“It’s a notebook. A spreadsheet would be excessive.”
“A notebook.” I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. “Handwritten, no doubt.”
“No doubt.” He nodded, his face the picture of professional objectivity. “I’m tracking a pattern. The pattern is relevant, because the separate living spaces are generating more combined foot traffic than the shared space did, which means the separation is producing more proximity, not less. It’s a counterintuitive outcome.”
“You find our inability to stay in our own apartments interesting as a data point?”
“I find it interesting and also—” He paused. This was “the Peter pause,” the one that meant his next words required an honesty his clinical framing was designed to avoid. “And also reassuring.”
I set my tea down.
“Reassuring how?” I asked.
“The frequency suggests the connection isn’t dependent on proximity. We’re choosing to cross the hallway. Repeatedly, at inconvenient hours, and for fabricated reasons. This means the thing between us isn’t a product of sharing an apartment. It’s a product of us.”
I looked at him across the kitchen, this man whohad just told me he loved me using hallway crossing frequency data and foot traffic interval calculations, and who had framed the most romantic observation of our entire relationship as a pattern analysis. His face in the stove light was open and steady and completely unaware that he’d just said something that was going to live inside my chest for the rest of my life.
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said. “And you framed it as a data analysis.”
“The data is romantic. I’m merely reporting findings.”
“The findings are that we can’t stay away from each other.”
“The findings are that we don’t want to.”
I kissed him on the counter in the stove light at 2:47 a.m.
The kissing was different now, less tentative, more fluent, the kisses of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms and were going to keep learning for a very long time.
Friday night, the kittens escaped.
For the record, this was Peter’s fault. I say this withlove and with the understanding that Peter would describe it as “a latch failure caused by insufficient door-closing force during a time-sensitive hallway crossing.”
Both descriptions were accurate.
The new litter, four tabbies I’d named Scary, Sporty, Posh, and Ginger despite Peter’s explicit instruction not to name fosters (Baby had been adopted the previous week with considerably less trauma than the Destiny’s Child departure, which I was choosing to interpret as personal growth), had been secured in the foster room behind a latched door.
Peter had verified the latch before leaving his apartment at 9:45 p.m. to cross the hallway for the forty-seventh time that week. In his haste to reach me, he did not pull his door fully shut.
The latch did not engage.
The door drifted open.
And four kittens, who had spent their entire lives looking for exactly this kind of structural failure, found it.
Peter was in my apartment for a twelve-minute conversation about weekend schedules that was actually a conversation about nothing. Rather, it was actually him sitting on my couch because he wanted to be near me and I wanted him near me and the schedule was a fiction we were both maintainingwith decreasing conviction.
When he went back to 4B, I heard the pause in the hallway.
Then his voice, carrying the specific tone of a man confronting a disaster of his own making. “No.”
I opened my door to discover the hallway contained four small tabby shapes moving in four different directions at speed.
“What’s happening?” I asked, though the answer was visually apparent.
“The kittens are out.”
“All of them?”
