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By the time they get the bookshelf in the U-Haul, it’s almost ninety degrees outside. Saps sets the shelf down with a thud — at this point, who even cares if the base gets a little scratched — and collapses down, exhausted and sweating. His wrist is starting to ache from all the heavy lifting, but that’s what he gets for having Fluixon as his moving aide.
“Seriously,” Saps mumbles, stretching out his wrist. “When I say lift you have to actually lift.”
Flux, nicely, flips him off. Then he sits on the edge of the truck bed, legs dangling over the side, and wipes the shimmering sweat from his brow. When he sighs it’s heavy, already worn-out. Moving has taken both of them longer than expected.
“You said moving would be easy,” Flux mutters.
“Hey. I said how hard could moving possibly be?”
“Which implies it would be easy. If we'd hired movers, like I told you to do —"
“Moving is easy!” Saps argues back. “Look. We’ve got literally everything in the truck. Objectively, we’re ahead of schedule —”
“I wanted to be out by one,” Flux sighs. “It’s already a quarter past.”
Ignoring him, as Saps is prone to do, he continues, “We’re basically killing it.”
Flux squints at him. But Saps can tell he’s feeling pretty good, even though he’s been forced into doing heavy manual labor for the last three hours — hellish, in Flux’s eyes, even if it’s necessary. He sighs and says, “What’s left, then?”
The books, mostly, which are all packaged up and ready to be slotted into all the empty spaces in the truck. The microwave, which will get sandwiched somewhere inside Saps’ car. They’ve got some food still in the fridge and a couple scattered things here and there — packing tape, at least two spare boxes, a handful of cat toys behind the fridge. But all of the furniture is ready, except for —
“Just the bed frame,” Saps says, somewhat grudgingly.
Flux takes a deep breath, then pushes himself back up. He holds out a hand to Saps. “If you break my bed, I’m going to kill you.”
Saps pretends to fan himself. “Aww, Flux. You’re being so nice to me.”
“I’m dead fucking serious.”
“Okay, princess,” Saps sighs, and takes Flux’s outstretched hand. “Let’s go take apart your stupid bed frame and be done with all of this.”
Flux moved into Saps’ apartment around ten months ago. He’d been living on campus as a junior (“It gets me a single every single time,” Flux had said, to which Saps had thought that can’t possibly be worth it) and despite his desire to live alone, Saps thought he’d secretly been glad to move off-campus. Besides, the apartment wasn’t even that bad. It was a little rundown, your average student apartment — half the cabinets didn’t close right, and Saps’ car had gotten broken into twice, and also there was a whole gas leak scenario, but ignoring all of that! — it was a lovely place.
Or so Saps had thought, until Flux moved in and had an endless list of complaints. The upstairs neighbors. The downstairs neighbors. The neighbors to their left, and the neighbors to their right. The three illegal dogs down the hall in an apartment complex that definitely didn’t allow pets, who barked at all hours of the night. Flux’s Amazon packages kept getting stolen. The commute to campus was too long. One time, he saw a bug in the kitchen that scuttled away before he could kill it (Saps was too afraid of house centipedes to get close). Also, there was the whole gas leak thing.
So approximately one month ago, Saps had been preparing to renew their lease, bracing himself for the devastatingly high likelihood that Flux would return to his luxurious life in a single on campus. Instead, Flux had sat him down and informed him, “We’re moving.”
“Oh,” Saps said. “We are?”
“I have a tour for a duplex unit tomorrow at ten AM,” Flux said evenly. “Only one downstairs neighbor. No dogs. There’s a garage, by the way.”
Saps was suspicious of how good it sounded. “What’s the parking fee?”
“Included in rent.”
Tempting, Saps thought. “Then what utilities do we cover?”
“Electricity and internet only,” Flux said, then frowned. “I sent you this listing two days ago. You didn’t even look at it?”
Saps had, admittedly, ignored it. “So what’s the catch? Is our landlord evil or something?”
“All landlords are evil,” Flux shrugged. “Why aren’t you reading my texts?”
“Because you send me so many,” Saps said. “The other day you sent me a Twitter post of a frog.”
“It reminded me of you.”
“It was the ugliest fucking frog on the face of the planet.”
“I know,” Flux said. He was smiling slightly. “Are we moving or not?”
So they signed the lease, and they ended up moving.
Here’s the other thing — Saps hadn’t actually thought that Flux would be sticking with him longer than a year. He’d been lucky to score Flux as a roommate anyway, in lieu of someone much louder and messier like Schpood or Spyder. But Flux was a notorious homebody and an introvert, and some part of Saps figured that he was a little too extroverted, a little too loud for someone like Flux to stick around.
Despite the complaints, though, Saps was surprised at how much he enjoyed living with Flux. The two of them had been somewhat-close acquaintances — a handful of courses together as sophomores, more than a few late-night study sessions in the library, and at least one night where Saps got way too drunk at a Mykonos party and ended up crashing on Flux’s floor. But they’d never really talked much until Flux moved in, after which they began talking all the time.
In another world, Saps might have been embarrassed at how quickly they became attached at the hip, but it was Fluixon. There was no one else he’d rather spend all his time with. Everything, from shitty late-night Domino’s orders to rewatching Flux’s favorite television shows (Saps will never admit this aloud, but he's grown to kind of love Game of Thrones) to showing Flux up in the kitchen, was fun in a way that no roommates had ever been before.
He’d even started learning to predict Flux’s mood. Saps knew exactly when he needed to brew an extra pot of coffee in the morning because of how wide Flux’s door was open at night. He knew when Flux would want to turn to him and say should we just cancel? because of how quickly he changed into sweatpants after coming back from campus. He’d started enjoying all the nights with Flux on opposite sides of their shitty sofa, worn-through and uncomfortable. He barely even noticed when they started getting closer — physically, that was. When Flux would kick his legs up onto Saps’ lap, or when he’d crash right next to Saps, or when Saps would come home late and find that Flux had made dinner and saved a plate for him. Even his camera roll was filled with endless photos of Joseph, curled up on Flux’s lap with his paws all stretched out, as Flux gingerly tried to figure out how to deal with cat body language. Sometimes, Saps would look at all the photos and feel something bubbly and pink inside his chest, and he thought that he would honestly like to live with Flux for the rest of his life.
That is, until the bed frame.
It’s literally just a bed frame. Just one plain Ikea bed frame, that Flux had delivered when he moved in, and he paid for Taskrabbit like an asshole (see: his hatred for manual labor). So the bed frame had been assembled inside Saps’ spare bedroom, which means it must be disassembled to fit out through the door. Saps has put together a lot of shitty Ikea furniture before, and he’s taken a lot of it apart, so in theory, they should be able to untwist some screws, pull the slats off, and get the whole mess of plywood tucked inside the U-Haul in fifteen minutes flat.
Until the screws don’t budge.
Flux watches him struggle in total silence for two minutes, unimpressed, arms folded across his chest.
At last, unhelpfully: “It definitely comes apart.”
“No fucking shit,” Saps mutters. “It obviously comes apart —”
“Don’t mock me.”
“You try, then.”
“Hm.” Flux pretends to think about it for a second. “No, I really feel like you can figure it out.”
Saps glares at him. “Put in some fucking work, dude.”
“I wouldn’t have to put in work if we’d hired movers. Like I told you to.”
“Oh my god.” Saps has to genuinely hold himself back from throwing a punch. “Do you know how much movers cost —”
“Like, twenty bucks?” Flux tries. “Over-under on fifty, maybe.”
“They definitely cost more than twenty dollars.”
“Okay, well, how am I supposed to know that?”
“You’re the one who asked for movers in the first place!”
“Erm,” Flux says, putting on his stupid nerd voice that sometimes makes Saps want to punch him in the face. “Technically, I'm pretty sure my dad would have paid for them.”
“Great,” Saps mutters. “Great. Why didn’t you bring that up when we talked about moving in the first place?”
“Because I can’t just spend a million dollars on Elanuelo’s card,” Flux explains. “There’s an art to having your parents pay for everything.”
“Uh huh.”
“For example, I can use his card for rent or groceries,” Flux says, making it sound as though this is obvious to everyone in the world except for Saps. “But I can’t use it for Doordash or for drinks. I can spend money at Home Depot but not Target. Everyone knows this.”
“I’m so happy you were born rich,” Saps says, even more grudgingly. “I’m so very happy that you refuse to use this privilege for anything useful at all.”
“I bought groceries the other day,” Flux says, somewhat snippy. “Actually, I’m sorry, when was the last time you paid for groceries at all?”
Saps… doesn’t have a good response to that. He has never once gone to the grocery store in the last six months of his life. He just opens the cabinets and everything is restocked, including the protein powder, the tubs of Greek yogurt in the fridge, the twelve-pack of Monster Energy cans, and the frozen chicken tenders that are always his late-night, too-drunk-to-function snack.
“See?” Flux says nicely, when Saps takes too long to answer. “I like you so much better when you’re quiet.”
“I will throw this screwdriver at your head.”
“Do it, then.” Then Flux yelps. “What the fuck!”
“You said to do it!”
“You —” Flux tosses the screwdriver back at him, where it narrowly misses thudding into the wall and destroying any hopes of getting their security deposit back. “How hard can it be to unscrew a bed frame, Saps!”
“I wouldn’t have to unscrew this bed frame if you weren’t so insistent on moving.”
“Well, maybe if we didn’t have two litter boxes taking up space in the living room, we wouldn’t have to move somewhere bigger!”
Saps points a finger at him. “Don’t go after Joseph. That’s a low blow.”
“Ugh,” Flux mutters, “Fine. Maybe if we didn’t have to keep all your stupid track and field trophies —”
“Those aren’t stupid!”
“You’re telling me you need to keep one from —” Flux picks a random trophy out of a half-packed box. “From your freshman year of high school? You’re almost a senior, Saps. A senior in college.”
“I think they’re sentimental,” Saps scowls.
“If they’re so sentimental, why didn’t you put any bubble wrap on them? Why’d you just throw them all into a box?”
“Flux,” Saps says, with utmost seriousness, “I am literally, genuinely going to fucking kill you if you keep talking.”
Flux narrows his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
Unfortunately, Flux is right. But Saps could, if he really wanted. There are more than a few perks to being a college athlete, and spending a lot of time in the gym is one of them. He can bench press three hundred pounds if he puts his heart and soul into it, which means he could definitely throw Flux across the room — Flux, who’s slender and a couple inches below him, who spends all his time tucked inside a library nook, who once told Saps that his only form of exercise was walking. Like what? Saps could absolutely body him. If he wanted. He flushes hot thinking about how he could definitely bench-press Flux, and then thinks about how that would probably (hopefully?) impress Flux, and feels himself grow even hotter.
Saps takes a very, very deep breath, sits back down, and determinedly tries at the screw again. His palms are sweating, for some ridiculous reason, making it hard to apply much force at all. The screws still won’t budge. At this point, he’s stripping away all the metal, and then a screwdriver will really be ineffective, and the bed frame will be totally fucked. It’s been thirty minutes, and all Saps has accomplished is ruining two screws and making zero progress on moving whatsoever.
“You know,” Flux says offhandedly, “None of this would have happened if we just had one bed.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Saps turns the screwdriver over in his hands, wondering if he’s maybe twisting it in the wrong direction. “But then where would you sleep?”
Flux goes silent.
“Oh, who knows,” he says at last. “I guess I’d take the sofa.”
“The sofa’s super uncomfortable, though.”
“I know,” Flux replies. He folds his arms over the top of the headboard and peers down at Saps, cross-legged beneath him. “That’s why I keep saying we should get a new one.”
“A new one is just so expensive,” Saps says. They’d gone to West Elm the other day just to see, in Flux’s words, because he wasn’t impressed with any of the sofa options at Ikea, and Saps had unfortunately watched Flux fall in love with some svelte chenille sofa with a price tag upwards of two thousand dollars. It had left Saps feeling both like his best friend had far too expensive taste and vaguely insecure about his own financial situation. He frowns down at the screwdriver. “Why would you even want to sleep on the sofa anyway?”
Slowly, Flux says, “I don’t want to sleep on the sofa.”
“Yeah, but you just said —”
“Oh my god.” Flux drags a hand across his face. “Let’s just forget it.”
Saps tries pitifully to unscrew it in the other direction, just in case, although he’s pretty sure righty-tighty, lefty-loosey is the way screws work.
“I think that’s the wrong direction,” Flux says.
“Yeah,” Saps sighs. He drops the screwdriver. “Me too.”
It’s hot as fuck in the apartment, even with the AC running at full blast. They’ve been carrying boxes in and out all day, and Saps feels like he’s going to melt out of his skin. He feels even hotter, somehow, with Flux staring down at him like that. Flux always manages to make him feel this way — odd, tilted askew, as though the whole world has shifted to accommodate his presence. He’s got this little irritated pout to his lips that Saps once found insufferable, but he now finds kind of cute when it’s directed towards him.
“Saps,” Flux says. He pops Saps right on the forehead, and Saps startles. “Tell me what I just said.”
“Uh,” Saps has to think hard, “Something about being a princess and hiring movers for no reason?”
“Close,” Flux tells him. “I think we should call Thomas.”
Something about Thomas has always made Saps want to punch him across the face. He’s not even joking, is the thing. Thomas is fun to hang around with on Wednesday trivia nights, and he’s not bad at pong in a pinch, and Saps can appreciate a guy who can hold his liquor (unlike someone else he knows). But for what he makes up for in friendly drinking competitions, he absolutely loses when it comes to his personality. Thomas is an engineering major — strike one — an active member of their campus Debate Club — strike two — and Saps is pretty sure that he’s maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout his entire three years of college so far — strike three. He’s insufferable about being smart, just like Fluixon, and he’s also the worst person ever to play a board game with. Saps, as a rule of thumb, hates admitting that he’s lesser than anyone else, and calling Thomas proves exactly that.
But, unfortunately, Thomas is probably pretty good at knowing exactly what they need to take apart this bed frame.
“Hiii,” Flux says, holding the phone to his ear. Saps tries to not pay attention to how his voice immediately softens, or how his tone goes all playful — has he ever talked to Saps like that? Does it matter? Flux and Thomas are best friends, after all. They’ve been best friends since Flux’s first day of freshman year, basically. Maybe Flux is just closer to him than he is to Saps.
(This is another reason why Saps doesn’t get along with Thomas — it’s not that he wants to be Flux’s only friend, he’s not that possessive. A small part of him does hope that he’s Flux’s best friend, is all.)
Fucking Thomas. Saps gives up on the frame, for now, and goes to sit in the living room directly in front of the window AC unit. Blessedly cool air floods over him. He closes his eyes; Flux is still talking, but Saps can’t hear Thomas’s voice over the sound of the air conditioning.
“...uh huh,” Flux is saying, voice filtering from the bedroom. “Yeah, the U-Haul’s only here for today.”
Thomas’s voice, muffled over the line.
“Ugh, I know. I told him we should have just hired movers.”
Saps rolls his eyes. Flux laughs, then says, “Thomas, that’s so mean, you can’t say that.”
“What are you saying about me?” Saps calls.
“Nothing!” Flux calls back, then lowers his voice, as though he thinks Saps can’t hear him. “Yeah, I told him he was being dumb as fuck, but it feels mean to say it over and over again.”
“I can hear you,” Saps says.
“I know,” Flux says pleasantly, then returns his attention to the call. “Dumb as rocks, I’m telling you. He threw a screwdriver at my head a second ago.”
“It was a joke!” Saps shouts.
“Domestic abuse isn’t a joke,” Flux says, before giggling — genuinely giggling — at whatever Thomas says on the other end of the line.
The sun is getting lower in the sky, late afternoon sunlight flooding through the windows. Saps tries not to feel urgent, but time is actually running out — he’s got to return the U-Haul in four hours, otherwise they owe a hellish amount of late fees. And god knows that Flux won’t be covering any of it, given that he’s the one who argued against a U-Haul in the first place. Saps really can’t handle another charge to his account when he’s already running thin this month after paying the security deposit from the new place.
Maybe they really do just need one bed frame. Maybe Flux is right — he can just buy another, after all. He’d be spending a couple of nights on the sofa, but how bad could that be? His parents would probably pay for expedited shipping for a new bed frame, and would probably splurge for the kind of white-glove service where the frame gets assembled for him. Maybe that’s better than fighting with this stupid piece of furniture until the end of time.
And like, Saps would just give Flux his bed anyway. It wouldn’t be nice to make Flux sleep on the sofa — that cheap thin thing that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Saps wouldn’t want Flux to be uncomfortable or to lose out on sleep — he’s seen Flux when he’s sleep-deprived, and he can be a nightmare sometimes.
Plus — and Saps feels himself getting flustered and hot all over again — it would be kind of nice to have Flux sleep in his bed. For no reason at all.
The AC must not be working right, Saps thinks to himself. He can feel himself sweating even though he’s been doing nothing but sitting still for the last several minutes.
“Okay,” Flux says, returning from his bedroom. Saps straightens automatically, runs fingers through his hair, tries to quell whatever restless thump ricochets through his pulse at the sound. “I have good news and I have bad news.”
“Bad news first,” Saps says. He’s pretty impressed with how steady his voice emerges. “That’s always easier to get it over with.”
“So the good news is that we need a hex key and that should work.”
“I definitely asked for the bad news first.”
“The bad news is that we don’t have a hex key.”
“Figures,” Saps sighs. “Can we go buy one?”
“I mean, sure,” Flux says. “But the closest Home Depot is thirty minutes away. And the U-Haul is boxing your car in, so good luck getting anywhere without moving the truck first.”
Saps scowls. “Fuck my life.”
“The other good news is that Thomas has a hex key for us.”
That… is, shockingly, good news. “Oh. Okay, sick.”
“Bad news is that he’s at work right now and he won’t be free until five.”
“In three hours?”
“He also offered to help us move,” Flux says primly. “When he gets here, though.”
Saps tries not to feel panicked. “Well. Maybe we can just wait until five.”
“The other bad news is that his internship is downtown,” Flux says. “And he also has to drive Snowbird home. So with rush hour traffic, he probably won’t get here until six. Maybe five-forty, if he drives like a maniac.”
“Oh,” Saps realizes. “So we’re totally fucked.”
“Just about,” Flux agrees.
He sits down beside Saps, stretching his legs out. Saps stares for a moment too long, then forces his gaze back up to the rest of their beautifully-packed, empty living room. There’s almost nothing left to move except Flux’s bed frame, at this point. Even Joseph is already happy at the other apartment, locked inside Saps’ future bedroom with all his millions of cat toys and the cat tower that’s one wrong leap from falling apart. Everything has gone perfectly, except for this awful frame that just won’t come undone.
“Moving is hell,” Saps says aloud.
Flux sighs, as though comforting a little kid. “I know.”
“Is it always supposed to be this bad?”
“I think so,” Flux says. “Moving is definitely one of life’s biggest stressors. It’s up there with the death of a parent and having a new kid.”
“It’s genuinely worse than both of those,” Saps says. “At least when my mom dies, I’ll think about today and remember oh, yeah, whatever, it could always be worse. I could be moving right now, you know? At least it’s just a dead mom and not this stupid bed frame.”
“And what about having a new kid?”
“Well,” Saps says consideringly, “The good news is that neither of us would be getting pregnant. So I feel like that takes away at least fifty percent of the stress.”
“You’d want to adopt?”
“I feel like we could find a cute little kid out there. There’s got to be at least one unloved kid in an orphanage somewhere with purple eyes and blonde hair.”
“I don’t think that’s how adoption works,” Flux says. “Also, purple and blonde would be the worst color combination ever. Our kid would look so bizarre.”
“You can’t say that about a baby, dude. That’s so fucked up.”
“Why can’t the baby just have your eyes and my hair?”
Saps, reluctantly, agrees with Flux’s assessment of their hypothetical future baby’s appearance. “Whatever. He can have my eyes and your hair. He’d be cuter that way.”
“He’s a boy now?”
“I guess we could have a girl.”
“Actually, a girl would be kind of cute,” Flux says. His head tips to the side, and he looks at Saps with the corner of his mouth tilted up. “Think about all the birthday parties… all the cute baby outfits we could get…”
“Oh, our kid would be totally decked out. She’d be cute as fuck.”
“See?” Flux says approvingly. “Moving is way more stressful than having a baby.”
“You’d be like, the worst helicopter mom in existence. Helicopter dad?”
“Helicopter dad,” Flux agrees. “And I think you’re getting too into this hypothetical-baby roleplay. You haven’t even bothered to ask me out on a date yet. Homeowning should probably be our first goal.”
“We’d have to figure out this fucking bed frame first before we can even think about buying a house,” Saps mutters, before — “Hang on, I haven’t what?”
“I told you we should have hired movers,” Flux agrees, as blasé as ever. “That would make this process a whole lot easier.”
Saps stares at him, feeling as though his brain is short-circuiting. He’s completely speechless.
Flux, as though he hasn’t said anything at all, pushes himself to his feet. He reaches a hand down to Saps, silhouetted by the sun flooding through the back windows, glowing all over. “Ready to try again?”
Saps blinks once, owlishly.
“Actually,” Flux says, “You know what?”
Numbly, Saps repeats, “What?”
“What if we just broke the bed?”
“If we — if we what?”
“Let’s just fucking break it,” Flux says. “Come on. You’re strong. You could rip it apart.”
“I… what?”
“Oh my god,” Flux mutters. “Wow. Okay. If I knew being direct was going to make you like this, then I would have been direct a hell of a lot sooner.”
“I’m so lost,” Saps says.
“Saps,” Flux says, patiently, as though he’s explaining addition to a second-grader. “I don’t know how much more obvious I’m supposed to make it. Are you telling me you haven’t noticed any of my flirting?”
Saps, feels like he’s missed the bottom step of a staircase. Has Flux been flirting with him? For — for how long, exactly?
"Oh my god," Flux mutters. "I'm in love with an idiot."
“Oh,” Saps says, feeling now as though the earlier metaphor was inadequate, and he’s instead falling head-over-heels down a whole flight of stairs. “Okay. Wow. Huh. Wait, are you asking me out —”
“Saparata,” Flux says. He enunciates very clearly, and speaks very slowly, and it makes Saps feel hot all over, but not exactly in a bad way. “Clearly, we are not going to get this bed frame out of the apartment in one piece. Clearly, we have to get the bed frame out somehow. Ergo, we should break it. And this will be fine, because I’ll just start sleeping in your bed, which I really don’t think you’ll mind that much. Understand?”
Saps is pretty sure his entire face has gone red. “Understand. I mean — yes. Understood.”
After that, they make pretty quick work of the bed frame.
The rest of moving is relatively simple. Flux holds open the dumpster — damn, Saps should have really done that, he can’t believe he made his brand-new boyfriend touch a dumpster — while Saps throws in the broken fragments of a very, very nice bed frame. Wood snaps easily, he’s found out. He’s also found out that desperation makes him much stronger. Desperation to avoid the U-Haul late fees and also the desperation to move into his nice new apartment with his boyfriend. His boyfriend.
Then they drive the U-Haul over — really, Saps drives the U-Haul while Flux zooms ahead in the Corolla. He drives more slowly than he’s ever driven before, which gives him enough time to mentally review the conversation, realize with a jolt that he’s absolutely been crushing on Flux for god knows how long, and then realize a second later that he’s absolutely struck the jackpot. By the time Saps arrives in front of their new apartment complex, Flux has already unlocked the front door, sitting on the front steps, waiting patiently.
“So about that date,” Flux says, keys swinging from his index finger. "I was thinking a reservation at —"
In lieu of hearing him out, Saps gives into his newfound inner instinct. He wraps one arm around Flux’s waist, the other curled into his hair, and kisses him as though he’s drowning.
Flux makes a muffled noise against his mouth. His back hits the front door, and then he’s grinning so hard that he can’t kiss Saps back, only laughing under his breath, one hand coming to Saps’ face and saying, “Okay, slow down, buddy, we’ve got a whole U-Haul to unpack.”
“I’m so, so stupid,” Saps mumbles against his mouth. “And you’re so, so annoying.”
“Annoying and always right,” Flux mumbles, beaming ear to ear, and kisses him again.
As Saps carries the last two dining room chairs in from the truck, Flux sets about opening boxes. Saps sets the chairs down, locks the door behind him, and wipes the sweat from his brow.
“There,” he says, breathing hard. “All done.”
He glances around the mess of furniture scattered through their new living room, a veritable maze of plywood and sofa cushions. Then he peers around the bookshelf and frowns. "What are you doing?"
“I’ve been unpacking,” Flux says. “And you’ll never guess what I just found.”
In the very first box he’s ripped open — Household Essentials #1/3 — he’s found a pile of construction tools that Saps had packed up a few days ago and evidently forgotten about. In his hands is a little silver hexagonal wrench, glinting in the sunlight.
“No,” Saps says, aghast.
“Oh yeah,” Flux says, smiling. “Here’s the hex key we needed.”
“This must be some sick joke,” Saps says. “The universe is actually conspiring against us.”
“For us,” Flux corrects. “I feel pretty happy with how today has gone.”
“And now we just have to unpack,” Saps says, turning around. He feels as though he’s floating on cloud nine — all the struggles of the bed frame have been completely forgotten at this point. Nothing could be going better.
Flux is smiling at him, flushed and pink all over in a way that makes Saps ridiculously, utterly charmed. All he says is: “Well, how hard could unpacking possibly be?”