Chapter 20
Duke
Audrey was asleep on the couch with her hand still on my chest when the alarm on my phone went off at five.
I reached over her to kill it. She stirred but didn't open her eyes. Nova was in the bouncer beside the couch, the same bouncer she'd been in when the three of us fell asleep the night before, her fist curled at her mouth, her breathing the steady rhythm I could pick out of any room now.
I sat up gradually, trying not to wake either of them.
The apartment in the early dark was quiet and warm, the blanket still over both of us, her feet still against my thigh.
I had a shift in an hour. My bag was in my truck.
I needed to get to the firehouse by six, and the drive took fifteen minutes.
I was sitting on Audrey Callahan's couch at five in the morning, not wanting to move because moving meant leaving a room I didn't want to leave.
I got up. I made coffee, poured two cups, and left hers on the counter where she'd find it.
I wrote gone to shift—back tomorrow morning on the notepad she kept by the refrigerator, which was something I did now, left notes on her notepad, because she liked knowing where I was, and I liked being someone she expected to hear from.
I was pulling my boots on by the door when she spoke from the couch.
"Duke."
"Go back to sleep, Aud."
"Come here."
I went back. She was sitting up, the blanket pooled at her waist, her hair a wreck from the couch cushion. She looked half-asleep and fully sure of whatever she was about to say.
"When you get off shift tomorrow morning. Go home, get cleaned up, and come back here at seven."
"Seven in the evening?"
"Yes."
I stopped with one boot on. "Why?"
"Because I'm taking you out."
"Where?"
"Don't ask questions. Just be here at seven. I'll handle the rest."
I looked at her across the dim apartment. She had the look she got when she knew something I didn't and had decided that was going to stay that way for a while.
Something registered that I wasn't expecting.
She was planning something for me. In fourteen weeks, I'd been the one showing up.
Coffee from the place on Main every morning.
Dinner at my place. I brought things to her.
I showed up for her. I didn't know I was waiting for her to do the same until she just did, and the not-knowing made the landing harder.
"Okay," I said.
She leaned forward and kissed me. Quick and warm, her hand on the front of my shirt for one second before she let go.
"Be safe today."
"Always."
I pulled the other boot on, picked up my keys, and let myself out. I stopped at the top of the stairs. I stood there for a beat with her kiss still on my mouth, the shift ahead of me, and whatever she was planning sitting in my chest like a gift I hadn't opened yet.
I kept going.
I got off shift at six the next morning and drove home.
The house was quiet the way it always was after a twenty-four, the particular stillness of a place nobody had been in since yesterday.
I slept until noon. Ate something. Tried to read.
Gave up on the reading because my brain kept circling back to whatever Audrey had planned, and the not-knowing was doing exactly what she wanted it to do.
By six, I was showered, shaved, and standing at my closet.
The house looked different from the way it had six months ago, and I noticed it sometimes the way you notice a season has turned, not all at once but in the accumulation.
A baby blanket was folded over the arm of the couch.
A small basket of Nova's onesies on top of my dresser because Audrey left them here last Sunday, and neither of us moved them to the car.
The nonfiction stack back on the coffee table, Krakauer on top, dog-eared where I left it.
The portable crib in the second bedroom. The pinball machine in the basement.
The house of a man who stopped performing what his home looked like. A man who lived here with the things that mattered to him, including the ones that belonged to two other people.
I changed shirts twice, which was two more times than I'd changed shirts for anything in my adult life. I had gotten a text during shift.
Audrey
Jeans are fine
And nothing else, which told me nothing except that she was enjoying this. I settled on the button-down I'd ironed for the Rhodes dinner, the one she'd seen me in twice. I looked in the mirror and saw a man who looked nervous in a way I found both ridiculous and completely accurate.
I drove to her building. Parked. Went up the stairs.
Knocked.
Audrey opened the door, and the apartment behind her was not her apartment.
The lights were off. All of them. In their place, string lights, hundreds of them, draped across the ceiling in long loops, wound around the curtain rods, taped down the edges of the walls in warm yellow lines that turned the whole room into something that glowed.
The TV in the corner was playing a video of a fireplace, the crackling being the first thing I registered after the lights.
The apartment smelled like food, something she'd cooked, and underneath that, the green smell of plants.
In the middle of the living room was a tent.
A real tent. Dark green, the dome kind, big enough to stand in, the corners actually staked into her rug.
I could see the small tears in the fibers where the stakes had gone through.
Around the tent, plants, too many of them, ferns and trailing things in pots she'd clearly borrowed from the bungalow, because I recognized Astrid's brass planter.
The coffee table was pushed against the far wall.
The tent flap was open, and inside, I could see sleeping bags zipped together, two pillows, and the battery lantern from the camping aisle at the hardware store.
And at the foot of the tent, the bassinet. Nova in it. Asleep.
I stopped in the doorway.
The woman who ran a hospital floor and organized a wedding without leaving a single detail to chance had spent her afternoon hanging string lights and staking a tent into her living room rug.
She borrowed plants from her best friend.
She set up a fake fireplace on the TV. She did this for me because I was a man who loved the outdoors, and she was a woman who didn't, and she built me a version of it inside her apartment because she wanted me to have something I hadn't asked for.
I looked at her.
She was leaning against the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips and a look on her face that said she'd been waiting for this part.
Her hair was down around her shoulders. She was wearing a dress I'd never seen, short, dark green, the neckline sitting lower than anything she'd worn since before Nova.
Her legs were bare. She looked like she'd spent the same amount of time getting ready that I had, and the result was not comparable.
The result was Audrey Callahan in a dress that made my brain go short for a full second.
She caught me looking. The small smile widened.
"Eyes up here, Rhodes."
I laughed. Something cracked open in my chest that was close to joy and further from composure than I'd been in months.
I crossed the apartment, put my hand on her face, my thumb along her jaw, and I kissed her.
I kissed her like a man who'd just been handed the version of her she kept behind glass, the version that planned and fussed and wore a green dress in her own living room because she wanted to be looked at. I felt her smile against my mouth.
She pulled back first, laughing softly. "Sit down. I made dinner."
The dinner was sandwiches. She'd made them earlier, so she wouldn't have to cook in the moment, and she told me this with the frank honesty of a woman who knew her limits and had made peace with them.
The sandwiches were on real plates. The chips were in a real bowl.
The wine was a bottle from the place on Main that she'd clearly asked someone to pick out for her because Audrey didn't drink red wine, and this was a red.
On the far counter, I clocked a bag of marshmallows, a bar of chocolate, and a box of graham crackers, but I said nothing about them yet.
We ate at the island because the coffee table was against the wall. Nova asleep in the bassinet visible through the tent flap. The fireplace crackling on the TV. The string lights doing what string lights do to faces, turning everything gold at the edges.
"How long did the tent take you?" I asked.
"Forty-five minutes. The stakes were the problem. Do you know how hard it is to drive a tent stake through a rug?"
"I do, actually."
"The answer is very hard, Duke. Very hard. I broke one. Astrid laughed at me in the car when I was loading the plants."
"Is the rug going to survive?"
"The rug is a casualty I'm prepared to accept."
I laughed. She laughed. The dinner was easy. Just the two of us at a counter, eating sandwiches in a living room she'd turned into a forest.
After dinner, the s'mores. She pulled the supplies off the counter with the determined energy of a woman who had committed to the bit and was going to see it through.
The roasting method was a candle. A single pillar candle, set on a plate on the island, because Audrey Callahan was not going to risk an open flame near a tent that was staked into a rug next to a sleeping baby.
The marshmallows didn't roast properly. They got warm on one side and stayed cold on the other.
The chocolate melted unevenly. The graham crackers crumbled when I tried to press them together, and I ate three of them anyway, lopsided and falling apart, because they tasted like a woman who cared about me enough to put marshmallows over a candle in her kitchen.