Chapter Twenty-Three
AVIANCE
The table takes up the right amount of space.
That's the thing about good design — it doesn't fight for its place or shrink from it. It occupies exactly the right amount of the room and makes the room better for being occupied.
I sit at the table with my coffee and my laptop and the morning light through the apartment windows and I think about all the rooms I've occupied in the last year.
The house where I waited to be chosen. The lawyer's office where I chose myself.
The studio on a winter morning where I first understood what it felt like to be seen by someone who had no agenda.
This room.
This table.
This life.
December.
Jayceon and I are at his apartment, which has become a kind of second home to me — all exposed brick and high ceilings and the smell of wood and machine oil that I have come to find categorically comforting.
We're in the kitchen and I'm sitting on the counter while he makes soup, the way he makes everything, with patience and full attention, and we're talking about the new year.
"What do you want?" he says.
"For the new year?"
"For everything. The year, the five years, the — whatever horizon you're holding."
I think about it.
"The practice to grow," I say. "Not frantically. Sustainably. I want clients who care about the work, and I want to be selective enough to only take the ones who do." I pull my knee up. "I want to finish the Germantown project. I want to take a real trip somewhere — not for work. I want—" I stop.
He turns from the stove. Looks at me.
"What?" he says.
"I want this," I say. "Specifically this. The kitchen, the soup, the—" I gesture loosely — "the life we're building. I want to keep building it."
He wipes his hands on a dish towel and comes to stand in front of me, between my knees. He takes my face in his hands.
"We're going to keep building it," he says.
"You're sure?"
"I've been sure," he says, "since the first morning in the studio when you touched the table like you were reading it."
I put my arms around his neck.
"Jayceon."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
"I love you too," he says. "Now let me finish the soup."
I laugh and push him gently back toward the stove and he goes, glancing back once with a smile that is so easy and so specific and so entirely his that I feel it land in my chest like something I've been waiting for and didn't know how to name until now.
Safe. I feel safe.
Not because someone is keeping me safe from the outside. But because I know myself, and I know him, and neither of us is performing anything, and the floor beneath this is real.
That's everything I needed.