Archive of Our Own

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Home shouldn’t be Penelope’s couch, but Colin likes it here, among all her pink and blue and green decorations.

After a week, he asks, should I go?

She says, no, it’s fine, stay as long as you like!

And he says, don’t you miss having your space?

And she says, not more than I missed you. Her face goes soft, sweet, and his insides melt like ice cream in summer. 

Colin doesn’t quite know what to do with her affection, only knows that he seeks it out. He isn’t sure what kind of person that makes him, if he’s bad for knowing Penelope will give him what he needs even though there isn’t anything he can offer her in return. His life is unstable—he doesn’t know where he’s going to be until he’s there and sometimes doesn’t know how long it’ll be until he comes home. But when he is home, he takes a car from the airport, and that car drops him off at 613 Bloom Street, and then he’s sleeping on a couch that doesn’t belong to him, in a house that doesn’t belong to him, thinking about a woman that doesn’t belong to him. He knows women cannot belong to anyone, but people can belong to each other. He thinks, at least, that he belongs to her, like one of her shelved knickknacks he’s brought for her on his trips. It started with a tiny giraffe carved from a block of wood by an old man sitting in a rickety lawn chair on a busy street in a city that had seen kinder days. Penelope told Colin he must fold up like a giraffe on airplanes since he’s so tall, and he reminded her that he flies with extra legroom, and she rolled her eyes and mumbled something about rich people and he laughed, of course, and tugged on a curl or bumped his shoulder into hers, or something like that. And, well, he’d seen the giraffe on a table for sale, a little sticker on a back leg that priced the giraffe at barely a quid and immediately he thought of her, so he’d bought it, gave it to her almost the second they separated from a hug that would feel a touch too long if it were with anyone else, but the welcome home never seemed long enough with her. She marveled at it, gasped and squealed—held the little thing up to her cheek and went, Oh my God, him so cute! And now there’s a ton of them—knickknacks, not giraffes—little bits of everywhere because he’s been everywhere but everywhere doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things when he always ends up here.

So it’s like he belongs to her.

And if he belongs to her, then he belongs here—he takes out the trash and does the dishes and cleans the bathroom so the sink isn’t messy with his beard clippings and she giggled once when a load of their clothes got mixed up and she ended up with his briefs among her panties, and she said it would probably be fine if they just washed everything together, and if he wouldn’t mind hanging things on the line in the back garden, she’ll take all the clothes down when the sun sets.

Of course, he doesn’t mind, and sometimes she forgets to take the clothes down because she’s spent all the daylight hours after work writing, but it's alright, he’s got it. He goes out and gets all the clothes he hung up and brings them inside and folds them on the couch to reruns of something he’s seen a hundred times. Later, she comes out of her room, rubbing her eyes and yawning and asking him if he wants to order in something to eat, and she apologizes for forgetting about their clothes and he tells her not to worry, and he pays for their dinner, and she eats with him on the sofa, and for one whole second, caught in an in-between, he feels like this is why he even bothers coming back home. It’s not something he can truly understand. 

Or maybe it’s not something he can understand with his brain, but he understands with his muscles and nerves.

It feels so—normal. And his life is normal—for him. All of what he does suits him. He has favorite flight attendants and pilots. He has so many hotel points he’d never have to spend another dollar on a hotel room as long as he’s alive and probably can bequeath his points to his kids if points are still a thing that far into the future. He has learned six languages in addition to English and can even read some simplified Chinese. He uses it all to write about what’s happening in the world underneath all the corruption and the crime and the hopelessness—because the world is still unmistakably beautiful and people still get up early in the morning to bake bread. 

And after all that. After all those long days and sleepless nights, he ends up here, with the girl he’s known for longer than he hasn’t, and he sleeps on her couch and she eats with him and laughs at his jokes and kisses his cheek as she thanks him for folding her unmentionables. She says things like Do you prefer PlayStation or Xbox? and hooks up a system to her TV that was handed down to her by a brother-in-law, and later, when he plays, she sits next to him on the couch and asks if his soldiers are winning. He teaches her how to play instead of telling her it’s not really a game you win, so to speak, walking her through the gameplay, showing her the secret passageways to get by enemies. She gets a furrow in her brow when she concentrates, eyebrows scrunched together, mouth bunched in a frown until she cheers when she shoots a target dead. He tells her she’s done a good job, and she preens and says, I’m actually the number one player in the world. 

And he says, right of course. I’m sure you can show me a thing or two. 

And she says, three, even. If you’re lucky.

But he doesn’t try his luck fast enough, because she yawns and says, goodnight, and drifts away into her room for bed, and he tries to understand why he wants to follow her in there.

Penelope’s room isn’t very big. Her house isn’t either, and neither is the plot, but she inherited it from an aunt and often says beggars cannot be choosers. The white fence is sturdy and has a gate that leads up to the walkway. When he’s around, he cuts the grass for her. He hates doing it, and she says she doesn’t mind doing it, but he’s around and does it for her. She thanks him—always so thankful, even though he doesn’t do it because of that, but because she deserves to have something nice that she doesn’t have to do herself. It feels important that he does it even though he hates it. She’s spent so much time and money and hours scouring second-hand sites and putting Pinterest boards together so the house looks exactly the way it does. And it’s cool in here. He likes it in here. But he sort of wants to go in there.

In her room.

And that’s not really an explainable feeling, is it? Feeling like he isn’t ready to be done with her. Isn’t ready to call it a night, maybe. Wants to feel her exist next to him for a little while longer. Coax out another laugh even, with some terrible joke just to keep her sat. It works sometimes, like the other night; her laugh turned into a tired stretch, and her toes poked into his thigh, and she mumbled, sorry, even though his first instinct was to curl his fingers around her tiny ankle and let her put her feet up on his lap. And she gave him a smile, something so sweet it made his stomach ache with something new, a taste he’s never had before—he’s a connoisseur of sweets, can break a cookie down to its ingredients just by taste with terrifying but fascinating accuracy—but this here, a little sleepy smile from Penelope is new, undiscovered. He’s seen her relaxed like this a million times, curled into a ball and hugging one of her flower-shaped couch pillows as her eyes focus on the TV and whatever happens is happening. He watches her happen.

But then she gets up and goes to her room, and he doesn’t go in there with her, nor does she ask him to, and it bothers him, because—

Because…!

Because?

Because of this new thing that makes him feel at home here, the most home he’s ever felt, even growing up in the home his mother painstakingly made, and bless his mother, she’s a wonder, a miracle even, but Colin can also acknowledge they had cleaners, and a cook, and a house manager. It’s not like this, where Penelope’s fridge has a bunch of notes for things she shouldn’t forget, like doctor appointments and wedding save-the-dates and receipts for stuff she has to return, and there’s a line for the laundry out in the backyard, and a cracked birdbath she’s been meaning to replace but she hasn’t found the right one so there it stays, and soft rugs over hardwood and a wall of photos she’s collected from over the years—sometimes when he brushes his teeth in the morning, he stands in the hallway and looks at all of them, people he knows—her family, his siblings, mutual friends—and people he doesn’t know—her colleagues and professional peers, friends from circles he doesn’t frequent. He’s there, obviously. Should it be obvious? Should he be there? Is that where he belongs? In the collection of moments of her life? He’s not there a lot. Eloise is in a ton of photos, but Colin is only in three.

Two birthdays and one of Colin and Penelope sitting on her front porch steps.

He remembers Eloise had taken that picture. It had been so hot that day, and Penelope was pink-cheeked and her hair was up and off her neck—she gets irritated when it’s too hot and her hair is too much, and he tries to keep an emergency ponytail holder on his wrist for her—it gets lost underneath his watch and a couple of bracelets and he mostly forgets it’s there, but once, when he was in Dallas, a woman he was chatting with asked him if she could borrow it—it was so hot in that bar that she grabbed her hair up off the back of her neck with one hand, fanning herself with the other—and he’d given the hairband to her. His wrist had felt so naked after. It shouldn’t have mattered. It shouldn’t have mattered, not really, but for some reason it did. He went home with her, fucked her, and as he got dressed, he took the hairband off the nightstand where she’d left it and put it back on his wrist. When he arrived back at his hotel, he texted Penelope that he was thinking about her, and she wrote back, aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?

And he was supposed to be sleeping, he needed to be up early to start drafting his next chapter, but he couldn’t now, caught halfway between energized and confused, chasing the tail end of a thought he can never keep up with. And so he texted her back, yes, but I can’t sleep.

And she FaceTimed him and they synced an episode of whatever show she was watching these days and didn’t make it ten minutes before he was out like a light.

Anyway. Penelope’s room. He’s been in there a few times. Not many times, but enough that he knows what it looks like. There’s a big bed that takes up most of the space in the middle, and some large glass doors that open up to the back garden. If the birdbath were functional, she could wake up to birds splashing in it, washing their beaks and feathers. There’s a small vanity with all her lip glosses and blushes and bronzers, so I don’t look dead, and a tiny writing desk with just her laptop and a comfy chair. She doesn’t watch TV in her bedroom, says it sucks out the good energy. Maybe that’s why he likes it in there; knows that’s where all her warmth is concentrated. It’s not an off-limits space—she’s told him he can do whatever he likes when he’s over, and when he’s done the folding, he puts her clothes away for her sometimes, and he stands by the glass doors and stares out at the garden and thinks. Imagines, maybe. Wonders. And at night, when she disappears in there, she turns on the string of fairy lights and the room is washed in the softest gold, and her eyes go from blue to clear, and she looks haloed—some nights he lingers in the doorway as she gets ready for bed. Braiding up her hair and pulling on her pajamas and brushing her teeth and yapping at him about a plot point in her book that she is stuck on, one that she inevitably works out with absolutely no help from him, but every time she says I swear it’s like you’re basically writing this for me, and then I’m going to dedicate this one to you. Or would you prefer to be in the acknowledgements? And he laughs and hopes she has more to say, because he likes when she has more to say, but instead, she goes, Will you get the lights on your way out? And he will get the lights and close the door and go back to the couch and stretch out his whole body and lie there thinking about her.

And tonight he thinks about her so much that he reaches into his pants where he’s already hard and strokes himself to abstract thoughts of her, like the shape of her lips and the arch of her foot and the way her bra digs into her back and how her shorts are too short to be shorts and are more like a second pair of underwear.

It’s not the first time he’s thought about her with his hand on his cock. Sometimes he thinks about her when his cock is inside someone else. It’s not on purpose. It just sort of happens. He tries to keep it in the shower, but he swears he won’t make a habit of it, of slinging his left arm over his eyes and tries to keep his breathing even and quiet as his thoughts turn over the feeling of her skin underneath his hand, freckles on her shoulders and the backs of her thighs and the way her nipples press through her bra—stuff he notices but shouldn’t fixate on, but he’s already fixated. Sometimes her shirt will ride up, and he thinks about how he’s never seen her stomach, and she’d probably kill him if she knew he was horny over her stomach of all things, the shape of it, right above where her thighs touch and he imagines she’s warmer and softer and wetter than anyone he’s ever been with, and that’s not fair to the people he’s been with but—shit, oh—fuck—

He shudders and his cum pools on his stomach because he didn’t plan to tug himself off, and he uses his shirt to mop it all up and wipe his hand off and drops it to the floor to deal with in the morning, and he has that feeling again, out of breath and chasing something he doesn’t know. And it isn’t guilt. There’s nothing to feel guilty about—at least he doesn’t think so—but it makes him feel further away from her somehow.

In the morning, after Penelope’s gone to a meeting with her editor, Colin checks the mail—he gets mail here sometimes—and he leaves her post on the counter in the designated post area, and then he leaves.

First, he orders a coffee and a scone, and he sits on a bench and scrolls through Penelope’s Pinterest board for the birdbaths she’s pinned. There aren’t a lot of pins. Just four of them—not a lot to go on—but he studies each pin, finds the commonalities, the similarities, searches for what speaks to her about them. And then he hunts.

When Colin makes it back to the house, Penelope’s in the kitchen, putting together something for the two of them to eat. And she greets him like she usually does, with a hug, propelling herself to the tippiest tips of her toes, and he drops a kiss to the top of her head, and that’s not how he usually greets her, but he’s thinking about all the birdbaths he’s seen and there isn’t really a connection between the thoughts other than he’s feeling overly affectionate for her today. Or maybe not overly, but more than he usually expresses, and he finds himself aborting more touches he initiates than he knows what to do with. Hand on her back—no. Hand on her shoulder—no. Hand on her arm, her hand, reaching out to boing one of her magnificent curls—no. And he isn’t sure why. Because then Penelope asks, are you alright?

And Colin says, yeah fine, why?

And Penelope says, you’re very quiet. And then, have I done something to upset you?

And he shakes his head and commits to a touch—his hand on her hip, and she looks up at him with her big, wide blue eyes that make his stomach ache.

Are you sure? She asks. If you’re not feeling well, you can sleep in my bed with me. I can look after you.

Colin’s brain goes numb for a second, just hopping static as he thinks very carefully about his answer. Because, well, that doesn’t make sense. He’s a grown man who tends to look after himself for the most part, and likes looking after people, and Penelope is one of the people he likes looking after the most, which is why he likes being here, in her little house with her clothesline in the backyard and the broken birdbath and their dishes in the sink and his regular bar of soap in the dish next to her bodywash that’s lemon scented. He likes to spend his Sundays scrubbing the glass pane of the shower that Penelope wishes she could rip out and replace with a clawfoot tub, the big kind that can fit two people, she will say, with a wistful little sigh. And he wishes he could do it for her, just shatter the glass and rip out the shower and put in a skylight so she won’t have to use the awful fluorescents, and everything could be exactly how she likes it.

So, instead of saying no, I’m alright, like he ought to, he says, I wouldn’t want it to catch.

And she smiles up at him and says, I’m immune to you.

And he doesn’t know what that means. If she means it in any sort of way. If it means anything in particular, if she’s just saying that as a joke, or if she doesn’t get all these fucked up little feelings he has to shove under a microscope and dissect and define. Maybe she isn’t breathless from chasing like he is. Maybe she understands their odd symbiosis. She knows what their friendship is and means, and that it equals months sleeping on her couch and folding her clothes but only three pictures on the Life Wall.

After dinner, he washes up like he usually does and Penelope helps him with toweling off the dishes and putting them away, and then she takes his hand and leads him to her room and his heart is pounding so hard that he feels like he’s going to explode and leave obscene amounts of viscera on her pretty pink walls.

They brush their teeth and change into their pajamas, and Penelope puts a hand to his forehead and makes a satisfied noise.

But there’s no one to get the lights, and so he moves to get up to shut off the lights, but Penelope pulls him back into bed and switches them off with a remote control.

And then he’s lying there with her. In her bed, with a stomachache that does make him feel like he’s dying. Can people die of stomachaches? He’s pretty sure people die from stomachaches. But not this kind, the kind brought on by a too pretty girl and her tiny shorts and warm fingers and her body heat beside him. He’s going to die, he thinks, right in here in Penelope Featherington’s bed, tucked between her blue checked sheets.

My editor wants to meet you, she whispers, shifting onto her side. The fairy lights are on and she’s barely lit they’re so dim, but he can see her eyes.

Meet me? Why? he asks, turning onto his side to face her. And Penelope smiles.

I tell her I get my best ideas from you.

He reaches out and touches her face, just the backs of his fingers over her cheek, a gentle sweep upwards. He isn’t sure why he doesn’t pull his hand back, or why Penelope shifts closer to him, or how it is that she’s burrowed into his chest with his face in her hair, but that’s where they end up. And after a moment she turns onto her side, and he’s cradled behind her, curved around her like armor around the moon. He can’t sleep; he won’t be able to sleep, soaking this up as much as he can, drinking it in like he’s starving, and Penelope links their fingers over her stomach and whispers, even when you are feeling better, you can sleep in here with me if you want.

And he does want. Okay, he says.

When he wakes that first morning, the glow of sunlight from the window feels so bright it’s like he’s staring at the sun. Penelope is in his arms still, tucked against him exactly as she was when they’d fallen asleep, and she’s warm and he’s hard and it feels perfect, the place where he belongs.

Everything else stays the same, except for the nights, when they finish dinner and watch too much TV, and they’re basically asleep on the couch, Penelope says, come to bed, and he follows her in.

One day, they’re at the shops, and Penelope giggles and says, I don’t think we noticed that we’re living together.

He noticed. The key. The mail. The trash, the dishes, the scrubbing the shower, the.

The sleeping in the same bed.

When they walk side by side and their hands somehow twist and tangle until he realizes he’s holding her hand and their fingers fit so well that it makes sense that he would hold her hand—he holds her body in bed, and this is like that—the kind of intimacy they both do and don’t share. Because they do, they do when he comes home from fucking about and she comes home from meetings with artists and editors and printers and bookshops wanting to host her, and they convene in her little house, and it feels like—

Like something. Like a life he isn’t supposed to know yet. The kind in fairytales maybe, too picturesque. Too still.

But it’s more than that. It’s. There’s.

Well. There’s also the way they show up to functions together. To friends' gatherings and dinner at his mother’s and Saturday afternoon picnics with Daph and Simon and Kate and Anthony and Penelope’s reading to all the kids and he’s watching her, thinking in that abstract way he thinks sometimes, about floor plans and second bedrooms and giraffes and the color green and how babies need baths in bathtubs.

It’s Daphne, of course, that asks where he’s living these days in that cool tone that Colin almost mistakes for nonchalance, but he focuses his vision on her, can see the sensors ready to analyze what he says before he says it. 

With Pen.

Daphne raises her eyebrows, eyes darting back and forth as she tries to make eye contact with both of his eyes at the same time. She asks, with her, or With Her? 

The question is stupid, it is. It’s so stupid. But now he’s exposed his belly to Daphne, and she cuts into him with a smile so knowing that Colin feels like he’s confessed something nameless to her. Something breathless and unheeding and incautious. 

It’s just until I find a place, he says, picking at blades of grass with anxious fingers, watching Kate converse Penelope, while Penelope coos at a baby with hands so tiny it makes Colin’s chest ache. 

Her place is kind of small, Daphne prods, where do you sleep?

Colin levels her with a look and Daphne’s mouth goes wide with a grin, even more knowing now and when he looks at Penelope again, she catches his gaze and scrunches her nose at him. So playful, so sweet. The sun has burned her cheeks. Or maybe she’s blushing. Colin will learn the difference later, when they’re in the car maybe, or when they’re in the bathroom brushing their teeth and Penelope’s washed her face and all that’s left behind are freckles over the bridge of her nose—

Daphne doesn’t ask actual words, so Colin doesn’t have to answer any actual questions. 

Hyacinth does, later, when they’re playing a game with predetermined questions and Colin picks a letter out of the bag for the subject and it’s a P and the question on the card is Would you rewatch a movie to keep this person company?

And it’s—yes. Obviously. 

But Penelope lifts her brows at him like she doesn’t already know, and Colin shrugs his shoulders, leaning back in his seat. He is sober. He told Penelope he’d drive them home. So there isn’t an excuse for him to—well, he doesn’t have to say—

I’d relive my whole life just to keep Pen company. 

He’s already looking at Penelope, and after a second, he notices everyone else is looking at her too. She lifts her glass to her mouth and drinks the rest of her wine, hiding her smile. There's oohing. His siblings ooh. Their friends ooh. And Penelope, well, she blushes, and Colin, of course, feels like he's won the game.

Later, something happens, when he helps her out of the car and her fingers hold his tight and she follows him up the path to her door and she says, wait. 

And he waits, doesn’t know what for, just does, with Penelope’s hand in his and his heart in his throat, and her eyes looking up at him curiously, tilting her head like she recognizes him but hasn’t seen him in a while, and he thinks about her being bothered, that she might do something like tell him he should start sleeping on the couch again, but she doesn’t say anything. 

Inside, she pours them both some wine, and they sit outside on the deck, underneath the porch light, and they talk about the birdbath. 

I would sit in my room—well, my aunt’s room and watch them all flutter and splash. I would imagine being a bird, too. A pretty one. Did you know that female birds are usually kind of dull and boring and all the boy birds get to be colorful?

He had known that, but he laughs instead of bursting her bubble. What color would you be?

She shakes her head. Brown probably.

You’d have color to match your hair. A little fireball. He reaches out to touch her hair, a stray curl that Colin winds around his index finger. She hums, a small, tipsy smile blooming across her lips. She scoots in closer, hinging her legs over his thigh. He wraps his arm around her shoulders, and she touches his chest, walking her fingers up his sternum. He swallows thickly, looking down at her fingers. Her nail polish is chipped, a soft pale blue that reminds him of a robin’s egg. He takes her hand, her fingers, lifting them to his mouth and kisses the tips of them. Doesn’t know what compels him, but he does. 

And then she leans her head on his shoulder and says, Oh, bluebird. 

So, yeah. He noticed. 

He spends a lot of time noticing things. Her. Always her, and it’s hard not to, living in her tiny house, waking up to her hair and her skin and the way she pokes her toes into his shin to see if he’s awake, and when he isn’t, she shakes him and asks him if he wants coffee, and she makes coffee and brings two too-full mugs back to bed. 

So he finally gets her a birdbath. He gets rid of the old one, directs the delivery men where to place the new one while he stands in front of the open doors in Penelope’s room. And when Penelope comes home, wet from the rain and shivering cold, he thinks that this doesn’t feel like stillness. It feels good. It feels like an adventure, grabbing her hand and pulling her into her room to show her what he’s done. And she shrieks, Oh my god! And pushes open the doors and rainwater is coming inside her room but the two of them are out in the garden and she’s touching the lip of the bath, already full of rainwater and she turns to him and says, you got this for me?

And he says, yeah. Do you like it?

And she laughs, her wet hair gone stringy and her eyelashes clumped together and she shakes her head and goes, Of course I like it.

And this is what he enjoys. Not stillness, but being anchored, weathering this storm, sitting on the floor in her room after they’ve changed out of their wet clothes, watching the clouds go incredibly dark and the thunder rattles the glass.

She says, I hope the power doesn’t go, and he adds another note to his mental list of all the things she’s ever said to him, with the birdbath and the clawfoot tub and the giraffes and—

And well, the power does go. And they eat cold sandwiches for dinner at her kitchen counter, and Penelope lights candles in her room; not too many so they don’t accidentally burn the whole house down, but enough that he can see her when she takes his hand and leads him to her bed when it’s time, and the thunder is so loud in his ears—oh, he’s actually confused it for his heartbeat, how wild.

It’s not that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or even what’s happening; it’s more like it happens in slow motion, and it takes him by surprise when he realizes that his body is gravitating towards her sun; that this entire time, he’s been a planet orbiting her, soaking up all her warmth so he can complete another rotation. They tumble down onto her mattress, and he kisses her, in the middle of this storm that shakes the walls and makes the floor underneath them tremble. She’s so soft and pliant and open, and he’s spent so long searching for the taste of her mouth in everything he’s ever eaten; his hunger for her is ravenous, morphs quickly into greed. He wants her, so much of her, all of her; her hands are splayed over his chest—he almost wants to look down and see them, like he needs to see her touch him in order to know or to be sure or to convince himself that he isn’t dreaming. 

He’s in her bed and he’s between her thighs and all their clothes have come off; not a dream at all but it feels like one, dreamy and wispy, the way she sucks in air like he’s seared her with his hands when he reaches down between her thighs to touch her between her legs. He explores her, takes his time pressing kisses to her cheek, her neck, her chest—everywhere he’s ever fantasized about putting his mouth. He wants to slide down and put his mouth on her cunt, taste her desire, and when he begins descending, she stops him. Later, she promises. Her eyes are so blue, even in this candlelit darkness, looking at him like he’s some kind of marvel, like he hasn’t been waiting for this exact moment when their bodies meet—oh—and collide—oh God—and he can feel all the emotion is in his body and gather in his throat and—

Colin, she whispers so softly, a hand on his cheek, beckoning his attention to focus back on her, and there shouldn’t be tears here, but there are, and she brings him down for a kiss as he moves inside of her, groaning into her mouth. The kiss breaks, and she gasps Ohhh, and God, she’s radiant, beautiful and sweet, perfect underneath him as she makes these tiny little noises each time he strokes in deep. She keeps his gaze, messy and tear-streaked as it is, her hand still on his face like she’s worried he’ll disappear, but he’s so out of his mind with how good it feels to have finally connected all his edges to hers and watch them tie themselves around each other. 

She scrapes her fingernails down his back, and he grips her thigh. 

Colin, she whines, yes, yes.

Pen, he gasps. Pen, Pen, Pen. 

He devours the little noise she makes, the smallest gasp before the whisper of his name, and there, caught in the palms of his hands: the tail end of a lightning strike.

When it’s over, she’s draped across his chest, rain pelting at the windows, candles flickering, light licking over her shoulders.

I didn’t know it could be like that, he says honestly after a while, and she lifts her head so she can look at him.

Well, you’re in love, she sighs. It should be like that when you’re in love.

And he is, isn’t he? In love with her and this life and this house and her pink walls and her blue kitchen and soft rugs and the couch he relegated himself to until he was so sick with love, she helped him find a place for it.

He laughs, he does, and it feels like true joy, like he can finally stop running.

What do you think about giraffes? He wonders sleepily, and she nods.

They remind me of you now. They have big hearts, did you know?

He hadn’t, but he can imagine, and he’s sure he dreams of them, of giraffes and big hearts and green walls.

When the storm passes, and the morning comes, and he’s untangled his body from hers, he draws out a sheet of paper and a pen and makes a list. A real list.

And over breakfast in the garden, on a blanket by the birdbath, he tells her about all the items he listed.

Those sound like promises, she muses, a twinkle in her eye.

I don’t want you to think you’ve made a mistake, he says.

When have I ever made a mistake? she giggles.

And he laughs, more and again, looking back at the house she built for herself and all the things she loves.

And she loves him, so he belongs here, to this little house on 613 Bloom Street and the woman who lives there.