Chapter 20 #2
She had chocolate on her cheek. A small smear, near the corner of her mouth, from the s'more she'd been eating with one hand while trying to keep the second marshmallow over the candle with the other. I leaned across the island and kissed it off without thinking about it.
I pulled back and registered what I'd done.
A small unconsidered thing. My mouth against the corner of hers because there was chocolate there, and my body had closed the distance before my brain consulted.
The kind of thing a man does when he's stopped thinking about what a room needs and started thinking about what he wants, and what he wants is to kiss chocolate off a woman's face in a kitchen lit by string lights.
That was what love was supposed to feel like.
Audrey took my hand and pulled me into the tent.
The inside of the tent was green and warm and smaller than the living room had any right to be.
The string lights came through the fabric in a muted glow, making the walls look like late afternoon through a canopy.
The sleeping bags were soft underneath us.
The bassinet was at the foot, Nova inside it, her breathing the steady rhythm I could pick out of any room now.
We lay on the sleeping bags. Audrey against my side, her head on my shoulder, my arm around her. The fake fireplace crackled on the TV. A car went past outside, headlights sweeping across the window above us and disappearing.
"She'll be old enough to take camping for real next summer," Audrey said.
"The Catskills. There's a spot near Slide Mountain with a creek."
"I should tell you something."
"What?"
"I'm not actually a camping person."
I laughed. She laughed against my shoulder, and the laugh vibrated through my chest.
"You staked a tent into your rug, Aud."
"For you. I staked a tent into my rug for you. There's a difference."
"Noted."
The conversation slowed. The sounds of the apartment settled in around us: the TV, Nova's breathing, the building making its nighttime sounds through the walls.
I looked at the top of the tent, the green fabric lit gold from the outside, and Audrey was warm against my shoulder, her hand on my chest.
She spoke. Soft. Decided.
"Move in with me."
My chest caught. The words landed a half second before the rest of me caught up to them. Recognition. I'd been waiting for this without knowing I was waiting, the same way I'd been waiting for her to plan something for me, and the not-knowing was part of what made it land.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She turned her face up to look at me, her chin against my chest, her eyes bright in the green light.
"Aud. Yes. Of course, yes." I kissed her, small and unhurried, her mouth against mine in the green light of a tent in her living room with our daughter asleep three feet away. Then I pulled back. "But shouldn't you be moving in with me? I do have a house."
She looked at me. "You have a house with one bathroom and a pinball machine in the basement."
"That's a selling point."
"Duke."
"I'm just saying. A house. With a yard. Nova could have a real room."
She was quiet for a beat. I watched her run it, the same quick calculation she ran on everything, the logistics sorting themselves behind her eyes.
The apartment was hers. She'd built it, paid for it, filled it with everything she chose.
But it was a one-bedroom with a nursery she'd carved out of a home office, and the closet space was already a negotiation, and a house on Elm with a basement and a second bedroom and a yard was not a small thing to put on the table.
"Are you serious?" she said.
"Aud. I have a house. You have an apartment with tent stakes in the rug."
She laughed. The real one. The full-body one that tipped her head back and shook against my chest.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. The house."
She settled back against my shoulder. "But it's our house. Not your house I moved into. Ours."
I pulled her closer. The word sat in the room with us, quiet and enormous. Ours. Her head fit against my chest, and her hand curled into the front of my shirt, and I felt her body settle against mine with the full weight of a woman who had stopped holding something up.
We talked. What to bring from the apartment, what to give away.
The pinball machine she told me I was absolutely keeping because she wanted to watch me lose a fight with it in person.
The nonfiction stack she was going to steal from.
Nova's room, which was going to need a real dresser and a paint color that Audrey would choose, and I wouldn’t argue with.
The tent was for the asking and the answering, and both of those were done, and what was left was two people lying on sleeping bags in a living room, talking about where to put a dresser.
Eventually, her breathing changed. The slow, heavy breathing of a woman who had spent the afternoon hanging string lights and staking a tent into her rug and was now done.
Nova made the small sound in the bassinet that wasn't waking, just the body of a sleeping baby, confirming she was still in the world.
The string lights were still on through the fabric of the tent.
The fireplace was still crackling on the TV.
Neither of us had gotten up to turn anything off.
I'd spent thirty-two years trying to be the man every room needed. Turns out, the room I needed was a tent a woman built for me in her living room because she wanted me to come home.