No. I should not be having that thought. He’s my neighbor.
I grab the gray one too.
Both. Both is the answer. Both is just giving him options, and options are the cornerstone of good hosting. Everyone knows that. You don’t decide for a guest whether he’s hot or cold, you put out both and let him sort it out himself. I put the gray one over the blue one and smooth them both down, and I step back, and the gray one is sitting slightly off-center, so I fix it, and fixing it knocks the blue one crooked, so I fix that too. And somehow this puts the gray one off-center again, which shouldn’t be geometrically possible but here we are.
Fine.
Blankets are handled.
Blankets, done.
Now, on to the pillows.
I look at the couch — the pull-out, I mean, the bed — at the two flat cushions currently lying there doing the absolute bare minimum a pillow can do while still legally being a pillow.
Two.
Two sad pillows.
For a grown man.
No. Absolutely not.
I tug down the corner of the blankets to smooth a wrinkle on the way to my room to get appropriate pillows.
I come back with three.
I stand there holding three pillows and looking at the two already there and the math isn’t working, because five is a weird number. Five is lopsided, so I go back and get two more, and now I’ve got the good ones, therealones. The ones that actually do something for your neck instead of just being present. Everyone deserves neck support. That’s not even a hospitality thing, that’s aspinething. That’s basic skeletal care, and I’m not going to be the host whose guest wakes up with his neck wrecked because I rationed pillows.
I arrange them against the arm of the pull-out, building it up, and then there are too many at that end so I redistribute. I move some to the other end, build that up too, and step back and realize I’ve now lost the reason I was doing any of this.
Doesn’t matter. Keep going.
One from the first side falls down, I fix it while I stare at the throw pillows.
The little decorative ones, on the chair, the ones that exist purely to be moved off the chair before anyone sits down.
Absolutely not. Not while there’s a job to do.
I bring them over. They’re firm but they’re soft on top, and honestly they’ve been freeloading on that chair for two years, it’s time they earned their keep. I tuck them in along the back edge, filling the gaps, packing it out so there’s no cold open space against the wall.
There, now it’s all soft, all the way around, no hard edges anywhere a person could —
I step back.
Okay.
I tilt my head at it.
It is… a lot of pillows.
Objectively.
If I’m being a scientist about it, that is a quantity of pillows that has crossed over from “made bed” into something else, something with walls, something you’d climb down into rather than onto.
But it’scozy.
Cozy is the goal.
