Chapter 30 #2
“Because we went from strangers to roommates to whatever this is in only a few months. We skipped approximately seventeen steps in the standard relationship progression, and if we don’t give ourselves the space to actually date like normal people, we’re going to build this whole thing on a foundation of proximity and stove lights and it might not hold. ”
“You think it won’t hold?”
“No. Of course not. No.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I think it will hold. I think this is the most solid thing I’ve ever been part of, and I think you’re the most solid person I’ve ever known, and I think that’s exactly why we should do this the right way.
Doing it right means not rushing. Living together before we’ve had a single date is rushing.
Skipping the part where I drive to your door and pick you up and bring you home at the end of the night and kiss you good night .
. . we skipped that part. And . . . I want that part. I want it with you, Peter.”
He was right.
The clinical part of my brain confirmed it immediately.
The emotional part, which had been gaining influence in ways that the clinical part found professionally concerning, confirmed something else.
The thought of this apartment without Benji’s noise and his cereal bowls and his inside-out shirts and his presence on the counter at 3 a.m. was a thought I could not sit with comfortably.
Nor could I with the thought of sleeping without his weight on the mattress.
Or the thought of mornings without a hand on my back.
“I agree,” I said instead of the words my rebellious heart begged me to speak.
“You . . . agree?”
“Moving back is the correct decision. We accelerated past multiple relationship stages, and a period of intentional separation would allow us to establish our relationship on its own terms rather than on the terms dictated by a plumbing emergency.”
“I think . . . that might be the most romantic way anyone has ever agreed to spend less time with me. Or it might be depressing. Ask me tomorrow.”
I smiled, though it didn’t reach my eyes. “I’m not agreeing to spend less time with you; I’m agreeing to spend time with you from a different starting location. The time itself remains unchanged. Only the geography shifts.”
“The geography shifts. Peter, you’re talking about me moving twenty feet across a hallway.”
“Twenty-two feet. I may have measured. Four times.”
“You measured the hallway?”
“The measurement was taken for unrelated purposes.”
“What unrelated purposes require measuring a residential hallway four times?”
“I was assessing whether the hallway width was sufficient for the new foster crate configuration. The distance to your door was a secondary data point.”
“A secondary data point?”
“Collected incidentally.”
Benji crossed his arms and batted his lashes. “You measured the distance to my apartment incidentally.”
“Are we discussing the move or my measurement practices?”
“Both. I’m definitely discussing both, because both are telling me you don’t want me to go.”
“I don’t want you to go,” flew out before I could stop it.
I sucked in a breath, held it, then let it out as slowly as humanly possible.
Thankfully, Benji waited patiently while I rebooted my internal operating systems. “But I also agree that you should go. Both things are true, and that they’re both true is why this is the right decision. ”
He looked at me across the island with a face containing at least four simultaneous emotions: affection, sadness, determination, and a humor that was holding the other three together.
“Twenty-two feet,” he said.
“Twenty-two feet. That’s nothing, just a hallway,” I confirmed, though I wasn’t sure whether I was offering him reassurance—or myself.
“It’s a separate dwelling unit with independent plumbing and its own lease agreement.”
“It’s twenty-two feet, Benj.”
“Twenty-two feet is a meaningful distance when it includes a door that closes.”
I was fairly certain the sentence came out heavier than he’d intended.
A door that closes.
My door had been open for months, the three inches expanding into a full opening. Now, the opening was going to close, and the closing was the right thing, and the right thing was indistinguishable from the hard thing.
Benji reached across the island and put his hand over mine.
“The door doesn’t close,” he said. “The door never closes. The door is permanently, structurally, irreversibly open, and I’m going to be walking through it so often that you’re going to tire of me and install a revolving door.
I’m going to personalize the revolving door with Post-it notes, possibly even glitter or rhinestones, and you’re going to hate it. ”
“I won’t hate it.”
“You’ll probably reorganize the Post-it notes by date.”
“Someone should. Maybe subcategorized by subject or header, too.”
He squeezed my hand. I squeezed back and didn’t let go. Instead, I drew a heart on his palm with my thumb, a gesture so small he might not have felt it, except that his breath caught, which meant he felt it.
“Saturday,” he said. “I’ll move Saturday.”
“I’ll help.”
“It’s twenty-two feet. I don’t need help.”
“I’ll help.”
He moved on Saturday. The physical relocation took approximately forty-five minutes, because Benji’s possessions had expanded during three months of cohabitation to include items that were mine.
A few he’d absorbed through gradual annexation included a hoodie, two books, a spatula he’d claimed as “his” based on the argument that he’d used it more, and a throw pillow that he insisted had been a gift, but that I was fairly certain he’d stolen during movie night.
“The pillow is mine,” he said, carrying it across the hallway.
“The pillow was on my couch.”
“The pillow was on my lap on your couch. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“That’s not how property law works.”
“It’s how pillow law works.”
Princess Consuela’s carrier went last.
She yowled once during transit, a sound that echoed in the hallway with the authority of a critter who wanted the building to know she’d been displaced.
Then his door closed.
I stood in my apartment. It was mine again, a single occupancy, the way it had been before a man with glitter on his collar had knocked on my door three months ago and changed the molecular composition of every room.
My apartment was quiet, but not the good quiet. It was the old quiet, the one I’d lived in for two years, the one that used to feel like peace and that now felt like subtraction or suffocation or some other S word that ended in “-hitty.”
Hiro looked at the door, then looked at me, then looked at the door again.
“He’s across the hall,” I told him. “Twenty-two feet away. You could smell him if you were a hundred years younger and your nose still worked like a dog’s nose should.”
Hiro was not reassured by the measurement. Nor was he pleased at being called old. His eyes were accusations pretending to be irises.
General Tso jumped from the refrigerator, padded to the front door, and sat in front of it with his back to me, facing the exit through which the person who had earned his tolerance had departed.
“He’s across the hall,” I told the cat.
General Tso’s tail twitched. The twitch communicated that twenty-two feet was twenty-two feet too many, and that I was personally responsible for his suffering that would surely follow.
I made tea and sat at the island.
The stove light was on.
It was 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Benji had been gone for fourteen minutes.
I lasted until 2:19.