Lily wheezes at my feet.
“Are you going to come back in?” I call to Jae, like he called out to me. “I won’t ask twice.”
He paces over my way, rubbing his hands over his face. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re allowed to be nervous, too,” I tell him, crossing my arms in the doorway in an attempt to seem in control when in reality all I wanted to do was hold his giant frame in my arms. “But don’t rush out the door next time.”
Thank goodness, he had the sense to stick around.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a relationship, ” Jae announces, like he’s broadcasting a documentary or doing a60 Minutessegment.
“Then we’re in the same boat together. It’s obviously been a long time for me too.” I uncross my arms, and cross them again over my chest, feeling especially vulnerable talking about my lack of relationship history. “If it helps, we don’t have to label it.”
Jae takes a pause the size of Alpha Centauri. I am begging him to say anything, something next. But he doesn’t.
Finally he says, “I want to label it, though.”
“What do you want to label it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the word for it.I just know I don’t want you in someone else’s apartment or in someone else’s arms.”
He pulls me into the hallway, into his arms. I am squashed flush against his chest. My cheek pressed to a chiseled pectoral muscle. I could live here, and I’d be happy.
“I think I can manage that.” His shirt muffles my response. “And you won’t go anywhere else, either?”
“I can manage that.”
“I think that’s called being exclusive, Jae.”
“Then we’ll be exclusive,” He laughs into my hair. “Smart ass.”
“It’s not being a smart ass if I’m right, and you just couldn’t think of the word.”
“Being a smart ass is about inflection, Riley. Not intention.”
I huff a big sigh as if I were Lily. “Would you like to come inside again?”
He picks me up by my waist and carries me two steps over the threshold of my apartment before setting me down. I take his hand and walk him over to my sofa where we sit, my legs draped over his, and I’m in the crook of his arm and lap.
“Riley,” Jae says my name the way one would sayI love you, darling. Every time he says it, I emerge a little further from the cracks he’s breaking in my shell.
“Hmm?” My lips mere inches from his, silently begging him to shut up and kiss me.
“How long is your lease here?”
What? Why would he ask that? Now of all times?
“It’s month to month,” I answer, snapping out of my sultry daydreams. “They wouldn’t give me a year-long lease. Why do you ask?”
Jae cranes his neck to look around my living space. “I think we should try to find you a better apartment somewhere. This place is cramped and falling apart. A place where you can have a real painting studio.”
He looks in the direction of the corner of my living room that now houses all of my painting supplies. Basically the entire southern corner is now a makeshift studio, with two easels, a stack of canvases and varying sizes of cans, jars and containers of paint.
And he’s not wrong.
I survey the space. This apartmentiscramped and falling apart. While Grant had helped design the apartments in this building, some of them had their budgets slashed and therefore corners were cut. This is one of them.
My vinyl countertops peeled, and the laminate floors dented easily. The walls had strange little bubbles from being painted over any number of times—the landlord special—as Grant had called it. The sofa and my painting studio take up the majority of the living room with the coffee table bumping my media console with the television.
