It tooka week for me to wrangle Morgan over to the apartment. She met me there at ten on a Thursday with a stack of boxes under each arm and rolls of tape around her wrists like bracelets.
“You have a lot of shit, but you also really don’t,” she said, dumping everything in the middle of the studio.
I exhaled loudly, placing my hands on my hips and surveying the space. It had been mine for so many years, and I’d accumulated so many memories, but I realized I wasn’t attached to a single thing in the space. I had my clothes, I had my pictures, and back at the house, I had Cory.
What else could I really want?
But if that was true, why was the prospect of packing everything up and moving in so overwhelming?
“This is a lot to digest,” I muttered, flopping back onto my bed and covering my eyes with my forearm. The Rolex abraded my temple. “I think I’m doing this backward.”
“If by backward you mean you should date someone in the same city as you for a while before actually giving up your apartment and moving in with them, then you are doing itbackward.” Morgan grinned at me and taped the bottom of a box. “But he’s a good one.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“And you love him.”
“I do,” I said.
“So, what is the real issue with the hesitance?”
I groaned, rolling onto my stomach and burying my face in the pillows that smelled more like him than me these days on account of the way he marked my sheets with his body like a cat when I was at work.
“I’m not hesitant when I’m with him,” I told her. “It’s when I’m not with him that I start to second-guess it all.”
“Why?”
“If I knew, I would be helping you pack already.”
“This sounds like one of your kink things.” She taped another box and set them side by side, open and ready to receive my belongings.
“How so?”
Morgan puffed a breath out, inflating her cheeks on the exhale and gesturing vaguely in the direction of where I imagined her brain lived. “Like, he makes it okay, right? Isn’t that a thing?”
“Kind of, but not like?—”
“Being with him gives you a space to be safe,” she steamrolled my interruption, “and when you’re not with him, you lose sight of the safety. Like you don’t have object permanence.”
“Cory isn’t a cucumber in my fridge.”
“Your fridge has never seen a cucumber in its life,” she teased, folding her legs beneath her and sitting in the middle of my apartment. She’d gotten more boxes made, and there was barely room for us and them, and all of my things I wasn’t even sure I cared about anymore.
“I don’t forget about him when he’s gone,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Morgan crawled to the bed and tugged her way up my body until she reached my wrist. She hooked her finger under the watch and used it to haul me into a seated position.
“What do you think this is for?” she asked.
“How do you know what it’s for?”
“Cory and I are friends, dumbass. Whether you meant for that to happen or not.”
“Oh, I know.” I shook her off. “I’ve felt ganged up on from the first moment the two of you met.”
“Because we both have your best interests at heart,” she countered. “And I like the way you look when you think about him.”
She pulled me onto the floor, into the mess of her boxes.
