The last box Theo carried up was marked KITCHEN???, in my handwriting, with three question marks, and it contained a toaster, a cactus, and eleven phone chargers for phones I no longer own.
“This is a lot of chargers,” he said, setting it on top of the pile.
“I’m a hoarder of possibilities.”
“You’re a hoarder of chargers.” He wiped his forehead with the neck of his shirt and sat down on a stack of books, which immediately slid, and he rode it down onto the floor with a long dignified “oh.” I laughed so hard I had to hold the doorframe.
That was nine at night. The movers had left at four, the truck was returned, and the apartment looked like a cardboard city after an earthquake. Boxes in the hall, boxes in the living room, boxes doing something architectural in front of the window. My bed was a mattress on the floor in the bedroom with a single sheet thrown over it. The one lamp I’d found was sitting on a box marked WINTER, and its light fell in a yellow circle on Theo, sprawled on the hardwood, his shoes off, looking up at the ceiling like it owed him money.
“It has a ceiling fan,” he said. “You didn’t tell me it had a ceiling fan.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“It’s a very good surprise.” He turned his head on the floor and looked at me. “Hey, Dani. You did it.”
And there it went, the thing in my throat. I’d been holding it all day under the lifting and the swearing and the fight with the key lockbox. My own door. My name on the buzzer, the right name, printed by a landlord who’d asked me nothing but whether I wanted parking. A place nobody could ask me to leave, where I could stand in my underwear in the kitchen at midnight if I felt like it, where nobody would ever again say “we need to talk about the way you’re dressing.”
“Yeah,” I said, and my voice cracked in half. “I did.”
He was up before I could wipe my face. Theo has known me since we were stupidly young, since the days of my bad haircuts and worse excuses, and he’s seen me cry in every way a person can, and he has never once told me to stop. He just put his arms around me and I buried my face in his shoulder, in his sweaty, dusty, kind-smelling T-shirt, and let it come.
“You deserve this,” he said into my hair. “You deserve every box.”
“Even the chargers?”
“Fuck the chargers. Okay, not the chargers. But the rest.”
I laughed wetly. He rubbed my back in slow circles, the way he used to on the stairs outside my old place when I couldn’t make my feet go in. I thought about all the years of that. All the nights he’d held me up without ever once asking to be paid back. And I pulled my head off his chest and looked at him, in that yellow lamplight, with his hair stuck up and his eyes soft, and the thought I’d been refusing to look at for a very long time got up and walked straight into the room.
“Theo.”
“Mm.”
“I want to ask you something. And you can say no, and nothing is ruined, and I’ll still make you eggs in the morning in a pan I haven’t found yet.”
“Okay.”
“I want to christen the bed.” I said it all in one breath. “With you. If you want. If you’ve ever. I just feel like I can’t do the first night here alone, and also I think I’ve wanted to since, I don’t know, forever, and I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did nothing, but I’m doing something.”
His eyes went wide and then kind of wet, which was not the reaction I’d planned for.
“Dani,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that for about three years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I made a whole speech. It had a diagram.”
“Where’s the diagram?”
“In a box. Probably the chargers box.”
I kissed him then, laughing, tasting salt, both of us still half crying. He kissed back like he was afraid to break something and then stopped being afraid. His hands came up on either side of my face and I felt the callus on his thumb, the one from the climbing gym, drag along my cheekbone, and my knees went. He caught me. He always catches me.
“Slow,” I said against his mouth. “Is that okay? I want it slow. I’ve been rushing for so long.”
“We have all night. We have all the nights. This is your home.”
“It’s ours for tonight.”
“Then we’re both home,” he said, and I thought my heart might split.
We went through the bedroom door and I kicked a box out of the way and he laughed at me. The mattress was low on the floor, the sheet wrinkled, the lamp from the living room throwing just enough light to see him by. I stood at the edge of it and found that, for the first time in my life, the nervousness wasn’t a knot. It was more like champagne. Fizz, no panic.
“Will you help me with this?” I asked, and tugged at the hem of my T-shirt.
“Of course.”
He lifted it slowly over my head. I’d chosen the underwear that morning with great care, a plain soft cotton set the color of sage, because I’d wanted to feel nice moving boxes and wasn’t thinking about anyone seeing it. He looked at me and his breath went out of him in a way that I could feel in my belly.
“God. You’re so beautiful.”
“I look like I’ve been moving boxes.”
“You look like a woman in her own bedroom.” He said it so simply. He touched my collarbone with two fingers and traced it, shoulder to shoulder, like he was learning a map. “You always get this look when you walk into a room you belong in. I just never got to see it with no shirt.”
“Theo.”
“I’m being sincere. I know it’s a lot.”
“It’s the right amount,” I said, and unbuttoned his jeans.
He had the best chest, solid and warm and covered in a little dark hair, the kind of chest you want to put your cheek on. I did. I lay him back on the mattress and kissed my way down his stomach, and he made this low surprised sound, one hand finding my hair, not pushing, just there. I took him out of his jeans, hard already, flushed, a little curved, and I wrapped my hand around him and he said “oh, fuck, Dani” so reverently I almost lost my place.
“Tell me what you like,” I said.
“That. Whatever you’re doing. That.” He laughed, breathless. “I’m going to be so bad at telling you anything.”
“Then I’ll pay attention to your face.”
So I did. I took him in my mouth slowly, and I watched him, watched his eyes flutter shut and his head tip back, his throat working. I took it slow, wet and unhurried, the weight of him warm on my tongue. When I hollowed my cheeks and rolled my tongue under the head his hips jumped, and when I stopped and just breathed against him, his fist closed in the sheet. I learned him like that. Every sound a little map. He got louder and I got slower, and finally he said “wait, wait, I want to be inside you, can I, is that” and I lifted my head.
“Yes.” I was grinning. My lips were wet. “I want that. I really want that. There’s lube in the box that says BATHROOM.”
“There’s a box that says BATHROOM?”
“There are three. It’s in the one with the towels.”
He went and found it, naked, in the dark of the hall, and I heard him swear softly, tripping over a stack, and then a cry of triumph, and then he came back holding the bottle up like a trophy. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. He climbed back onto the mattress and kissed me, still smiling, and I thought, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. Not terrifying. Not a performance. Just a good friend in the lamplight being ridiculous with me, and wanting me, and neither of those things getting in the other’s way.
“How do you want me?” he asked.
“On your back first. I want to see your face.”
He lay back and I straddled him, my knees sinking into the thin mattress, and slicked him with my hand, and then rose up and eased down onto him, slow, one careful inch and then another, a stretch and a burn and a fullness that made me gasp. He said “oh my god” under his breath. His hands came up to my hips and held, light, waiting.
“Okay?” he whispered.
“More than. Don’t move yet.”
I sat there with him all the way in me, breathing, feeling my whole body get used to it, feeling the warmth of his thighs under mine. The ceiling fan was turning above us, slowly, ticking, stirring the smell of cardboard and the lamp and our skin. I looked down at him, his eyes huge and dark and fixed on mine, and I said, “I’m so happy,” and he said, “I know. I can see it. You look like the sun.”
“Don’t make me cry again.”
“I’m going to make you do something else.”
He rolled his hips, just a little. I gasped. He did it again. And then I found a rhythm, rising and falling, my hands braced on his chest, and his hands moved on my thighs, my waist, my hips, stroking me like I was something he was glad to be holding. He reached between us and touched me, gently, and I jerked, and he said “this okay?” and I said “yes, yes, don’t stop” and he didn’t, he matched his hand to my pace and I felt it building low in my belly, a warm tide that kept getting higher. I was whimpering. I could hear myself. I wasn’t hiding it.
“Dani,” he said. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
“I know you are.”
I came first, hard and sudden, with my head thrown back and a cry that bounced off the empty walls. My whole body clenched around him, and he groaned, and his hands tightened on my hips, and a moment later he followed, shuddering up into me, saying my name over and over like he was trying to memorize how it sounded in his mouth. I collapsed on his chest. He wrapped his arms around me. We lay in a slick, shaking heap with the fan turning above us.
After a while I felt his heart slow under my ear.
“We should clean up,” he said, no hurry in it at all.
“We should. In a minute.”
“In a minute.”
I stayed there. He stroked the length of my back, slow, from shoulder to hip, and I could have fallen asleep right on him. The wall in front of my face was bare. No pictures yet. No shelves. Just white paint and a smudge of someone else’s old fingerprints, and the lamp throwing our two shadows huge across it, one on top of the other.
“I’m going to hang something there,” I said sleepily. “A good thing. Something I picked.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet. But I get to choose.”
“You get to choose everything now,” Theo said, and kissed the top of my head.
Later we shared the one towel that I found, and one fork, and a sleeve of crackers that had survived the move, sitting cross-legged on the mattress with a cactus in the corner like a chaperone. He asked what I wanted to unpack first. I said the kitchen, so I could make him the eggs. He said he wanted to do the bookshelves, so I’d have a place to put the chargers.
“We are not putting the chargers on the bookshelf.”
“They deserve a place of honor.”
“They deserve a bonfire.”
In the morning I woke up in my bed in my room in my apartment, with the sun coming gold through bare windows, and a warm arm slung over my waist, and the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. My name was on the buzzer downstairs. The cactus was in the corner. There was a box labeled KITCHEN??? with three question marks, and for once, I knew exactly what the answer was.
