Tom’s face was alarmed far beyond what the situation called for, so Rose held up her hands in surrender.
“I was going to do it later,” he muttered as he headed to the hallway and the back stairs, which led to the kitchen and utility room. Rose rounded up an armful of socks and underwear that had escaped the initial collection and followed him down.
“I’d like it noted that I know how to do laundry,” Tom said when he’d loaded the big industrial washer. His movements as he added soap and collected the last odds and ends from her hands were rattled, but as Rose watched, he smoothed his face and turned on the charm like he was flicking a light switch.
“I’m noting it,” Rose said cautiously.
“And did you notice that I have fixed many broken things around this place?”
“Yes, of course I’ve noticed,” she said, backing up a step,because she was wary of any conversation where Tom felt like he needed to pour it on thick.
“I’m downright handy,” Tom said, following her. She was backed up against the line of washers, caught between his body and the counter. “I can also reach much higher shelves than you.”
“That’s true,” Rose allowed. So that’s where this was going. Tom was still pressing the point about her apartment. He leaned forward to prop his palms on either side of her and trap her between his arms, looming big and dusty over her.
“But not only am I useful around the house, I’m also decorative,” he declared. He ducked his head to press a kiss to the point of her jaw, ticklish and open-mouthed, which wascheatingbecause he knew she liked that.
“Uh-huh,” she said, because Tom had slipped one hand up under her shirt to cup her rib cage with the spread of his fingers, and he was nuzzling down her neck. He made several very fair points, which deserved due consideration, but she had counterpoints.
“You have your own apartment,” she said. “I’ve been there. It’s not bad.”
“My apartment doesn’t have a Rosie in it,” he said, lips brushing her collarbone.
Tom had nostalgia goggles on if he thought that would be an unqualified good thing. Rose had ruthlessly assessed the parts of herself that were difficult for other people to deal with and knew that she was unable to be the best version of herself on a sustained basis. For the length of a weeklong holiday vacation? She could ooze Christmas spirit from dawn to dusk.For a date night in Chelsea? A cast party in the Village? She could sparkle. She hadn’t lived with anyone since Tom though, because she knew there were nights when she’d come home from work drained of her ability to be a good Rosie. Sometimesshewas nothing but work.
“It wouldn’t be like this,” Rose warned him. “Everyone likes me better in short doses. I’m not actually that fun to deal with every day. Remember? You didn’t like living with me.”
Tom froze with his face in her cleavage. “That’s not true,” he said. “We lived together for a whole year before we got married. Best time of my life.”
Best of hers too. But it was important to pay attention to why.
“That wasn’t just us. It was us, and Adrian, and Ganima and Meagan,” Rose said firmly. Three other people who’d done not just housework but a lot of emotional care and feeding for Rose. She tried to scoot to the side, out from under Tom.
He exhaled in frustration, but he followed her to pin her again, with his hips this time. “Well, Adrian and Caroline are moving to New York in two months. Or what are Ganima and Meagan doing these days? Do any of them want to go in on a three-bedroom in Brooklyn? We could have them over, feel them out on it—”
Tom’s expression was so deadly serious that Rose couldn’t help but giggle.
“That’s your plan? Get Adrian drunk and see if he wants to join the Wilczewski-Kelly polycule? If he had any interest in having sex with either of us, pretty sure he’d have let us know at some point in the last fifteen years.”
Tom wrinkled his nose in mock outrage and leaned over to rub it against hers. She matched his face and snarled back at him until he laughed.
“I was just making a point about being creative,” Tom said, stealing a brief kiss from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t want some tiny space in your life just because you’re afraid of my dirty clothes all over your apartment. I’ll fucking become a nudist. I’ll wear a single pair of vinyl fishing waders every day and you can hose me down in the hallway.”
“Iambeing creative, and I don’t care about your dirty clothes on the floor,” Rose said, even if he didn’t seem to believe her. Not living together, not falling right back into the same patterns they’d failed at before—that was her being creative. That was her thinking about which parts of her life he’d actually want to live in. “We’ll just have to see what works.”
“What more do you need to see me do?” Tom asked, and there wasn’t any self-pity to it, but there was a whole lot of worry in those words.
Be happy with me, she thought, but that wasn’t something she could actually ask someone else to do. In any event, she didn’t have to answer, because she heard the doorbell ring.
“Must be the basement furniture I ordered,” she told Tom, making an effort to seem bright and cheerful and not at all worried that Tom would spend one Tuesday night eating reheated pasta on the couch with her and remember all the better options he had for his time.
She hurried out the front door to greet the big moving truck that was laboriously backing up the gravel drive.
“We have the budget for new furniture?” Tom asked.
“It’s not new. A department store closed, and I bought a bunch of the used furniture. Snowy found it, actually.”
Tom looked glum, but Rose didn’t think that expression was going to last past her reveal. She’d been incubating this surprise for several weeks. Tom might have thought the basement project was going overboard, but what was in the back of the truck was going to change his mind.
