Chapter 26
THE CONDO
I scarfed my burrito in the car on the way to Barry’s house, Junior offering agitated meows from the backseat the whole way.
Barry’s apartment building was tall and elegant, and closer to the stadium than my house by a good fifteen minutes.
He had his own parking spot in the garage beneath the building, which required keycard access to even get in.
He helped me with the suitcase and bag, and I held Junior in his carrier along with an empty litter box under my arm. Kate remembered to pack food, toys, and treats for him in a neon orange backpack that Barry slung over his shoulder.
The elevator took us up thirteen floors to a hallway with few doors, and the one at the end was Barry’s. I should have expected that the apartment would be stupid nice. Part of me did, I know. I just didn’t expect the apartment to be more square footage than my entire house.
I stood in the doorway taking in the nice, though sparse, entrance.
It was open concept: a living room, a dining room, a huge modern kitchen with a big island.
Everything was light: tall windows letting in evening glow, white marble countertops, wood cabinets, a cool green subway tile backsplash I liked.
It was nice, like something out of a magazine, with none of the cozy corners and low ceilings found in my home.
Junior meowed again, low and loud in his carrier, and I looked down at him. He meowed again.
“Fine, fine, sorry,” I muttered, putting him on the ground and unzipping the carrier. He looked wary but ventured out.
I turned to Barry, who studied me.
“How many bedrooms is this place?”
“Four.”
“Four,” I echoed. I don’t think I knew they even made apartments with more than three.
“And an office over there. Though I don’t really know what to do with that space. Thinking of making it a gym, but there’s a gym in the building, too.”
I toed off my shoes and walked barefoot on the cold floor to the glass doors into an empty office with a nice tall window. Lots of big windows in this apartment. I imagined it felt a little like a fishbowl at night.
At least there was no mold in the walls. Probably.
“Maybe a playroom,” I said, already smiling at the thought—a little book rack, a play kitchen, a plush green rug in the middle of the room. It would be perfect. “Do you own this place?”
“Yeah, I bought it before coming down. Figured if I didn’t like it, I could rent it out and go somewhere else.”
“How very landlord of you.” I crossed into the living room and skimmed my fingers across the back of the couch. There was a big TV, a luxury blanket on the couch, a comfortable rug, a PlayStation, even.
“Barry,” I started.
“Hm?”
Junior rubbed against my ankles, then jumped on the couch. After a moment of exploring, he started making biscuits on the soft blanket.
“Why have you been staying on an air mattress in my living room and keeping your things in the most horrible basement?”
Barry looked surprised, then shrugged.
“I told you. I wanted to be around.”
“But—” I gestured vaguely in the direction of, well, everything. “This place has just been sitting empty?”
He shrugged again, and I mimicked him. When he shuffled on his feet, I let out a stunned laugh, too high to be natural.
“Barry, you’ve been sleeping in a living room with mold in the walls when you had this empty here for you?”
“Well, I moved onto that lovely mattress recently,” he corrected. “And I like your house.” Even as outlandish as it felt standing in this place, I believed him.
I sighed. “I like it too.”
Barry tentatively took a step closer, his hand stretched halfway toward me. When I didn’t stop him, he closed the distance and tugged me against him, my head resting on the front of his shoulder.
After a stiff moment, I exhaled and lifted my arms around his waist.
“Your house is going to be okay,” he said. “The mold is going to get dealt with, the kitchen is going to be beautiful and functional, and that bathroom is going to be so cool.”
I sniffled, his words soothing my anxiety more than I wanted to admit.
“Our baby is going to want to stay here all the time,” I said, the fear escaping without my meaning for it to.
Barry pulled back and lowered his face to be in line with mine. “Oh, Han, look at me.”
I didn’t want to, but his light fingers on my chin turned my gaze in his direction.
“You are so, so wrong about that. She is going to love that house as much as you love it, as much as your grandmother loved it, and she’s going to beg to buy it from you when she’s old enough.
She’s going to live in that backyard every summer and leave muddy footprints on the kitchen floor.
She’ll leave her toys everywhere, and do puzzles with you at the old table, and she’ll never be scared of the basement, because you’ll have made it so, so nice for her. ”
I laughed, a wet sound, and Barry smiled. I hated those dimples as much as I prayed our daughter would have ones just like it.
“And where will you be?”
“In the basement, if you’ll have me.”
I laughed again and rolled my eyes.
“And if you won’t, then maybe your grumpy neighbor will sell his house to me.”
“Maybe,” I said, and used the sleeve of my sweater to wipe under my eyes.
“Your house is going to be perfect.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. When I glanced over my shoulder, Junior was already lying on the couch. He didn’t look happy, but he’d get comfortable here. He’d probably have a blast running through this apartment.
“Let’s get you that nap, yeah?” Barry said.
I nodded.
“Okay. Yeah.”
Barry insisted I stay in the primary bedroom since the bed was the biggest and nicest in there, plus he’d probably start playing bad hockey if I stopped letting him cuddle me and the pregnancy pillow at night. I was too tired to fight him.
“Can I borrow a shirt?”
Barry grinned too wide before he got his face in check and retreated to a big walk-in closet. He returned with a soft Columbus shirt and left me to change into it. I left my clothes in a heap and put on the big shirt that was like a dress on me, even with my belly.
I crawled into the bed with the world’s softest sheets and was asleep no more than five minutes later.
I woke to find Junior asleep with half of his body draped on my legs and the baby wiggling around in my stomach.
Barry had come in at some point, because my phone was plugged into a charger on the nightstand next to a tall glass of water, which I drank down so quickly that I was a little queasy after.
The windows had thick blackout curtains over them, but yellow light filtered in through the crack under the door. I pulled on a pair of sweats, rolled them at the ankles, and then picked up Junior and ventured back into the living space.
The light was from the living room and kitchen, since I could see it was dark out by now through the windows.
Barry was in the kitchen cooking something that smelled delicious, headphones over his ears as he bobbed along to whatever he was listening to. I stood and watched him and scratched under Junior’s neck until Barry turned around and startled to see us standing there.
He took off his headphones and smiled.
“How’d you sleep?”
“I’m firing my two-hundred-dollar mattress,” I said, still groggy, and it was damn dimple central in this kitchen.
“It’s had a good run.”
Junior wriggled out of my grasp and went to rub his body all over Barry’s shins in the kitchen. Barry turned back to the stove where I saw he had two steaks searing in a pan.
“Smells bomb,” I observed.
“Veggies finishing up in the oven. Want to grab some plates and we can dish up?”
I opened cabinets at random until I found a set of plates—the flat stoneware kind that look so chic and modern.
“I got the drinks you like delivered, too,” he said, and sure enough, the fridge had all sorts of my usuals stocked on its shelves. Cozy.
I fed Junior before I slid onto one of the barstools and watched Barry dish the food.
That was one fortunate thing about Barry forcing his way into my life; I was never bad at cooking, but I wasn’t very inventive either.
I could eat the same meal for lunch for seven days in a row, and tended to cook with two key features in mind: was it economical, and did it provide leftovers? If yes, it was on my rotation.
Where I could rarely stomach food in the first trimester, I was suddenly hungry constantly, and Barry was all too thrilled to prep meals, snacks, and desserts for me to have on hand at any time. If he didn’t have hockey, maybe he could do something with food. He’d be good at it.
He placed the plate in front of me and sat on the stool next to mine, our thighs pressed together. He didn’t need to be so close, but I wouldn’t tell him so.
“I’m sorry about today,” Barry said after a few quiet minutes of just our forks and knives on the plates.
“I was mad at you. Less mad now.” I waved my fork over the plate, and he huffed. “It wasn’t cool to go behind my back like that, but we wouldn’t have found the mold otherwise.”
“I wanted to help,” he admitted. “I should have talked to you, I just didn’t want you to say no because of money.”
“Money is a really valid reason to say no to something.”
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I just—you’re always trying to be so independent, you know that? And stubborn.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“It’s not a bad thing, but I think you make your life harder than it needs to be in an effort to do it all yourself.”
I chew on a piece of meat and mull over this.
“Growing up, I was always a kind of free spirit,” I said finally.
“Just, I was disorganized and did my own thing, and got into trouble without meaning to, and I think my family always felt like they had to protect me. Or steer me in the right direction. Then I went to college and almost dropped out because it was hard and I was lonely. I pulled my shit together eventually and graduated, got a corporate job I hated, then another I hated worse—”
I shrugged, ate a bite of roasted sweet potato, met Barry’s steady, focused gaze.
“I feel like I’ve been trying to prove to them that I’m good, I can do things on my own, I don’t need their help all the time. I’m not just some fuckup who can’t handle her corporate job and gets pregnant with the first hot stranger she meets in New York—I want them to see that I’m capable.”
“They do,” Barry said simply and with full certainty. “Everyone sees it.”
I put my fork down so I could face him fully with my confusion. He nodded like he wasn’t going to take it back or backtrack.
“What you’ve done to your grandma’s house, the plans you’ve made, how you’ve been saving for the baby—you’re strategic, thoughtful, and smart. Your brother looks up to you, your sister would almost definitely kill a person if you asked her to, and your parents all think the world of you.”
I lowered my eyebrows and frowned. “They baby me. Kate especially.”
“They adore you,” he corrected me. “I think they want to help you, not because you need it, but because they love you. They know you’d never ask, so they insert themselves where they can.”
I swiveled back toward the counter and took a drink from my can, weighing the truth of this assessment. Of course I knew they all loved me. We were a loving bunch and very close. But I thought I was…burdensome. More than any of them, I thought I asked the most.
Barry pointed at me with his fork.
“It’s why they all jumped to help me when I said I wanted to bring in help with the kitchen and bathroom. They were thrilled.”
“How’d you convince the guys on your team to help on their day off?” I asked.
Barry’s lip pulled into a lopsided smile. “Reminded them how you wake up before any of them to keep the facility so nice for us, even eight months pregnant.”
“They care about you,” I noted. “They wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t.”
“Maybe. I also promised them a hundred bucks each, though, so maybe it was that.”
We both laughed, and I bumped his arm with my elbow.
“It would’ve taken way longer without them,” I said. “And I was mad at you, but—it’ll be really nice to have it done. I guess I mean, thank you.”
Barry’s gaze was so soft, so knowing. I couldn’t deny that he had gotten to know me in these weeks together. If that was his plan, then he’d succeeded.
I still feared, though, that the more he learned, the more he’d find wanting.
I smiled, despite myself.
“And I guess if we hadn’t found the mold, I wouldn’t know where I can rob a really nice mattress from.”
Barry laughed and didn’t say that he’d give it to me without having to commit a bed heist. He didn’t need to.