Page 28 of Lease to Love

I pulled the wings and fries out of the fridge and put them in the microwave.

This was breakfast.

I was almost twenty-seven years old, a whole business owner, and a semi-functioning adult, and leftover carryout wings and fries was breakfast.

My appetite had been on a full personality disorder since the breakup—one day I was eating an entire quart of beef and broccoli like someone was going to take it from me, the next day a bite of rice sat in my stomach like a rock.

Today I was hungry, which I was choosing to count as a win.

So I was going to eat leftover wings and fries with mumbo sauce at eleven-fifteen in the morning and feel no type of way about it.

"Okay," Maya said, shifting gears the way she always did when she'd wrung the last drop of comedy from her own disaster and was ready to turn her attention to me. "Enough about my dating crime scene. How was your Saturday night?"

"Beautiful," I said honestly, pulling the food out of the microwave before turning to the fridge for my mumbo sauce, "After closing, I came upstairs, ordered the food you're about to hear about, put on Living Single, and spent the rest of the night on my couch with my titties out."

Maya made a sound that was somewhere between fond and concerned. "Summer..."

"I was comfortable."

"You're always comfortable. That's the problem." She said it gently, which was somehow worse than if she'd said it with her usual dramatics.

Maya was a lot of things—dramatic, romantic to a fault, a disaster in parking garages—but she wasn't careless with the people she loved.

"Sunny, you have so much light in you. I love the way you give it to people. I do. I just hate that you give it to everybody but yourself."

I reached for a fry without thinking about it and dipped it in the extra puddle of mumbo sauce I'd made on the edge of the plate. "I do plenty for myself. I made a whole business doing what I love—"

"Sun-Sun. I know your Mama E taught you how to love fashion, but you have to fill your cup with something other than work."

Her mentioning Mama E brought a smile to my face. Memories of me wobbling in her heels, her watching me strike my poses from her couch… The way she always taught me to reach for the bold color instead of the safe one.

"I'm fine, Maya. I love what I do. Helping my customers look amazing fills my cup. Really."

"You're a shitty liar," she said, not unkindly.

I laughed despite myself. “Whatever.”

“You know the only person who could ever read you better than me was Autumn."

Her name hit me in the chest like a freight train.

The fry in my hand tumbled onto the floor, a streak of orange sauce landing across the front of my white camisole.

I wasn't prepared to hear her name today.

"Shit," Maya said quietly. "Sunny. I'm sorry, I didn't think—"

"It's okay." I put the fry in the trash. "I'm okay.”

I wasn’t.

Autumn was a phantom limb. You know it's gone, you learn to live around it, but sometimes you forget it's not there and then you remember all over again.

I looked down at the mumbo sauce stain on my cami and decided it wasn't worth addressing right now.

"It's fine, Maya. I'm fine."

Maya was quiet in the way she went quiet when she was feeling bad about something. I knew her silences the way I knew all the furniture in this apartment — by feel, in the dark.