Chapter Twenty-Two
While he hadn’t been sure what to expect from Gabriel’s apartment, Reid couldn’t pretend for a second that he was surprised to find it a mess, with stacks of books and papers everywhere. There was barely a clear surface in the entire place, and it looked as though there hadn’t been in a long time.
It seemed very much like Gabriel.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t bother cleaning up for me,” he said, handing pizza boxes over to Gabriel.
“I did, actually. There’s a space on the coffee table and there’s nothing on the couch anymore,” Gabriel said. “You should have seen what it was like before.”
“I’m probably happier not knowing,” Reid said, though he really didn’t mind the mess. His own apartment felt a little on the sterile side, sometimes. Gabriel’s felt more like a home, if a disorganized one.
That was Gabriel, though. He was warm and kind and funny when he wanted to be, but he was also messy and scatterbrained.
Reid wouldn’t have wanted him any other way. He liked all of that. It made Gabrielfun. He didn’t need to date someone who was exactly like him.
He’d been there and done that, and it had been the most boring, soulless relationship he could imagine. Gabriel was like him in the ways that mattered, in the ways that let them understand each other, so it was cool that he apparently never threw anything away.
If they ever got to the point where they were living together… they could figure that out then.
It was weird to look forward like that. Not only to look forward, but to look forward and not be horrified by the idea.
He could live with Gabriel.
In the future, he could imagine having a life with him.
And it wasn’t scary to think that at all.
“I wasn’t sure what you liked on pizza, so there’s one with everything, and one with just cheese,” Reid explained. “I figure that way one of them will work for you, and I’ll eat the other.”
“I’m not picky,” Gabriel said. “But I’m not getting through a whole pizza. Do you always eat like this?”
There wasn’t quite enough room on the table for two pizza boxes, so Gabriel was busy clearing the piles of papers off of it and onto even bigger piles on the floor, one-handed, as he held the pizza boxes in the other.
Reid would have stepped in to help, but it was too mesmerizing to watch. Gabriel had one-handed clearing down to an art.
He probably did a lot of it.
“Uh, volume-wise? Yeah, pretty much. I’m a big guy. I use up a lot of calories just… existing, so…”
Gabriel smiled wryly at that. “Well, I’m okay with being on the short side. It means I fit inside a space shuttle.”
Gabriel finally managed to clear enough space on the table, setting the pizza boxes down and then flopping onto the couch.
“Yeah?” Reid asked, following Gabriel and sitting down next to him.
“Five-ten is the maximum standing height. We considered increasing it to an even six feet for this model, but the increase in cost meant it was more efficient to just leave tall people on Earth.”
“Hey!” Reid objected. “You’d leave me behind?”
Gabriel leaned forward to open the pizza boxes, taking a slice of the one with everything on it. “Not if I was leaving forever. If I was going on another shuttle trip, you wouldn’t fit. I’d be back.”
“You’d take me with you if you were leaving forever?” Reid asked, his voice softer than he meant it to be. The thought of that made his throat catch, his heart clenching tight.
“I don’t think I’d leave forever right now,” Gabriel said.
Reid wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed.
The idea of being that important to someone made every atom he had sing. He wanted to be the kind of person someone else wanted to spend the rest of their life with, even if there was no way of escaping him.
