Chapter 13 #3
I set down the wet plate I'd just rinsed. It clattered on the steel.
"Cole."
"He's going every other Saturday for four hours. I'll drop him off. I'll pick him up. I'll be in the lobby the whole time."
"That's a lot to ask of you."
"You didn't ask. I'm telling you."
"Cole—"
"Tessa." He set the towel down. He turned to face me fully. "I'm not letting you sit in that lobby every other Saturday. I'm not letting you be in a building with him for four hours, in a parking lot, around the corner, anywhere."
The kitchen had gotten very quiet.
"I'll do it," he said. "It's not your job to do that piece."
I didn't say anything for a second.
He had cleared all the ground around me before I knew I was standing on it.
He had thought through what it would cost me to be in the same building as Nicholas every other Saturday for the next year.
He had thought through what it would do to me to come back to the apartment after dropping Noah off and try to be a person between then and pickup.
He had thought about it before I had been able to. He had decided.
"Thank you."
I said it quietly. I had to. There wasn't a bigger version of it that wouldn't have come apart in my mouth.
He nodded once. Picked the dish towel back up.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"It's something I want to do."
I stood at the sink with my hands in the soapy water and didn't move. He went back to drying.
After a while, I got back to the dishes.
Noah was at school. Cole was on his day off. We started right after I got back from the drop-off.
We started with Noah's new room. Cole had cleared out his clothes the night before and stacked them on the chair in the bigger room.
The walls of the small room had been bare since we'd moved in—Cole hadn't bothered with art, hadn't bothered with anything that required a nail.
The room held a bed, a dresser, a small table by the window.
Noah's stuff would fit. We just had to move it.
Cole did the heavy lifting. I did the boxes.
I took Noah's clothes out of our shared dresser one drawer at a time and ferried them across the hall to the small dresser in his new room.
Cole moved the smaller bookshelf from our room into his—ducked through the doorway with it, set it against the wall opposite the bed, leveled it with a folded piece of cardboard he'd pulled out of the recycling.
He lined Noah's books on it the way Noah liked them—series together, tallest on the left, the Lightning Thief paperback always in front. He'd noticed how Noah lined them.
I watched him do it from the doorway with an empty box in my hands.
Noah's lamp went on the bedside table. The picture of him and his class from third grade went up over the bed with a small nail Cole drove in with the heel of his palm. The sleeping bag we'd been keeping in the hall closet went on the high shelf, in case Noah ever wanted a fort.
Then we did the bigger room.
That was the slower work.
Cole's clothes were already stacked on the chair in piles he'd made the night before. He carried armfuls to the closet and started hanging. I stood at the dresser, sorting which of my drawers were going where.
The closet was a single one. It wasn't big.
I came in with a stack of his shirts and reached up to put them on the high shelf. The shelf was about two inches higher than I could comfortably reach. I went up on my toes. The stack started to slide.
A hand came under my elbow, steadying me. Another hand came over my hands and caught the shirts.
Cole was right behind me. Close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the back of my sweater. He didn't move.
"I've got it," he said. Quietly.
I let go of the shirts, and he set them on the high shelf with the kind of ease that came from having two more inches of reach. He stayed for a half-second before he stepped back.
I came down off my toes. I didn't look at him. My face was warmer than it had been a minute ago.
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't."
He went back to the chair for another armful.
The closet was not the only thing.
We met at the dresser, both of us reaching for the same hanger that had ended up in the wrong stack—his fingers closed around the wood at the same second mine did. I let go first. He didn't say anything. He took the hanger and went back to his side.
We met at the doorway when I came out with a box, and he was coming in with a box. The doorway was narrow enough that I had to tilt sideways to let him pass, and he had to tilt the other way, and for a beat, we were both standing in the doorway together, not breathing.
I came around the corner of the bed when he was making it—which he had insisted on, said it would feel weirder if it wasn't made, said the floor is fine for me, but you're not sleeping on a bare mattress—and he was bent over tucking the corner of the sheet under.
I came up to help with the other side, and we tucked corners on opposite sides of the bed, and our hands almost met in the middle when we both went for the comforter at the same time.
I stepped back.
He kept his eyes on the comforter.
"Got it," he said.
"Yeah."
I went back to the closet.
By two in the afternoon, the rooms were done.
Noah's small room had his bed, his dresser, his shelf, his lamp, his picture, and his sleeping bag on the high shelf.
The bigger room had Cole's clothes in the closet and mine on the other side of the closet, his bathroom things on the left of the bathroom counter and mine on the right, his side of the bed and my side of the bed already declared by the way the pillows had ended up.
The bed itself looked like a bed two people slept in.
The room looked like a room two people slept in.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
It looked exactly like what it needed to look like.
Cole came up behind me with two empty boxes under his arm.
"Looks right," he said.
"It does."
He set the boxes down by the door.
"Pickup's in an hour."
"I'll go."
He nodded. Left the room. Went to the kitchen.
I stood there for another minute.
The closet was open. My clothes were hanging next to his clothes. His shirt cuff was almost touching the sleeve of one of my dresses. His belts were on the same hook as my scarves. His shoes were lined up on the floor next to mine.
This was what a married woman's closet looked like.
I had not had one since I'd left.
I closed the closet door.
Noah went down at nine-fifteen, the way he had every night since we'd been here.
Cole read with him in the new room—the lamp on the new bedside table, the new bedside table the only piece of furniture we'd actually bought new, the rest borrowed from the old configuration—and Noah fell asleep.
Cole eased the door shut behind him, and the apartment got quiet.
We brushed our teeth at the bathroom sink at the same time, not looking at each other in the mirror, which was a thing I had not done with another person since I'd left Nicholas. He spat. I spat. He held the door for me.
The bedroom looked the same as it had at two in the afternoon.
Cole had set up his bedroll already—sleeping bag unzipped and laid flat as a sheet on the carpet on his side of the bed, a pillow, a folded blanket. He had done it before he'd come into the bathroom. I hadn't seen him do it. He'd just done it.
He went to it now. Sat down on it. Started untying his shoes.
I stood at the foot of the bed with my hand on the comforter.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
"It's the floor."
"I've slept on worse."
I didn't ask where. I didn't want to make him say something he didn't want to say at ten o'clock.
I got into bed.
The sheets had been washed that afternoon—he had thrown them in while I was finishing the closet. They smelled like the soap he used, which was not the soap I used. The pillow on my side was firmer than the one I would have chosen. I didn't move it.
I reached up and turned off the lamp.
The room went dark except for the small yellow bar of light under the door from the hallway.
I lay on my back. I could hear him breathing. Slow. Even. Already slowing the way a person's breath slowed when they were settling for sleep.
I hadn't slept in a room with another adult in eight months.
I hadn't slept in a room with another adult who was not Nicholas in thirteen years.
The breath on the floor stayed slow and steady. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.
I closed my eyes.
I opened them.
I rolled over to his side of the bed and leaned my head over the edge.
He was on his back on the sleeping bag, hands folded on his chest, eyes closed. Not asleep. Not anywhere near it.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Get in the bed."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm fine, Tessa."
"You are six feet tall on a sleeping bag on a wood floor."
"It's a thick sleeping bag."
"Cole."
He didn't open his eyes.
"I can't sleep in a room with a man sleeping on the floor," I said. "I can't. I'm going to lie here for the next eight hours listening for every sound you make. Get up."
He opened his eyes and looked up at me from the floor.
A beat.
"Tessa—"
"With your clothes on, Cole. Just get up here."
A long pause.
The sleeping bag rustled.
He stood, came around to his side of the bed, and sat on the edge. He took off his shoes, set them beside the bed, then lay back on top of the comforter.
He was perfectly still.
I rolled back to my own side.
He was warm. I could feel it through the comforter, the kind of warmth that came off a man who had run hot all his life.
"Cole."
"Yeah?"
"You can breathe."
"I am breathing."
"You can breathe at a volume above mouse."
He let out a breath. Long. Audible.
A beat.
"I'll pick up a pullout this week."
"A pullout?"
"A pullout couch. Folds down. Goes in the corner during the day. Sets up at night. The room reads the way it has to for the GAL. I get a bed."
A beat.
"That works."
"Goodnight, Tessa."
"Goodnight, Cole."
I closed my eyes for the second time that night. He was an arm's length from me, on top of the covers, fully dressed, and the day finally let go of me in a way it hadn't all day.
I fell asleep before I'd told myself I could.