I held her for a long time, my heart hammering against her spine while we watched thick drifts of snow accumulating on my balcony.
“You should stay,” I mumbled, sudden exhaustion weighing down my words. “If it keeps snowing like this—”
She shifted, running her fingers through my hair. There was something new in her affection, something comforting, something dissolving my panic. I arched into her touch.
I nuzzled her neck, inhaling her lavender scent, and melted against her warm body.
“I’m staying,” Andy said. “I’m not leaving you, Patrick.”
*
Andy didn’t leavethat night, or the next.
She stayed in my bed and by my side through the snowy nights of winter, and memories of life before Andy slipped into the dark recesses of my mind. When April rolled around, some of Andy’s clothes shared space in my closet, and her random glass jars of mushrooms and chia seeds and assorted oddities took up residence in my refrigerator.
She made pancakes. Not normal ones, but healthy applesauce pancakes that were surprisingly tasty, all while standing at my stove in tiny camisoles, panties, and the ever-present knee socks on Sunday mornings. My DVR housed all of theHarry Potterfilms, and I acknowledged the appeal of the boy wizard and his crew.
I expected my hunger for Andy to diminish by small degrees each day but it was exactly the opposite. Before the first day of spring, we were intimately acquainted with every flat surface in my apartment. I was hornier than any teenage version of myself, and I turned into a pissy bitch if Andy wasn’t within an arm’s reach. Her Saturday trips to the farmers’ market and yoga with Lauren left me climbing the walls, and I was no better when she met her friend Charlotte for drinks every couple of weeks.
She claimed I growled in my sleep whenever she rolled out of my hold, and on more than a few occasions I found all two hundred-odd pounds of me completely sprawled over her sleeping body. Andy didn’t mind. She was always cold and I was merely making good on my promise to keep her warm.
It all felt right, so fuckingright.
With some minor exceptions.
We worked hard to keep it professional in the office, though the comforts of intimacy whittled away our cover. Anyone paying attention would have seen us holding hands as we walked up Cambridge Street each morning, or leaving the office together in the evening. We seized every unnecessary opportunity to touch, whether it be brushing against each other at the copier or me pressing a hand to Andy’s waist while I studied her designs. I chose to believe my siblings were too wrapped up in their projects to notice I brought her an iced green tea with lemon every afternoon, or the fierce, heated way my eyes lingered on her.
Part of me wanted to get caught. A big fucking part, and my sanity frayed a little more each time I ignored questions about my weekends or omitted the most important details. Nothing would make me happier than Sam walking into my office while Andy talked through designs with my hand conveniently fondling her ass. It was a matter of time until we ran into one of them at the grocery store, and there was no mistaking the meaning behind a Saturday afternoon Whole Foods trip. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, how I’d tell them Andy was mine, and she accepted every dark, dusty part of me, and I belonged to her.
Sheltering our relationship from my siblings wasn’t without its costs, and I paid the highest price with Shannon. It wasn’t long ago Shannon and I met for dinner or drinks most weeknights, talking through everything from project problems to her latest disasters in dating. Nothing was off-limits: she knew my morning runs doubled, tripled, and occasionally quadrupled in distance when I needed to get laid, and I knew more than enough about the trials and tribulations of finding a birth control pill that kept her periods regular but didn’t make her intermittently crazy.
We still connected a few times each week, but our discussion of personal topics centered around disposing of the estate, Shannon inserting herself into Matt’s wedding, marathon training, and Sam’s impending meltdown. I padded my stories with highlights from European soccer. After an extended analysis of Chelsea’s defense intended to distract her from the fact I ignored all of her texts that weekend because I was buried in Andy the entire time, Shannon gave me a long, contemptuous glare and stopped asking altogether.
All told, I needed Shannon. I wasn’t equipped to confront the emotions stemming from an increasingly serious relationship, and though Shannon sure as shit wasn’t either, I knew she would understand and get me through it. If there was anyone who knew a few things about helping me make sense of myself, it was Shannon.
I wasn’t going to be settled until they knew.
Wondering about life post-apprenticeship replaced most of the time I previously dedicated to obsessing over Andy. Most. Her hair was still everywhere, she still drove me crazy with her ‘hm,’ and springtime meant there were fewer black layers between me and the body I knew better than my own.
We never discussed the next step. It was a delicate détente, and it was easier to joke about keeping my siblings in the dark than addressing the reality that was closing in around us. I watched Andy in those in-between moments when she wandered around the apartment in a bra, panties, and knee socks, when she gazed at her designs and twirled the amethyst studs in her ears, when she read new restaurant menus as if she was looking at the Rosetta Stone. I tried to decipher what I wanted. What she wanted.
I wanted this, butmore, and that scared the living shit out of me.
That ‘more’ was a giant fucking question that kept me kicking copiers and yelling at Shannon’s herd of support staff whenever their atrocious grammar made it into client emails, or they applied whimsical organizing principles to the materials room.
‘More’ always translated to Andy dumping her apartment. I’d never seen it and she lusted over my wide balcony and restored hardwood. I wanted to be open with my siblings and have a shared address, and every combination of possibilities beyond that consumed my thoughts like a spectacular case of flesh-eating bacteria.
Andy’s exams couldn’t come soon enough, but I needed every minute of the next few weeks to get my shit together.
*
“You want togive me the fifteen-second update on Wellesley?” I pressed my fingers against my eyelids to clear the fog. I never regretted late-night indulgences in Andy’s body. I only regretted the amount of time it took caffeine to hit my brain cells the next morning.
Andy’s rapidly expanding expertise meant she was able to manage the majority of my projects, the Wellesley project in particular. I checked in once or twice each month, and we all gave up on the wall issues after she talked us out of tearing into it. She might have said something about being a human barricade if my crazy ass even thought about coming at the wall with a sledgehammer, and not being afraid to drop Riley and Matt with one swing each if they tried.
“Hm.” She paged through her notebook before glancing up. “Still on the timeline. Once electrical wraps this week, floors are scheduled for refinishing and a saltwater pool pump is going in, and I told you that taking advantage of me at two a.m. would turn into only three hours of sleep and a day full of surly.”
“I wouldn’t be surly if you let me take advantage of you against the wall in the printer room, or,” I rolled away from my desk and gestured underneath, “you could take care of my mood down there.”
