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“I think we’ll have to go outside at some point, and it’s pretty cold out there,” Elizabeth replied, looking up at her.

Cheryl could feel it. She could hear their voices, yes, but she could feel what they felt for each other, too. It was love. It wasn’t just young love like Barb and Richard, either. Bess and Elizabeth had a real kind of love that she wanted for herself but had worried she might never find. Then, she pictured Diana in that jumpsuit from the previous day, and that feeling between her legs, which she’d been taught to believe was bad, returned. She reached into her sleep pants and touched herself.

“Oh,” she let out.

She’d never done that with any purpose before, but when she pulled her fingers out, she found them coated and wanted to put them back there, but her mother yelled for her to come downstairs to help with dinner, so she’d have to wait.

CHAPTER 26

“You’ve written thisalready?” Quinn asked as she looked up from Abby’s phone to the woman herself. “Just now? We haven’t been apart that long.”

“I’ve been typing faster these days. My hands kind of hurt, actually.” Abby looked around the house for the first time since they’d walked in and sat down on the couch. “And it’s not much. Just a few chapters.”

“A few chapters? In a day?”

“Normally, I’m not like this.”

“Did you have that moment?” she asked and held out Abby’s phone, which Abby had handed to her prior to that, asking Quinn to read what she’d written of a story between Cheryl and Diana.

Having read a few chapters, to her, it felt like a different story from Harriet and Deb’s. While they still faced some of the same obstacles, Cheryl and Diana’s relationship felt sweeter somehow. Maybe it was because, in these few chapters, Quinn had gotten a better glimpse into how those two actually met and began to discover things from their joined past, which felt very similar to what she and Abby were going through right now.

“What moment?” Abby asked, taking her phone back.

“The onetheyhad. Diana saw Harriet, didn’t she?”

“It’s hard to tell what I’m making up, what’s true, or if I’m making nothing up at all and it all actually happened, but yes, I think so. I don’t know how it works, exactly, because, in my mind, they didn’t know about Deb and Harriet prior to the day this happened. I obviously can’t know when Harriet and Deb met with Cheryl and Diana how they did, but it feels like floating to me.”

“Floating?” Quinn stood. “I’ll get us something to drink and a piece of pie. Beer, maybe? I don’t have wine.”

“Well, you wouldn’t. You don’t like it.”

Quinn looked at her, lifting an eyebrow, and replied, “Ido, actually.” When Abby looked up at her in confusion, Quinn added, “I’m guessing whatever version of me you’re thinking about right now didn’t like wine, though.”

“Oh. I guess it’s hard to tell what I know about you and what I know aboutyou.”

“I don’t drink it a lot, which is why I don’t have it, but I do like it. I’m a red fan. The dryer, the better,” she shared. “White wine is fine, and I’ll drink it, but just a glass, if that, even. With my ex, who liked white, if that was the only option wherever we were – and this would’ve been years ago now – I would always take a glass to be polite, have a few sips, and then give her mine when I was done. So, there’s something new you didn’t know about me.” Quinn walked into her kitchen. “And what did you mean when you said floating?”

“Oh,” Abby said as she stood up. “It just felt to me like maybe their spirits or souls – or whatever other thing I’ve given zero thought to in my life until now – float out there, searching for each other. Maybe sometimes, they’re moving into new people right away, and other times, they are floating, waiting for the right ones to come along so that they can be together again.”

“That’s kind of depressing to think about,” Quinn said as she pulled open the door to the refrigerator.

“Can I help?” Abby asked, suddenly appearing next to her.

“Sure. Plates are in there.” She pointed to the cabinet above the stove. “And there’s a knife in the drawer below it.”

“Itisa little depressing, yeah. But then, they somehow find the right people at the right times, and they, I don’t know, join them or something.” Abby went about getting plates and a knife for the pie.

“But were Diana and Cheryl not meant to be until then? What if they were both meant for someone else, and Harriet and Deb hijacked their lives?”

“It didn’t feel that way to me. Does it feel like that to you when you think about it now?”

While Abby sliced the pie, Quinn twisted the cap off the first beer and set it on the counter, thinking about how best to answer that very complicated question.

“I don’t know. When I was reading what you wrote, it felt good. It felt like they’d finally found each other. Still, what if that’s just the Harriet in me who’s searching for Deb more than the feelings of Diana falling for Cheryl? What if they were both meant for other women, but then Harriet and Deb’s spirits floated right on in, making that connection feel like it was the only thing that mattered and causing them to end up together instead of who they were supposed to be with initially?”

“God, this is all so confusing,” Abby said as she plated two pieces of pie. “That makes it sound kind of bad, right? But it doesn’tfeelbad. It feels like Cheryl and Diana were meant to be. And it… doesn’tfeelbad with you. Very, very confusing and overwhelming? Yes. But not bad.”

Quinn opened the other beer bottle and smiled inside because Abby had just told her that it didn’t feel bad for her to be with Quinn or, at least, to think about being with her. She nodded for them to go back to the living room and carried the beers while Abby carried the plates. Sitting back down, she passed Abby a bottle once the plates were on the table.