Chapter 16 #2
We figure out the rest the way we've figured out everything — imperfect, negotiated, his hip requiring certain angles and my body learning which ones.
He pulls me down onto the bed and we rearrange — him on the right, me on the left, careful, the choreography of two bodies mapping each other's limits and finding the spaces between them.
His mouth on my neck. My hand on the flat of his stomach.
The catch in his voice when I touch somewhere new — not a gasp, just a hitch, the small sound of someone recalibrating.
The warmth of him — he's always warm, but this close, skin to skin, it's specific warmth, localized, his chest against mine and I can feel his heartbeat and it's faster than his calm voice suggested.
I laugh. Not a big one — a small, uncontrollable sound that escapes from somewhere I wasn't guarding.
"You're ruining the moment," he says. Low. Against my collarbone.
"Your heartbeat is really fast."
"I'm lying next to a woman I've been thinking about for weeks. Heart rates respond to stimuli."
"That's very clinical."
"I'm being clinical to avoid saying the non-clinical thing."
"Say the non-clinical thing."
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His face is right there — flushed, open, the angles of him softened by proximity and effort and the particular expression of a man who has been careful for a long time and is done being careful.
"You're—" He pauses. Searching. Not for the right word — for the honest word. "Here. You're actually here. And I keep— checking. Like you might—"
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I know." His forehead against mine. "I know. I'm just—"
"Checking."
"Checking."
His mouth finds mine. And there's no more clinical, no more careful, just his body and mine in the dark and the quiet — where pressure is welcome, where gentleness is needed, what makes his breathing change, what makes mine disappear entirely, the rhythm that isn't smooth or practiced but is ours, ours, ours.
"Ow—!" His whole body tenses.
I jerk back. "What — are you okay? Is it the hip? Did I—"
He's grimacing. Not at me. He's looking down.
Poutine.
She is on the bed. She arrived silently, as only Poutine can.
She has placed herself — with the surgical precision of a creature who has never in her life made an accidental movement — directly on his left hip, both front paws planted there.
Her entire compact weight, pointed and deliberate, on the exact territory where the hardware lives beneath his skin.
She looks at us. Her expression says: I was here first. This is my surface. Your activities are not my concern.
"Poutine," Ethan says. "Not now."
Poutine does not move.
From the doorway, Bagel's head appears. He surveys the scene. He meows — the questioning one. The one that means what's happening and can I be involved.
I start laughing.
I can't stop. Ethan is lying next to me, shirtless, with a black cat planting both front paws on his surgical scar and an orange cat requesting permission to enter and the moment has been dismantled by feline sovereignty.
Ethan looks at me. The struggle on his face — annoyance, desire, amusement, the specific frustration of a man whose cat has zero respect for his intimate life — and then he breaks.
He laughs. The real one. The full one. The one that hurts his hip and makes him press a hand to his side and say "Ow" through the laughing.
"She has — the worst — timing—"
"She has perfect timing," I say, wiping my eyes. "She always has perfect timing."
He removes Poutine. She allows herself to be relocated with the dignity of a queen being transferred to a secondary throne.
He sets her on the floor. She stares at him with betrayal.
Bagel takes this as his invitation and jumps onto the foot of the bed, where he curls into a ball and begins purring.
"One cat on the bed," Ethan says. "Final offer."
"Accepted."
He turns back to me. The laughter fading. The other thing coming back — the warmth, the want, the look of someone who has been interrupted by a cat and is choosing to find that endearing rather than devastating.
"Where were we," he says.
"You were checking."
"I was checking." His hand finds my hip. "Checked. Still here."
"Still here."
III.
The apartment is late-afternoon quiet.
I'm on the couch. My laptop is on the cushion next to me — the florist project, the "organic but not like a salad" brief that I'm still finding my way into.
Bagel is on the keyboard. He has been on the keyboard for twenty minutes.
He's added six lines of gibberish to the mood board and I'm keeping all of them.
And Poutine — in a development no one saw coming — is sitting on the arm of the couch, one paw extended, batting at my hair with the slow, appraising disdain of a queen who has decided that interacting with her subjects is no longer entirely beneath her.
On the floor by the door — my slippers. Grey. The heels worn down from months of hardwood. They're next to his boots. Next to his sneakers. In the spot that became mine without anyone assigning it.
I reach for the bag of chips on the coffee table.
Barbecue. The brand from that night — the one I ate on his kitchen floor at 2 AM, whispering to his cat because the cat was the only one who didn't need me to be better than I was.
Ethan buys this brand now. He puts the bag in the kitchen like it's always been there. Neither of us mentions it.
I eat them here now. On the couch. In daylight. Hand in the bag. Crunch filling the quiet.
Ethan comes out of the bedroom. Dressed. He walks past the couch and reaches into the bag and takes a chip.
"Those are mine," I say.
"You're in my apartment."
"I live here."
The sentence falls out. Simple. Neither heavy nor light. Just true — the kind of true that doesn't need architecture around it.
He looks at me. I look at him.
"You do," he says.
He takes another chip. He goes to get water. Bagel jumps off my keyboard and follows him because Bagel follows everyone everywhere and has never understood personal space and never will.
I sit on the couch. The light through the window is green-gold. The chips are warm with barbecue dust. Poutine is back on the bookshelf — motionless, almost eternal, as if the couch incident never happened. My slippers are by the door.
A chip crumb falls on the couch cushion.
I don't pick it up.