39. Home Together #3
“He's a smart cat,” Sterling says, turning me in his arms so we're face-to-face. The twilight from the window catches the planes of his face, the steady kindness in his eyes. “He knew before we did that we were always going to end up in the same room. “
I take one last look at the studio, at the light that's now faded into a soft, twilight blue, and at the name on the window that finally feels like it belongs there.
Professional success is a great thing, and a design studio with north-facing light is a dream come true, but they aren't the things that make a life.
The life is the person standing behind me, the friends who showed up when everything was burning, and the quiet, stubborn courage it took to believe I deserved any of it.
The fire didn't just take away my things; it burned away the clutter of who I thought I was supposed to be. It left me with the raw materials to build something better.
I look out at the city from my own studio window, and whatever burns down next, I know how to rebuild it.
And as Sterling leans down to kiss me, a slow, certain promise of everything we have yet to build, I know that for the first time in my life, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
We aren't just roommates, and we aren't just friends, and we certainly aren't a charade. We are home.
We do not go straight home.
There is a taqueria four blocks from the studio that Sterling discovered during the electrical week, and we end up in a plastic booth under a television playing a soccer match neither of us is following, eating out of paper baskets, still slightly overdressed.
My mother’s lipstick is on the rim of a glass in a sink two miles away and I am here in a launch dress eating a carnitas taco with my elbows on a laminate table.
“Your dad shook my hand twice,” Sterling says.
“He does that when he’s rattled.”
“He asked me about my pension.”
I put the taco down. “He did not.”
“He absolutely did. Sat me down by the window and asked, in the voice, whether the department pension was defined benefit or defined contribution.” He is enjoying this enormously. “Mandy, I think your father was vetting me.”
“He vetted Derek for three years and gave him a golf lesson.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs, wipes his hands, and does not look up. “He didn’t ask Derek about the pension.”
I sit with that longer than I mean to.
The thing nobody warns you about, when you have spent twenty-six years waiting for your parents to look at you a particular way, is that when it finally happens it does not arrive as a moment.
There is no scene. It arrives as your father asking a firefighter a boring question about retirement vehicles by a window, because in Robert Peterson’s language that is the same as saying I would like you to stay.
We walk back. It is that hour when the light goes long and gold and the whole city looks like it has been color-graded by somebody with excellent taste, and Sterling has my hand and his suit jacket over his other arm, and he is telling me a story about Jake and a raccoon that I am fairly sure has been embellished twice.
Somewhere on Damen I stop.
“What,” he says.
“Nothing. I’m just, ” I gesture, uselessly, at the entire street. “This is a Saturday.”
“It is a Saturday.”
“No, I mean. This is what a Saturday is now.” I am not explaining it well. “For six years my Saturdays were a to-do list with a person attached. And this is just, a day. That we’re in. And tomorrow’s going to be another one.”
He looks at me for a second, and whatever he is thinking he does not say, but he shifts the jacket to his other arm so he can hold my hand with the hand that is closer.
At home, Bowie is furious. He has been alone for eleven hours and wishes to make a formal complaint, which he does at volume, following us from the door to the kitchen and back with the outrage of a small landlord.
Sterling puts food in the bowl. I get out of the dress.
We do the dishes from breakfast that neither of us did at six in the morning, and he washes and I dry because it turns out those are our jobs now, assigned by nobody, never discussed.
I hang the towel on the oven door. Sterling leans back against the counter with his arms crossed, watching me the way he does sometimes when he thinks I am not tracking it.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve got a face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“Sterling Hayes, you have an entire face.”
He laughs and lets it go, and later, much later, in the dark, when I am mostly asleep with my head on his chest and his hand tracing an absent line up and down my spine, he says something into my hair that I do not quite catch.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Go to sleep, Sparkles.”
I find out four months later what he was working himself up to say.
But that night I just fall asleep in a warehouse in the West Loop that I did not move into on purpose and have never once thought about leaving, and outside the windows the city goes on being unpredictable, and it does not worry me at all.