Chapter 11
My apartment wasn't new to guests. Oliver had a key once. Anne had fallen asleep on that couch more times than I could count. But something about his presence made the whole place feel smaller somehow, like the walls had quietly moved inward the moment he stepped through the door.
He looked around. The couch with its two stuffed animals that I had owned since university and had no intention of explaining to anyone.
The curtains with small trinkets threaded through the ends that caught the warm lamp light.
The narrow kitchen. The bookshelf with no remaining organizational logic.
"It's small," I said.
"It's fine," he said like it was simply a fact.
Right. This poor man had probably lived in far more cramped places. I looked around my apartment with fresh eyes for the first time since moving in. It was livable. People lived in smaller places. I looked at him. And some people didn't even have a place.
For the first time since moving in, the apartment didn't feel too small. It felt like enough.
"Bathroom's through there," I said. "Go shower. You smell like a restaurant."
He gave me a look that questioned every life choice that had led to me giving him orders.
"Go," I said. "I'll find something for you to wear."
He went anyway.
I stood there for a second after the door closed. Then I went to find him something to wear.
This took longer than expected.
I stood in front of my wardrobe and looked at its contents with fresh eyes. Oversized t-shirts. Oversized hoodies. Three pairs of deeply beloved sweatpants. The button-down I had stolen from my father four years ago and never returned.
He was large. I had registered this in the alley but it was registering differently now, in the context of my wardrobe, which had been assembled entirely around the dimensions of someone who was five foot four and preferred not to feel like their clothes had opinions about them.
I pulled out the biggest t-shirt I owned. A grey one. Enormous on me, it came to my mid thighs and drowned everything in between. By any reasonable logic it should be fine.
I left it folded outside the bathroom door with the sweatpants that had a drawstring and tried very hard not to think about it further. The bathroom door opened ten minutes later.
I was in the kitchen. I heard him come out. A brief pause. Then footsteps.
"These are yours."
I turned around and immediately regretted it.
The towel hung low. Low enough to see the sharp lines of his abdomen disappearing beneath it and I was absolutely not going to think about that.
The tattoos that I had only caught in pieces before, wrists, collar, forearms were fully visible now and there were so many of them, sprawling dark patterns across his shoulders, down his back, creeping around his chest like they had claimed every available surface and found it insufficient.
His chest was the kind that made people forget what they were talking about for a moment.
His arms were huge enough that the thought crossed my mind -that he could snap me in half without particular effort.
And for some reason my brain chose this specific moment to remind me that those same arms had been around my waist not too long ago -
He was looking at me with a smug curve at the corner of his mouth.
He knew exactly what he looked like. He absolutely knew. He was standing there letting me look like it was something he did regularly for sport.
"It'll fit," I said.
He held up the grey t-shirt. Looked at it. Looked at me. One eyebrow raised.
"It'll fit," I repeated firmly, and turned back to the kitchen before my face made any decisions without my permission.
Focus. Noodles. Food. Anything.
After a while I heard footsteps approach the kitchen. He was dressed now. It was safe to look.
The t-shirt fit in the way that things fit when the definition was being applied very generously.
It covered him. Yes, Technically. The fabric pulled across his chest and shoulders with the tension of something designed for an entirely different category of person and doing its absolute best.
The letters printed across the chest had stretched to the point of appearing cursive.
For a brief moment I genuinely felt bad for the fabric.
He stood in my grey t-shirt and drawstring sweatpants and looked at me with a completely flat expression.
"Perfect," I said, and turned back to the kitchen with great conviction.
Instant noodles. Simple, fast, filling. It wasn't that I didn't know how to cook - I loved baking, actually - but he looked like a man who hadn't eaten properly in longer than was reasonable and instant noodles were the quickest thing I could make and I was too tired for anything requiring more
effort.
When I set the bowl in front of him he gave it a skeptical look. Then he picked up the fork and ate without comment. I sat across from him with my own bowl.
"Do you have a place to live?" I asked, trying not to sound too rude.
He thought about it for a moment.
"No,"
Oh my.
I looked at him across the small kitchen table. At the tattoos visible above the stretched neckline of my grey t-shirt. At the quiet way he was eating like he was making no assumptions about anything.
"How long has it been since you've eaten?" I asked.
He looked at the noodles. Then at me.
"Some weeks," he said.
I stared at him.
He said it the way you said something was fine when it hadn't been fine for a long time and you'd simply stopped expecting otherwise. Like going weeks without a proper meal was just a thing that happened. Unremarkable. Not worth making anything of.
Something in my chest did something that was going to be a problem later.
I looked down at my bowl. Then I picked it up and slid it across the table without a word. He looked at it. Then at me.
I gave him a look. Don't argue.
He pulled the second bowl closer.