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He leans down.

And I close my eyes.

…And then I hear the very distinct sound of someone clearing their throat.

15

“Please tell me I’m interrupting something.”

My eyes fly open to see Koko staring down at us from the doorway.

I let go of Mackenzie’s shoulders and scramble to my feet, this time with the sense to hold on to the vanity so I don’t slip.

“We were fixing the pipe.” I glance at my profile in the mirror, and as suspected, everything above my neck is glowing a fire engine red.

“Oh, yeah.” Koko nods. “That’s exactly what it looked like.” She waggles her eyebrows at me, but I am spared the need to respond as Harmony appears behind her with the plug for the wet vac.

“This should have things cleaned up in a jiffy.” Harmony leans over to plug it in.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Mackenzie lunges for the plug, startling Harmony, who has failed to realize how close the plug is to pooling water.

“How about we move that cord somewhere a little drier? Just to keep us all in one piece.” He takes the plug from her hands, catching my eye as he wheels the wet vac toward the much drier kitchen.

“Told you I got you,” he says as he passes me.

It sends a weird flutter through my body that I tell myself is gratitude for avoiding yet another brush with death.

Ten minutes later, the majority of the water has been vacuumed, and the rest of the apartment seems to be back to normal.

Harmony leaves to return the vacuum, and Mackenzie excuses himself to head back to our apartment and change. I watch him leave, my eyes following the wet trail of footprints he leaves behind him until, once again, Koko clears her throat.

“So I need to get back downstairs to the store.” She gives me a knowing look. “But I will be there all morning should you want to drop by and…I don’t know…chat?” She winks, then lets herself out.

One of the many downsides of losing your mom at sixteen is that you lose the default person who is supposed to be the sounding board for life’s critical milestones. My mom had explained the birds and the bees to me when I was seven, in perfect anatomic detail, using the correct terms and enough description that I spent my childhood with the well-informed opinion that sex was gross. However, that opinion changed the year after she died when I was asked to the Winter Formal by a boy a year older than my almost seventeen self. Hunter P. Anderson, my biology partner, had been dumped by his girlfriend of three years two weeks before the dance. His invitation was mumbled as we dissected a worm. I was elated and half in love by the end of class. I made the mistake of not clearing my browser history after googling “things to know about having sex for the first time” on a laptop both Larry and I shared. The night of the dance, Larry came into my room. He dumped a shopping bag with four different boxes of condoms onto my bed. He told me he respected my right to make choices about my body, and if I felt I was ready for sex, then his only ask was that I do it safely. “And if you change your mind at any time,” he said, pausing awkwardly in the doorway, “know that it’s okay. You never have to do anything you’re not comfortable with. And I’ll leave my phone on all night so you can call me. I’ll always come.” Then he left me to finish getting ready.

I called him just after two a.m. when my date was getting handsy, and I decided I didn’t want to spend the night at the Howard Johnson Hotel. Larry picked me up, just as he said he would. He took me to the apartment, made me hot chocolate, and held me when I cried and recounted the not-so-gentlemanly things my date said when I told him I wanted to go home.

“Want me to call my buddy Moose?” he asked. “We could give him a nice, long talking to about how to treat a lady.”

I made him promise not to, but from that night on, Larry became my confidant.

I don’t have a Larry anymore.

But I think, with some effort, maybe I could have a Koko?

Ten minutes later, I open the door to Thrift Me, carrying two coffees and two bagels.

“Good morning, little miss wet and wild,” Koko says as she takes the coffee from my hands and sets it on the counter.

“I’d been hoping you’d stop by. My imagination has been filling in all of the salacious details of what I stumbled into this morning, but now I want to hear them from you. But before we get into it, I need your help.” She points at the clothing rack in the middle of the aisle. “Flip the lock with your toe and then push.”

I’m familiar enough with Koko’s store to know she wants me to take the rack onto the sidewalk. I flip and push as instructed. She follows me out with a second rack. When we get back inside, she hands me my coffee, and we both take a moment to enjoy the caffeine in silence.

“What do you do when it rains?” I tip my head toward the racks on the sidewalk. I’ve never considered this question until now. Koko’s store isn’t big, and other than the very tiny back office, every available space is already filled with clothing.

“I figure it out,” Koko replies, understanding my question. “If I lived my life planning for rain, I’d drown in flannel button-ups. I prefer to assume it will always be beautiful out, and when it isn’t I have friends.” She winks and takes a long sip of her coffee, followed by a dramatic ahhhhh.

“Thanks.” She holds out her cup to cheer with mine. “I needed that. I might have had three hours of sleep last night.”