This isn't weird.

Cosmos

"Go easy on it. It's gonna hurt real bad if you make yourself cough," Dustin warned her.

"Ain't my first rodeo," Millie replied, rolling her eyes, but as soon as she took her first inhale of sweet, pungent smoke, she began to cough. It did, in fact, hurt real bad.

He got up and fetched her a glass of water. "Doing alright?" he asked as he passed it to her.

"Better than alright," she replied, and soothed her throat with a long gulp of water before sinking back into the sofa. "So worth it." The high washing over her body was like a warm hug from an old friend. All traces of pain in her body were quickly fading into a hazy memory.

Dustin rifled through a stack of battered vinyl records, listing off some options, and they soon discovered a shared love for 60's folk. They agreed on an Arlo Guthrie album, and it took a moment of fiddling with a tired-looking old turntable to get it to start. He flopped down on the recliner next to her seat on the couch and she handed him the pipe. A meandering conversation about books ensued, and she was impressed and embarrassed to realize that he had read more in the last three weeks than she had in the last year.

It seemed strange to her that this situation was so comfortable. He really wasn't hitting on her, or making detectable overtures of any kind. They were just two people passing a pipe back and forth while he breathlessly explained to her everything he knew about quasars and bonobos and microchips, though she was far too high to really follow much of it.

It was a stark contrast to her time alone with Ben. She had never realized just how emotionally and mentally draining it was to spend so much time swallowing her feelings for him. A dull ache tightened her chest every time she thought about him tonight. She would have expected to be thrilled to learn that he was straight, but instead, she was consumed by the certainty that she would have known from the beginning if he actually had any sliver of attraction to her. She kept thinking about their conversation in the diner that second night after they met, her coy implication that he might ever want to bed her, and his incredulous response.

Ridiculous. How weird would that be?

"Hey, can I show you something?" Dustin asked, interrupting her train of thought.

Millie blinked several times, suddenly aware of how dry her eyes were. "Sure," she said. They got to their feet and he led her through the house.

It was odd to see his home up close. He must have inherited it from a family member, she figured, as the furniture and decor didn't seem to have been updated much since the 80's. The living room had faux wood paneling on the walls and shabby gabardine curtains in a tacky shade of burnt orange. A faded picture of the Virgin Mary was framed over the mantel, partially obscured by an impressive collection of dirty bongs. The entire house was badly cluttered, every surface covered with books, beer cans, and the scattered innards of mysteriously dismantled electronics. It made her oddly nostalgic for the summers she had spent visiting her older brother.

He opened a door in the kitchen, and the darkness within greeted them with the strong scent of sawdust and cigarette smoke. It took him a moment of fumbling to find the light switch. The fluorescent lights flickered to life, revealing a two car garage that was considerably more organized than the rest of the house, though that wasn't saying much. There were two workbenches made of unfinished wood, one of which was fitted with a table saw, a large, red standing toolbox with two smaller toolboxes balanced atop it, and a staggered row of several odd wooden towers of irregular shapes and sizes, in various stages of being wrapped with sisal rope and carpet.

It took Millie's stoned brain a moment to piece together what she was looking at. "Are those... cat trees?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah," he said, moving toward the back of the garage where a rack of steel shelves reached all the way to the ceiling. He kicked a nearby stepladder in front of it. "I build them to donate to a bunch of different animal shelters in the area. It's kind of a pipe dream of mine to make a business of it one day." He climbed to the top step of the ladder and rummaged through the jumbled melange on one of the high shelves. "Ah, here it is."

Dustin found a squat, awkwardly sized wooden case and lifted it up. It made Millie anxious to see him haphazardly balance as he stepped back down. He pushed aside a few empty, ash-covered beer cans and screwdrivers from the top of a workbench and carefully put down the box. It was square, about two and half feet across, and stained mahogany red, with two brass clasps on the front. Burned into the top in shaky black letters were the words, Property of Lacey Tombaugh, with two purple, star shaped rhinestones glued on either side of her name.

"Hold on just a second. Don't look yet," he said, and fished around under the bench until he produced a small, unlabeled plastic bottle. Millie averted her eyes as he undid the clasps and opened the box. He squirted a few drops of some sort of clear lubricant onto something in the center, then wiped it off with a grungy shop towel. "Okay, good to go. Come see."

She walked over next to him and peered down into the box. The interior was painted jet black, and speckled with hundreds of pinpoints of tiny white dots. Inside, ten orbs of drastically different sizes—mostly painted marbles, from the looks of it—were mounted on spindly, L-shaped arms, except for the one that stood in the center. It was the largest, painted yellow and covered with gold glitter, and the rest of the spheres surrounded it, all from different distances.

"A model solar system!" Millie said with surprise.

"Not just a solar system," Dustin said with a proud grin. "It's an orrery. Well, a rudimentary one, but still."

"What's that?" Millie asked.

"Watch." His hands found a small brass hand crank that she hadn't noticed before on the side of the box. As he began to turn it, it briefly made a stubborn, creaky noise that quickly gave way to a gentle mechanical whirring. The little planets began to rotate around the glittery sun. "She made it for the sixth grade science fair."

"By herself?" Millie asked.

"She let me help a little," he replied. "Just with the construction of the box. She insisted on doing the mechanical parts all on her own. It killed her to make the scale so inaccurate, but an actual scale model would have been a few miles across, so she made some concessions. Begrudgingly."

"And she did this as a sixth grader?"

"Yep!" He was beaming. "She was the smartest person I ever knew. Absolutely obsessed with outer space. She named our cat Copernicus."

"That's adorable!" she laughed.

"Right? She wanted to be a cosmologist. Our parents got us the box set of Cosmos on VHS for our birthday one year—I swear, we must have watched it together about a thousand times."

"It's really beautiful," Millie said. He stepped aside to let her get a closer look, and she carefully turned the crank herself. "So, did she win?"

"Of course she won!" he laughed. "She won every science fair. It was so fucking annoying."

Watching the way his face seemed to glow when he described his late sister, Millie wondered wistfully if she had ever loved another person that much. She tried not to think about Ben. "Thanks for showing me this, Dustin," she said. "Hey—do you still have those VHS tapes?"

"Hell yeah, I do!" He walked back over to the shelves. On a center rack was a large, yellowing plastic tub. He yanked off the lid, and dug around in it for a moment before victoriously holding the beaten up black box set over his head.

"And a VCR?" she asked.

"I have three," he answered smugly.

"You're just full of surprises," she said with a grin.

"How about you load us another bowl while I set up the TV?" Dustin suggested, and she readily agreed.

Millie fell asleep on his couch that night.