“Did you build this to impress girls?” Miriam asked, laying her head on Noelle’s shoulder.
“Hell yes,” Noelle said, suddenly nervous. “Is it working?”
“Definitely working. I love that I destroy antiques, and you restore them. Although if you want me to add some glitter glue…”
Noelle glared at her, and she grinned mischievously.
They drove into Advent with only the sound of the radio between them, their legs pressing against each other every time Noelle shifted. Noelle kept her eyes firmly on the road, hoping Miriam couldn’t see her blush.
Their first stop was an antique shop. Noelle wanted to give Miriam a chance to play and show her that Noelle took her work seriously. The owner was overjoyed to see Miriam. “I’ve been following you on Instagram. I love that mirror piece you posted last month. Come on, I’ll make you a cup of coffee while you warm up, and then I’ll show you some junk I think you’ll like.”
They followed the woman into the back of the shop, past a wall of porcelain heads filled with plastic flowers, and plastic Christmas decorations from the sixties. This was definitely Miriam’s kind of place.
“You brought me to an antique shop?” Miriam whispered to Noelle. “I’m going to get distracted by stuff and not pay any attention to you!”
“I know,” Noelle said. “I’m going to watch you do it, and it’s going to make my whole day. Nothing’s cuter than you getting excited about art.”
Miriam made that noise in her throat that Noelle was already learning meant she was about to get kissed, but the shop owner interrupted.
“Now, I think you’ll love this badly taxidermized mongoose.”
They left the shop with the back of the pickup full of various merchandise and a ton of shots of Miriam holding the pieces up for the Bloomers. Miriam and Noelle walked, hand in hand, down Main Street, visiting the diner and the boutique. Collin made them latte art and blushed when Miriam asked him about Marisol.
They also stopped by a tiny library in a converted old house. The librarian had worked at Carrigan’s as a teen, before going away to college and coming back with her master’s, determined to convince the town council to fund a library. She was excited to see Miriam back home, and Miriam was excited to have a place for new books. When warm vanilla smells wafted out onto the snow from a bakery and ice cream shop, Miriam dragged them inside to eat specialty homemade ice cream, in spite of Noelle’s protestations that it was, in fact, below freezing outside. (“It’s my birthday, I get ice cream,” she argued.) The baker picked Miriam’s brain about some of Rosenstein’s vintage recipes that they’d retired. They talked for so long about local distributors of artisanal butter that Noelle ate all of Miriam’s ice cream, and they had to order a second round.
Noelle loved watching Miriam connect with all the people in Advent, who were a part of her own daily life. It made this feel more real, more concrete, that Miriam was here to stay. And she found that kissing the ice cream out of Miriam’s mouth warmed her up quickly, even as snowflakes began to fall around them.
As they started to make the drive back, the snow started coming down harder.
“So,” Noelle said as she drove, mostly to stop herself from daydreaming about Things a Person Could Do to Another Person in the Bench Seat of a Truck, “you’re the only gay girl I’ve ever met who only hangs out with a straight guy and a bunch of old people who own antique stores. Don’t you get lonely for fellowship?”
“Let me tell you a secret about the kind of confirmed bachelors and spinster aunts who own antique shops,” Miriam said with a wink. “And I have friends in Charleston, although admittedly many of them are Tara’s friends. I don’t know, my childhood was somewhat lacking in examples of normal affection, you know, except from Cass, so I sort of gravitate toward people who remind me of her. Besides, I often feel unwelcome in queer spaces as a bisexual, so sometimes I avoid them, so I won’t have to feel like I’m not gay enough.”
“You need friends your own age,” Noelle grumbled, “who do not worship you on social media.” She was grouchy, because she wanted to go back and make the last ten years—hell, the last thirty years—of Miriam’s life less lonely.
“Well, Ms. Judgmental, I’m so glad you’ve volunteered,” Miriam said dryly.
“I was volunteering you for Elijah’s trivia team. Is friends what we’re going for?” Noelle asked, raising an eyebrow in Miriam’s direction. “I’m going to be very disappointed, if so.”
Miriam put her hand on Noelle’s thigh, and Noelle felt the sensation all the way through her body. “I’ll have to be friends with someone else then.”
“Good,” Noelle growled before pausing. She glanced at the little clown music box Miriam had bought at the antique store and was now fiddling with. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure?” Miriam sounded wary.
“Well, you may have noticed that I’m interested in unwrapping the mystery of Miriam Blum,” Noelle began, “and one of the many questions I have is, why the Bloomer Face? You put this weird as fuck art into the world, but then you sell it with this fake version of you.”
“Part of it is that my fans are strangers I have a parasocial relationship with,” Miriam explained, shifting in her seat to look at Noelle, “and there’s only so close I want to be to them, for safety reasons. I am a queer Jew on the internet, so that requires some careful boundaries. But I’m also not convinced they would want to know the real, messy, fucked-up person who makes that weird art.”
Noelle shook her head. “If they don’t want to, they’re missing out. You have a deeply strange soul, and it’s pretty incredible.”
She tried to keep her eyes on the road while also gauging Miri’s reaction. She could see out of the corner of her eye that Miriam had blushed all the way up to her hair.
“Pull the truck over,” Miriam said, in a strangled voice. Noelle did as she was told. She put the truck into park and looked over at Miriam, who was already throwing a leg over her lap. Before Noelle knew what was happening, she was being straddled by a tiny elf, curls enveloping her head, hands in her hair, and Miriam’s lips on hers.
“I’m not complaining, but what are you doing?”
“You just said the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Miriam said, kissing her harder.