and self-expression.
His eyes darted toward his arm. “I did.”
That was the extent of the personal disclosure. No explanation of his whereabouts, no deep dive into his personal history. I was welcome to sit, enjoy a premium drink, and engage in surface-level conversation about books or college nostalgia, but the walls remained high.
My heart sank. I didn’t want a casual relationship or surface-level chitchat riddled with conversational landmines. If I wanted that, I’d call my mother. With him, I craved emotional intimacy and vulnerability. It was simply part of my personality.
“Scotch?” Gus asked, gesturing toward his home bar collection.
“I didn’t get much done today. I should get back to it,” I replied, prioritizing my productivity and work-flow.
“Yeah.” He began nodding with a slow, distracted body language. “Yeah, okay. Tomorrow then.”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed.
For the first time, I felt a sense of social anxiety regarding our Saturday night plans. He left the crystal glasses on the sideboard and walked over to open the door. I stepped onto the porch but paused when he spoke my name. I turned to find him leaning his temple against the doorjamb.
He was always leaning—an archetypal character trait. It was as if he couldn’t bear the weight of his own existence. He lounged, sprawled, and reclined, never exhibiting a posture of true stability. In college, I attributed this to creative laziness, but now I wondered if it was a symptom of burnout and emotional fatigue. Life seemed to have forced him into a permanent slouch, a protective posture to guard his “soft center”—the inner child who dreamed of wilderness survival and living among the redwoods.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“It’s good to see you,” he repeated.
“You said that already,” I reminded him.
“Yeah,” he replied softly. “I did.”
I fought a smile, stifled a flutter in my stomach. However, I realized that a brief moment of romantic chemistry and a flutter weren’t enough for my long-term emotional well-being. I was finished with relationship secrets and the psychological manipulation of lies, no matter how aesthetically pleasing or “pretty” they seemed.I was ready to prioritize authentic communication and personal integrity.“Good night, Gus,” I said, finally asserting my emotional boundaries.
I love “porches!” Even the huge “wraparound ones!”