Chapter 26
I woke up wrapped in a stranger’s careful stillness, which was maybe the most Caleb thing about the whole morning.
He wasn’t asleep. I could tell by the way his hand had stopped its slow drift down my spine sometime near dawn and just stayed there, flat and warm, like he’d decided moving might wake something he wasn’t ready to face yet.
“You’ve been awake for a while,” I said into his chest.
“Forty minutes.”
“Just lying here. Doing nothing.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing.” He said it like the accusation offended him personally.
“I cataloged every sound in the building. Your refrigerator cycles on at irregular intervals, which means the compressor’s probably failing.
Someone two units over runs a shower at six ten every morning.
Your neighbor downstairs starts a coffee maker at six forty on the dot. ”
“That’s Rosa. And that’s not a hobby, Caleb, that’s a stakeout.”
“It’s a Tuesday.”
I propped myself up and studied the crease between his eyebrows, still there from last night’s question about his house. I decided not to reopen that fight before coffee.
I lay there a second longer than I meant to, feeling the strangeness of it settle in underneath the humor, the way it does when something you spent weeks imagining becomes, overnight, an actual person breathing next to you instead of a question you got to keep circling.
It wasn’t a bad strangeness. It just asked something of me that fantasy never had, which was to stay.
“Do you want breakfast,” I asked instead, “or are you going to lie there memorizing my HVAC system some more?”
“I don’t have anything to contribute. I should warn you now, before you get your hopes up. My refrigerator has hot sauce, a jar of pickles somebody gave me two Christmases ago, and possibly a lime.”
“That’s not a refrigerator, that’s a crime scene.”
“I eat out mostly. Or I eat whatever you’ve already decided I like, apparently, since you’ve had my order memorized before I told you what it was.”
“I have context clues and a system. You’re not special.
” I kissed him before he could argue that point, because arguing it would have led somewhere neither of us needed to go at seven in the morning, and then I rolled out from under his arm and went looking for pants, because someone was definitely going to knock on my door in the next ten minutes and I had learned, the hard way, exactly which someone that would be.
I had barely gotten a shirt over my head when the knock came, three sharp raps and then, without waiting for an answer, Rosa’s voice through the door.
“Josie, mija, I brought coffee, and also your toilet handle is doing the thing again where you have to hold it down for a full count of five or it keeps running all night and I can hear it through my ceiling.”
I opened the door to find her standing there in a cardigan despite the fact that it was already seventy-five degrees outside, two paper cups balanced in a cardboard tray, her sharp brown eyes going past me into the apartment before I’d even finished pulling the door open.
“Good morning, Rosa.”
“Mm-hm.” She stepped past me without waiting to be invited, which was just how Rosa operated, and set the coffee down on my counter with the satisfaction of a woman delivering evidence. “I brought two cups. I only expected to need one for you.”
Caleb came around the corner from the bedroom at that exact moment, in yesterday’s jeans and no shirt yet, and had the decency to at least look faintly caught out, which from Caleb was practically a full confession.
“Rosa,” he said.
“Caleb.” She looked at him the way you’d look at a crossword you’d already solved and were just confirming. “There’s coffee for you too, then. I guessed.”
“You guessed right.”
“I usually do.” She turned back to me, and I watched her decide, in real time, that she was owed an actual sentence and not another week of shy-boyfriend theater. “So. Are you going to tell me, or am I going to keep pretending I don’t already know?”
“We’re dating,” I said. “Officially. I’m telling you on purpose, not because you caught us.”
“I caught you three weeks ago, mija. I was waiting for you to catch up.” Rosa picked up her coffee. “He fixed my faucet without me asking twice. Men do that for something they’re trying to earn.”
“I wasn’t trying to earn Rosa specifically,” Caleb said.
“I know that. I’m not stupid, I’m old.” She waved a hand at him, entirely fond, then pointed it toward my bathroom door instead. “While you’re standing there useful, go hold that handle down for me. Count of five. I’m tired of hearing it run through my ceiling all night.”
Caleb, to his credit, didn’t even blink, just disappeared into the bathroom like he’d been given an assignment he intended to complete correctly. I heard the toilet flush, then the solemn silence of a man counting seriously to five in his head.
“There,” he said, coming back out. “It’ll hold for now. The flapper’s probably warped. I can replace it this week if you want, it’s a ten-minute job.”
Rosa pointed toward the hall. “The package boy has been carrying groceries for the older woman in unit two every Thursday. I told him I noticed.”
“That’s good,” I said, and meant it.
I called Dani before I finished my coffee. “It’s real,” I told her. “Caleb and me.”
“You waited until after coffee to tell me you slept with him?”
“Rosa brought coffee. The morning got away from me.”
“Of course Rosa knew first.” I heard Dani smile, then her voice softened. “You sound happy.” I told her I was. “Good. Check-ins stay.”
When I hung up, Caleb was leaning against the counter in a borrowed T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders, watching me with the careful expression that meant he already knew what I would ask.
“I still want to see your house,” I said.
“I know.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no.” He said it slowly, like he was testing the shape of the sentence for weak spots. “It’s not today. Give me a little more time before you’re standing in the middle of it.”
I let it sit there without pushing, because I’d learned the difference between a door closing and a door still finding its hinge, and this felt like the second one. “Okay,” I said. “Time. Noted.”
He kissed the top of my head, found his shirt draped over my kitchen chair, and pulled it on while I watched him from the counter, coffee warm in my hands.
At the door he paused, keys already out, and looked back at me like he was memorizing the room the same careful way he’d memorized every sound in the building.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“You’d better.”
I watched him go from my doorway, watched him take the stairs instead of the elevator like always, and then I closed the door and went to find my phone, already composing the message I’d send Dani tonight, already thinking about what I’d say the next time he tried to postpone the house again.