I pulled the sketchpad closer, and together we started filling in the details. If this was what building a future looked like, I wanted to spend the rest of my life at the drawing board.
By noon, the kitchen table looked like the aftermath of a paper mill explosion: loose leaf, grid paper, the spiral notebook open to three different blueprints, and an army of stubby pencils with teeth marks up and down their length. Sunlight burned through the grimy windows and bounced off the aluminum percolator on the stove, painting the far wall with wobbly gold.
We’d forgotten to eat, but neither of us cared. I’d never seen Levi this locked in—his whole body bent over the table, tongue out, lips flecked with graphite where he’d unconsciously smudged his face.
It started practical: a main bedroom for us, a second for “guests or emergencies,” as Levi put it. But then the plans grew wild, uncontained, sprawling across page after page: secret attic hideouts, ladder-access lofts, a wraparound porch that would take three years to build at my pace. We went at it with a kind of fever, neither willing to be the one to say “enough.”
At one point, Levi paused in the act of shading a window. He looked up, eyes bright, and said, “We need a tub. Like, an actual, grown-up bathtub. One you can float in, not those sad little ones you can’t even fit your knees under.”
“Done,” I said, marking it on the plan. “You want jets in it?”
He hesitated, then pressed his hand over his mouth, half-laughing, half-mortified. “I mean. If you want. Doesn’t have to be fancy. Just…big enough for two.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, but the flush that crawled up his neck said everything.
I considered letting him twist in the embarrassment, but he looked so hopeful it was like kicking a puppy. “Already in the budget,” I said, deadpan. “You want to pick out tile colors now, or after we finish the wiring?”
He threw a wadded-up ball of grid paper at me, grinning. “I’ll just Sharpie it onto the walls. Saves time.”
“Good thinking. Less mess.”
The silence was comfortable, broken only by the scrape of pencil on paper and the buzz of a fly head-butting the windowpane. I started on a new sheet, plotting out the main floor in quick, square hand. Levi leaned over to watch, his hair brushing my cheek, breath close enough to fog my glasses if I wore any.
He pointed at an empty rectangle off the main hall. “What’s that?”
“Office,” I said. “For furniture orders, business stuff, hiding from Bo when he drops in to borrow money.”
He laughed, short and sharp. “You’d actually use it?”
“Maybe. If I want you to miss me.”
He rolled his eyes, then went back to the original drawing, erasing the kitchen walls to make room for a bigger pantry. “Gotta have space for all of Ma’s preserves. She’ll riot if we don’t have at least three shelves.”
“She’d never forgive us,” I agreed.
We kept at it, trading the pencil and the notebook, working in sync until the lines on the page blurred into something almost beautiful. Levi had a way of adding flourishes—curved doorways, spiral stairs, even a dumbwaiter at one point—while I stuck to right angles and the language of efficiency.
Still, neither of us tried to steamroll the other. If anything, we got closer the longer we worked, our hands bumping, legs pressed together under the table, bodies drifting toward each other until the air felt like it was charged with static.
I pointed at the top corner of the plan. “That’s north,” I said. “If you want a studio, that’s the wall for the big windows.”
He looked up, startled. “Studio?”
“For your art.” I said it like a fact, but I could see his brain trying to find the catch. “You’re gonna want proper light. And space for canvases. And a wall to pin up your reference sketches.”
He stared at me, dumbstruck, as if I’d just suggested putting a moon landing in the backyard. “My art? You really think I’d need a whole room for it?”
I put the pencil down, then took his left hand in mine. The calluses were new—he’d built them up in the shop, but they felt right against my own. “You make things, Levi. Doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or in wood or whatever. You deserve a place for it.”
He blinked once, then again, and I thought he might cry, but he covered for it by pretending to check the sun through the window. “Okay. Yeah. North light. That’s the best, right?”
I nodded. “Never gets direct sun, so your colors won’t go weird.”
He squeezed my hand, then let go, the tips of his ears red as cherries. “You’re the weirdest boyfriend ever,” he said, but there was no heat to it.
I shrugged. “That’s why you like me.”
“Maybe.”
He put the tip of his pencil to my chest, right above my heart. “We’re not putting any deer heads on the walls, though. I draw the line at animal murder.”
