That evening, we sat at the island after dinner. The stove light was on. Hiro slept at my feet. General Tso glowered from the refrigerator. Potato scratched himself on the couch. Princess Consuelayowledfrom inside her carrier. Our new kitten fosters did whatever squirmy newborns did in a cardboard box lined with a fluffy blanket.
“So,” Benji said.
“So.”
“The apartment is done.”
“The apartment is done.”
We sat with this, two people stating a fact that neither wanted to be true and that both knew was necessary.
“I think I should move back,” Benji said.
That sentence slammed onto the counter like a mallet.
“Tell me why,” I said.
“Because we went from strangers to roommates to whatever this is in only a few months. We skipped approximately seventeen steps in the standard relationship progression, and if we don’t give ourselves the space to actually date like normal people, we’re going to build this whole thing on a foundation of proximity and stove lights and it might not hold.”
“You think it won’t hold?”
“No. Of course not. No.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think itwillhold. I think this is the most solid thing I’ve ever been part of, and I think you’re the most solid person I’ve ever known, and I think that’s exactly why we should do this the right way. Doing it right means not rushing. Living together before we’ve had a single date is rushing. Skipping the part where I drive to your door and pick you up and bring you home at the end of thenight and kiss you good night . . . we skipped that part. And . . . I want that part. I want it with you, Peter.”
He was right.
The clinical part of my brain confirmed it immediately.
The emotional part, which had been gaining influence in ways that the clinical part found professionally concerning, confirmed something else. The thought of this apartment without Benji’s noise and his cereal bowls and his inside-out shirts and his presence on the counter at 3 a.m. was a thought I could not sit with comfortably.
Nor could I with the thought of sleeping without his weight on the mattress.
Or the thought of mornings without a hand on my back.
“I agree,” I said instead of the words my rebellious heart begged me to speak.
“You . . . agree?”
“Moving back is the correct decision. We accelerated past multiple relationship stages, and a period of intentional separation would allow us to establish our relationship on its own terms rather than on the terms dictated by a plumbing emergency.”
“I think . . . that might be the most romantic way anyone has ever agreed to spend less time with me.Or it might be depressing. Ask me tomorrow.”
I smiled, though it didn’t reach my eyes. “I’m not agreeing to spend less time with you; I’m agreeing to spend time with you from a different starting location. The time itself remains unchanged. Only the geography shifts.”
“The geography shifts. Peter, you’re talking about me moving twenty feet across a hallway.”
“Twenty-two feet. I may have measured. Four times.”
“You measured the hallway?”
“The measurement was taken for unrelated purposes.”
“What unrelated purposes require measuring a residential hallway four times?”
“I was assessing whether the hallway width was sufficient for the new foster crate configuration. The distance to your door was a secondary data point.”
“A secondary data point?”
“Collected incidentally.”
