"How are you handling this?" I asked them. They'd been quiet all day, but we'd also been busy getting everything unpacked too. Now there was a large pile of cardboard boxes in the garage and things in every corner of the house.
"Did you figure out that I'm a bit overwhelmed?"
I smiled and slipped my hand under the bottom of their shirt. They'd worn a t-shirt and shorts today. "A little." I stroked my fingers over their stomach.
"I'm glad I'm here. That we're all here," Trin quietly said.
"But?" I kissed the side of their neck.
"It's a big change."
Yes, it was. It was a good change though, one I was looking forward to, because it brought me Trin. I slid my hand over their ribs to their chest where I was able to tease their nipples with my gentle touches.
"What if Andy comes back down?" Trin asked me as they buried their face in the crook of my arm.
"Do you want to go upstairs? Or should I stop?"
Trin shook their head. "Neither. I don't know."
Upstairs it was. I knew how to turn them on, but I didn't want them to get embarrassed or regret anything between us if Andy did happen to see us together. We were always careful and we kept what we did together private. That was important for both of us.
"What about the fire?" Trin asked me as I started to take them upstairs.
I shrugged. "It'll go out soon. I'll check it in a little bit too."
"Okay."
Trin had already put all of their things away in the bedroom we'd be sharing so it no longer felt like it was just mine. I'd had two months where the house had only been mine, and Trin and Andy had come to visit plenty of times. But there hadn't been a big push to move all of their stuff in until today. Trin closed the door behind us and I watched, fascinated, in the change in them as they were no longer shy about their own body with me.
Trin stripped out of their clothes easily then lay down naked next to me as if we'd always been like this and there had never been any reason to be self-conscious. I loved touching their pale skin and playing with their hair. It was so long. Now that we were alone and no longer working on anything, I undid their hair and let it fall around their shoulders.
I loved everything about them, from their careful, guarded smile, to the way they sometimes still asked me if I cared how they looked when we were going out as if I had any right to tell them to wear a dress or not. They were still cautious at times. And I loved that about them, not because it meant that we still had a lot of work to do together, but because it showed how far we'd come. I could have never imagined little Socks ever being the Trin that I had lying next to me in our bed right then. Socks had been a frightened child so full of mistrust and pain. I'd spent four years earning their trust and trying to keep their demons at bay. It seemed that I'd been able to help, even just a little, because Trin had come back to maybe one of the few places they'd ever truly felt safe in order to find me again.
I didn't deserve Trin's love, but I wanted to work hard for it and prove to them that I was worth the trust that they'd placed in me, first as Socks and now as Trin. "What did I do to deserve you?" I whispered.
Trin smiled at me, in a sleepy kind of way, and just shrugged. "Plenty of things. Years of them all built up over the past nine months, and then four years before that. But the first thing you did, the thing that really got my attention, was back in that alley."
I remembered the moment when I had first met them, but I didn't have any idea what I had done. "And what was that?"
"You could have grabbed me, you could have picked me up and tossed me into the back seat. It would have been for my own good, but it would have scared me even more. I was terrified of what you wanted to do to me and instead of yelling at me, or insisting, or trying to trick me in some way you instead compromised. You drove your car next to me as slow as you could possibly go and that's how I knew I could trust you."
Of course I wouldn't have forced them. That would have likely been a disaster for us both. I would have probably gotten punched. They could have easily broken my nose while trying to get away, even as small as they had been back then. "I had no idea what I was doing that night."
Trin giggled. "I noticed. You were trying really hard though. And then you became my best friend. I was a kid who didn't know how to trust anyone again, and you figured out how to get me to trust you."
They reached for me and I took their hand across the sheets. "And then you came back into my life and I fell in love with you all over again."
"Same here."
I rolled over Trin and knew I would want to spend the rest of my life with them, as soon as I got up the guts to ask them to marry me.
