The unlocked door.
The living room and Peter on the couch with his glasses on and General Tso behind his head and absolutely nothing else.
My brain supplied the image with a vividness that made my pulse do something that Peter, if he’d been awake and monitoring, would have classified as clinically significant.
And then everything after the couch.
The bedroom.
The darkness.
The feel of him everywhere . . . and I do mean everywhere.
My brain, now operating at a solid eighty percent, offered a comprehensive highlight reel that I had not requested and could not stop. I lay in Peter’s bed with his arm on my chest and a mouthful of residual pillow lint and felt my entire body flush in a way thatwas visible, probably, from outer space.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to the ceiling.
General Tso, who was curled in a perfect orange circle at the foot of the bed—the bed, not the refrigerator—opened one eye, assessed my whispered crisis, and closed it again with the weary patience of a cat who had witnessed the full trajectory of human foolishness the previous evening and was not interested in a morning sequel.
“Don’t judge me,” I hissed. “You were there. You saw the couch situation. You’re complicit, you furry minx.”
General Tso’s tail twitched once. Whether this indicated agreement, dismissal, or a dream about birds, I would never know.
Hiro was on his bed in the corner, watching me with steady, knowing eyes, his tail doing one slow wag. Hiro had seen everything. Hiro had been in this room the entire time despite Peter’s best effort at closing the door, which meant Hiro had witnessed his owner in a state of vulnerability that I was fairly certain no living creature had witnessed in two years. Remarkably, Hiro was handling this information with the calm discretion of a therapy dog who understood that some things were private even when you were present for them.
“Good boy,” I mouthed at him.
Wag. Singular. Because he only ever gave one.
I turned my attention back to the arm on my chest and found Peter’s hand. I knew this hand. I’d watched it perform a hundred precise tasks, such as writing Post-it notes or adjusting his glasses. I’d watched this hand cradle kittens and wrap Hiro’s leg and hold a giraffe’s face against his chest in a zoo.
Now that same hand was on my chest. It was open and relaxed. The surgeon’s fingers rested against my sternum with the unclenched trust of a man who had, for the first time in two years, fallen asleep holding someone and not let go.
I could feel my heartbeat against his palm.
I thought,This is what it feels like to be in love with someone who folds his boxers before lying naked on a couch,because I’d watched him do that last night. I’d walked in and seen his clothes on the chair in a neat folded stack, his shoes aligned on the floor beside it, every garment removed with the same meticulous attention. The folding had almost killed me, though the folding was the most Peter thing I’d ever witnessed.
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
Not because this was funny, but because it was so much more than funny, so much more than any single emotion could contain. The laugh was the pressure valve, the thing my body did when feelingsexceeded my brain’s ability to process whatever was happening.
Peter’s arm was on my chest, his breath was on my neck, and I was in his bed.
I was in love with a man who folded his underwear before a nude ambush.
That same man had said my name in the dark with both syllables carrying everything.
He’d laughed afterward, the real laugh, the surprised one, and said, “I forgot what this felt like,” with the quiet honesty of a man who didn’t use words bigger than the truth they carried.
I didn’t move.
I lay there and breathed and let the morning hold me the way Peter’s arm was holding me, with a weight that was not heavy but present, the kind of weight that tells you where you are.
He stirred.
His arm shifted.
His fingers flexed once before settling.
