Iwake up with Parker on my chest.
She’s in the hollow below my collarbone, the exact spot she chose the night Teo was in Columbus and I was on my couch with his cat and the purring filling the space where his voice usually is. Same weight. Same vibration running through my ribs. Same small head tucked under my chin. The difference is the arm across my waist and the breathing beside me and the fact that the man I was missing is six inches to my left with his face in the pillow and his hair going in four directions.
I don’t move. Parker has precedent about disruptions to her position, and this configuration, according to her established standards, requires a minimum residency before any human activity is permitted. I close my eyes and let the purr run through my chest and listen to Teo breathe and feel the particular weight of a morning that has no alarm in it and no boundary to reconstruct before I walk out the door.
The apartment is his and has become partly mine in the way apartments shift without anyone discussing it. My toothbrush in the holder next to his. My coffee in the cabinet he clearedwithout being asked. The charger on the nightstand that he bought because I kept borrowing his and he got tired of the negotiation.
Teo stirs. His arm tightens across my waist and he makes a sound into the pillow that isn’t a word but communicates the following: he is aware that morning exists and has filed a formal objection.
“Coffee,” I say.
“Mm.”
“That’s not coffee. That’s a vowel sound.”
“Five more minutes.”
“Parker has been on my chest for fifteen. I’m going to lose circulation in my left shoulder.”
“Your left shoulder is fine. I’m the one who’s been lying on it all night.”
“You’re not lying on it. You’re adjacent to it.”
“Adjacent.” One eye opens. The blue is absurd at this hour, unfairly vivid against the white of the pillow and the mess of his hair. “You’re using clinical language in bed.”
“That’s not clinical. That’s spatial.”
“Same energy.”
“Wildly different energy.”
He grins into the pillow with his entire face and I feel it in my chest, the specific warmth of being the person who gets this version of his morning. Unshowered, half-asleep, grinning at me like I’m the best thing in a room that also contains a cat, which is competitive.
I extract myself from under Parker, who registers her objection with a chirp and a stare that implies a covenant has been violated. I pull on my sweats and go to the kitchen.
His kitchen. The coffee above the microwave. The mugs on the second shelf. The sugar he doesn’t use but keeps stocked because I do. Nonna’s bolognese recipe taped to the cabinet, thehandwriting soft where the steam reaches it, the paper curling at the edges. The bolognese bowls from last night still on the counter because neither of us cleared them before bed, which his nonna would have opinions about and my nan would have louder ones.
And next to the bowls, on the cutting board I washed and dried at midnight while he was asleep, the biscotti.
They’re not right. I know they’re not right. The shape is close but the edges cracked where they shouldn’t have and the second bake went too long on two of them and the anise is either too much or not enough because Nonna said a pinch and my pinch and her pinch are not the same measurement. But they’re on the cutting board and I put them there, and the recipe I wrote down in my own handwriting while an eighty-one-year-old woman in Jersey walked me through every step on the phone is folded in my back pocket, and that’s the thing. Not the biscotti. The phone call.
I got her number from Gina after the Christmas dinner. Texted first because I’m not a person who calls strangers without warning, especially strangers whose grandchildren I’m sleeping with. She called me back in four minutes. Didn’t ask who I was. Didn’t ask how I knew Gina. Just said, “So you’re the one,” and started talking about flour.
Coffee maker on. The sound of it filling the quiet.
I’m reaching for the mugs when Teo comes up behind me, barefoot, and his hand settles on the back of my neck. Not deliberate. Not a gesture. Just the touch of a man passing through his kitchen and finding the person he knows on his way to the coffee.
My body doesn’t brace. The muscles under his palm release, the same half-inch they release under Nan’s hand, the response that was wired into me before I had language for any of it. His thumb traces once along the tendon beside my spine. I lean intothe weight. That’s the whole thing. A hand on a neck in a kitchen and a body that takes it without asking the hand to explain itself first.
His hand moves on. He reaches past me for the coffee pot. Pours two mugs. Adds sugar to mine without asking because he knows.
He presses his mouth to the back of my shoulder. Stays there, breathing against my skin. Then he lifts his head and looks past me at the counter.
His hand goes still on the mug.
“Those are,” he starts, and stops.
I don’t turn around. I let him look. I can feel him behind me, the particular quality of his stillness when the words have left the building and his body is the only thing processing.
