Page 27 of Derivation

“Oh, we don’t have to worry about that. Vi and Stella have probably left already because they wanted to get home so that they could watch their favorite nerdy TV show together for the tenth time. Enya is in her room, learning… something. Arlowe got upset that everyone left her, so she went to the garage, probably to work on something on the side, not work stuff. They assume I went to bed.”

“Where do they think I am?” Gabi asked.

“They probably forgot you were here,” Sarai teased, doing her best to hold in her laughter this time.

“Very funny.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” she said.

CHAPTER 8

Sarai Kaplan: Did you read it?

Gabi laughed and closed her laptop.

“Are you heading out?” Chase asked as he approached her desk.

“Yeah. I need to get more of my stuff over to the new place. I think I’m going to get rid of my couch and a couple of other things. Do you and Mark want dibs? You can have whatever. They’re not new, but they’re not exactly old, either. I don’t want to have to pay another month on the storage unit. I think everything else has a place to go.”

“I’ll ask Mark if he wants anything, but do you have pictures? You know how he is.”

Gabi smiled up at her friend and stuffed her computer into her bag.

“I’ll take some tomorrow when I go over there.”

“I thought you were going over there tonight,” he said.

“No, I have stuff in my trunk that I’m dropping off tonight. I picked it up on my way in this morning. When I tell you how happy I’ll be to finally not have to be moving somewhere…”

“How’s it going, by the way? I thought you’d ask us to help you move.”

“It’s fine. I have most of my boxes over there already, just sitting in my new room. I’ll unload more tonight and then unpack what’s there as much as I can. I hired a truck for tomorrow with two cheap movers to get the few pieces of furniture I’m keeping. The rest are either going to be sold, donated, or given away. I can take pictures of all of it, and if you want anything else that I’m not keeping, all you have to do is get it out of the storage unit.”

“That could work. We didn’t get everything on our wedding registry as we’d hoped.”

“You only asked for money,” she reminded before she stood up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and picked up her phone with the waiting text message from Sarai on it, sliding it into her sweater pocket.

“I know. We didn’t get as much as we hoped.”

“I thought you got your honeymoon paid for.”

“Yes, which was priority number one since we’ve been living together for a while, we own our own home, and we didn’t need much.”

“Then, what was the problem, Chase?”

“We didn’t need much, but we wanted much.”

Gabi laughed.

“We wanted some new things for around the house, but I don’t mind some used-but-new-to-us things. Mark will be the one who takes convincing.”

“He’ll need convincing after you tell him it’s all free?”

“He is a very gay man.”

Gabi laughed again and said, “I have to go. I want to get there early, drop off, unpack, and head to the hotel for one last night before midnight.”

“Okay. Well, have a good weekend. Call us if you need any help.”