Page 7 of Bed and Breakup (Dial Delights #15)

Molly

It’s after noon by the time I leave Drizzled Donuts, and I’m considering asking Thembi to pay me for the stained-glass window in baked goods. She’s got a real gift, especially with bold, colorful frosting patterns, which gets my own creativity flowing. I couldn’t ask for better inspiration.

Key has to get back to her studio, but before she does, she walks me around the curving Main Street to Wild Card, the other business I’ve agreed to work with for a friends-and-family discounted window design.

She introduces me to the owner, Louis, before heading out.

Louis is just as quickly swept off by a couple of customers with questions about the shop’s monthly Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so I browse the store’s impressive supply of tabletop games, dice sets, and gifts to craft my vision.

I’ve already got an idea brewing, inspired by classic board games.

Stained glass is a perfect medium for this quirky Victorian town: a vintage aesthetic with plenty of room for modern design and color choices.

It blends the old and the new, proves that some things are worth the trouble of preserving.

“Sorry about that,” Louis says when he returns, straightening his fashionably retro glasses. “Find anything you like?”

I look down at the game in my hand, a colorful card game about patternmaking. I hadn’t intended to buy anything, but when I saw that this one could be played solo, I was intrigued.

“Excellent choice,” Louis says. “It’s got beautiful illustrations, and it’s super relaxing. Designed by an artist in Missouri. If you like it, I’ll hook you up with the expansion pack.”

“Can’t wait to try it,” I say as Louis walks me to the register. “So, tell me about the shop.”

His face lights up instantly. “Wild Card, well, it’s my whole heart in one building,” he says as he scans my game.

“I worked at a gaming chain store in Chicago for years and always dreamed of how I’d do it differently.

How I’d make it more than just a place to buy stuff.

A place to build community and experience the magic of play with your neighbors.

I only opened the store six months ago, and yeah, running a small business feels damn near impossible most of the time.

I’m working sixteen-hour days, and hardly find the time to eat, and still worry about breaking even.

But I look around at the family of gamers I’ve already brought together, and it amazes me.

I’m getting ready to hire a new staff member who can lead a second Dungeons & Dragons campaign, because our waitlist is a mile long.

And when I sell someone a game I know will bring them joy and let them spend quality time with their friends?

Nothing compares to that feeling. Oh, speaking of, your total is $28. 56.”

“I can tell how special this place is, even just being here for a few minutes,” I say, tapping my card to pay. “I want to create a window for you that brings the same enthusiasm and…unique energy that you do.”

Louis laughs shyly. “You can say it. I’m a big old nerd.”

“A nerd is the best thing a person can be,” I say. “It means you’re passionate about something. As someone who’s spent a lot of time in dusty garages learning my old-school craft, I’d say I’m a pretty big nerd too.”

“Go nerds!” Louis gives me a high five.

“So Chicago, huh? How’d you end up here?”

“My husband and I are rock climbers,” Louis shares.

“We heard Eureka was a good climbing spot, and super queer. We actually wanted to stay at this famous queer bed-and-breakfast we saw on TV, but turns out it closed a few years back. Didn’t stop us from visiting town anyway, and then we were hooked. Now we’re lifers.”

I’m on the verge of confessing that the bed-and-breakfast he saw on TV was mine, but I can’t quite manage the words.

“So you like it here? Even being all, you know…Arkansas?” I ask.

I’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship to my home state.

I don’t have any family here anymore, not since my gram died.

Yet I still feel tied to it in a way that sometimes feels comforting and sometimes hurts, especially when conservative politicians spew nonsense about queer people being the devil.

I hear there are kinder places to live, even if I’m too scared of airplanes to see them for myself.

My work has taken me all over this area of the country.

My biggest commission yet involved installing steel-and-glass pieces across three states on Route 66.

Even after years on the road, I can’t imagine really leaving Arkansas for good.

But I also can’t imagine choosing to live here after growing up somewhere different.

Louis shifts his head and shrugs in a way I take to mean “it’s complicated.

” “Is it perfect? Definitely not,” he says.

“I’ve encountered racists and homophobes.

But they have those in Chicago too. And they don’t have the same mountains, cool history, and queer hidden gems as Eureka.

I love this weird little town. It may not be perfect, but I can build something here that makes it a little bit better.

A community that plays together, that fosters creativity and connection and joy. That’s what gaming’s all about.”

Hearing Louis echo all the things I love about this town makes me feel guilty for walking away from it seven years ago.

As much as I’ve learned from my years on the road, as much as I’ve grown as an artist, I’ve still harbored some discomfort about leaving the inn, our employees, and our faithful guests.

We built something special, a community kind of like what Louis is talking about, one I thought was meant to last. Did it make Eureka better?

And if it did, was my impact erased when I packed my bags and ran?

I thank Louis for his time, grab the game I purchased, and walk back to the Hummingbird.

Slowly, the sights, smells, and sounds of the Ozarks pull me out of my head.

There’s something extra magical about Eureka in June.

Everything is blooming and green. The air smells like honeysuckle.

Every restaurant and storefront has a Pride flag in the window, and queer tourists come from all over to hold hands and wander the town in their short shorts and crop tops.

Back when the Hummingbird was at its peak, June was our busiest month.

Some of our most loyal guests would book their stays for Pride years ahead of time.

When Robin and I first bought the Hummingbird Inn, I never dreamed it would become an LGBTQ+ travel destination.

Robin and I never really felt like the Pride-celebrating, rainbow-flag-waving, “Born This Way” kind of gays.

My grandmother never made me feel like an abomination for being a lesbian, and she also didn’t turn into some outspoken queer advocate.

To her, my sexuality was just a neutral fact about me, like my freckles or my shoe size, which is its own kind of progress, I guess.

Robin’s parents are similar, which is more surprising considering they’re lifelong Republicans.

But it was hard for both of us not to absorb some generalized shame about our queerness growing up in Little Rock.

It felt like something to keep private, something that, if brought up around strangers, would likely bring more harm than good.

But then I found Eureka Springs. I was suddenly surrounded by queer people, had access to spaces where Robin and I could hold hands in public, and was given the chance to attend drag performances like the one taking place in Basin Park as I walk by on my way home.

When people started calling the Hummingbird a queer destination, I realized I actually felt proud of that label.

But the whole lore of the inn was founded on Robin and me, as a unit, as two people in love.

That B&B owned by the lesbian couple. What was I supposed to do when she ran off to Portland with another woman?

Convince tourists that the B&B owned by one recently abandoned and heartbroken half of a lesbian couple was just as romantic?

Spend the rest of my days in the penthouse apartment we’d shared, haunted by memories of all the tiny celebrations we held and the cute little love pranks we pulled on each other, watching alongside the rest of the Internet as Robin moved on to the hot new chef of the week?

Louis’s words about building a community that makes the town he loves a little better are still echoing in my head as I round the corner onto Bridge Street and spot the inn.

I want to hate this place. Maybe my life would improve if I sold it to the first person to make a cash offer and washed my hands of it forever.

But when I see that hummingbird window gleaming in the sunlight, my heart beats faster.

There’s something about this old building that sticks.

I knew from the moment I laid eyes on that stained-glass window thirteen years ago that I was meant to find it, meant to give it the love and care it deserves.

My grandmother loved hummingbirds, always had feeders for them on the front porch, would spend hours watching them.

She was a rather serious person, raised on a struggling rice farm during the Great Depression.

Gram didn’t talk or even smile much, but those tiny, flittering birds enchanted her.

Even though she passed before I found this place, I believe her spirit is in these walls.

I took all the love still coursing through my veins after her death and channeled it into the inn.

As I admire the exterior of the building in the afternoon sun, I remember how each repaired patch of drywall, each new shingle on the roof, each coat of paint was my love letter to her.

Or was it my love letter to Robin? Even now, I can’t tell where my feelings for the Hummingbird end and my history with Robin begins.

I fell for Robin and the inn in one life-altering tumble on a weekend getaway to Eureka just two weeks after we met.

Looking back at that time, it’s hard not to see myself as a grieving, vulnerable twenty-two-year-old, searching desperately for somewhere and someone to make me feel like I belonged.

I’d just lost the only person who had ever truly loved me, ever tried to understand me.

All it took was one of Robin’s earnest, wide-eyed “I’m listening to you” faces and I would have followed her off a cliff.

The Hummingbird Inn just happened to be the nearest one.

Its owner, Miss Addy, who had been recently widowed and reminded me just a little too much of my own grandmother, was looking for someone to buy the inn so she could retire.

It felt like fate. I fixed up Gram’s house and sold it, Robin convinced her dad to let her access her trust fund, and suddenly we were two young idiots in charge of a decrepit historic property in need of a lot of work.

But what does it matter? I tried to make this place better, but whatever misplaced love I funneled into the inn is gone, replaced by cheap furniture and mass-produced “art.” The pastel-painted exterior of the house may look mostly the same as how I left it, but inside, all the vintage charm I worked so hard to preserve has been erased in favor of decorations like any other vanilla hotel’s.

And now, in an effort to support my best friend and the town that built me, I have to face the two greatest failures of my life: my marriage and my B&B.

Even if there were a world where I could fix up the Hummingbird and restore it to its original glory, I certainly can’t do that with Robin lurking about.

She’s useless with a tool kit and was more of a hindrance than a help when we renovated the inn.

Back then I found her DIY incompetence cute.

Now I think it would toss my sanity down a garbage disposal.

I step onto the porch, readying myself for the frustrations waiting behind the front door, when I suddenly have an idea. What was it Key said about pushing Robin’s buttons?