"Couch?" I say.
"Couch."
Getting him to the couch takes both crutches and a process I know by heart — I position them, he takes his weight, I walk alongside. But this time my hand stays on his lower back, andthe contact isn't clinical. It's just my hand on his back because I put it there and didn't take it away and he didn't ask me to.
He sits. Edge, brace, descend. I've watched this hundreds of times. This is the first time I sit before he finishes — right next to him, zero gap, my thigh against his, because the three-inch ocean that used to live between us on this couch isn't there anymore and I'm not putting it back.
His arm goes behind my shoulders. On the couch back. There's a half-second where it hovers — not deciding, not uncertain, just the last echo of a habit that used to saydon't— and then it comes down. Around. Settling.
Bagel jumps up immediately, as if he's been waiting for this exact configuration for three weeks and is finally cleared for landing. He wedges himself between Ethan's hip and my thigh — ten pounds of orange diplomacy — and begins purring at a volume that suggests he is both satisfied and taking full credit.
My phone buzzes. On the armrest.
Sophie:Nora Chen. It has been TWO HOURS. If you don't text me back I am getting in a cab and you are paying for it
I pick it up. I type:I kissed him.
Three dots.
Sophie:I KNEW IT. I KNEW IT SINCE THE HOSPITAL. HOW WAS IT
I turn the phone face-down.
"Sophie?" Ethan says.
"Sophie."
"She's going to—"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Forever."
He huffs. The almost-laugh. My favorite sound — the one I used to try to earn with careful comments and now seems to come from proximity alone.
Poutine watches us from the bookshelf. She has not moved. She will not move. Her standards transcend the emotional developments of lesser creatures.
The light is gone — not amber anymore, just the streetlight and the blue of a winter evening — and the apartment has settled into its nighttime sounds: baseboard heater, fridge, the occasional car outside. Normal sounds. The same sounds that have been here for three weeks. Except I'm noticing them with his arm around my shoulder and his heartbeat under my ear, which makes them different sounds entirely, or maybe makes me a different person hearing them.
I catch myself reaching for my hair. The tuck — the move I do when I want to look un-messy without looking like I'm trying. My hand is halfway to my ear when I realize what I'm doing.
I stop. I put my hand down.
My hair stays where it is. A mess. His mess, my mess, our mess.
II.
I don't go back to the guest room.
It's not a decision — nobody announces it, nobody negotiates. It's just that at some point the evening becomes late, and the late becomes late enough that one of us should saygoodnightand go to a separate room, and neither of us says it, and then Bagel gets off the couch and walks down the hallway toward the bedroom, and we both watch him go, and I say "I think the cat just decided for us."
"He's been deciding for us since January," Ethan says.
We follow the cat.
His bedroom. The door is open — all the way open. I've passed this door a hundred times — half-open, a sliver of light, the sounds of him shifting in bed at 2 AM. Now I'm throughit. Inside. Standing on his side of the bed while he sits on the edge and does the hip-management process, and I pull back the blanket on the other side — the side that hasn't been slept on, the side with the unwrinkled pillow, the side that's been waiting.
