I see Melly freeze for a moment. I rub her back as she sits down and don’t comment back. The thing with Stanley is that he’ll only keep going if you feed into it. I’m not getting into it this morning.
I walk to the fridge and make us two glasses of water. Then I sit next to Melly. We drink.
“Fuck,” Stanley says, watching. “You two are parched.”
I put my glass down and hide my laugh. “Fuck off, Stan.”
Melly coughs into her cup. She makes her cheeks big, and then she swallows. My foot finds hers under the table, and she looks at me and smiles.
Rowan slides plates in front of us. Eggs. Toast.
“Eat.”
“Thanks, Row. Lucy.”
“Mhm.”
“No problem.”
Lucy sits with Benson across from us. She tucks herself under his arm, and Benson kisses the top of her head without looking up from his eggs, and it hits me — sudden, sharp, clean — that this is the picture. This is the picture I’ve been adjacent to for two years and didn’t realize I was waiting to be inside of. Benson and Lucy on one side of the table. Me and Melly on the other. The team around us being themselves. Sunday morning. Eggs.
I’m in it now.
I’m in the picture.
My foot presses against Melly’s under the table again.
She doesn’t look at me. She just smiles into her coffee.
We eat.
Stanley resumes operating at his normal volume, which is to say loud, and he tells Melly a story about a freshman on the team that’s been getting his ass handed to him from Coach. Lucy laughs in the right places. Benson rolls his eyes in the right places. Rowan finally puts the cereal box down. Percy continues sipping water.
Melly leans into me at one point and rests her head against my shoulder, and the whole table sees it. Stanley’s voice catches on whatever word he was saying, and Lucy’s eyes go bright, and Benson hides a smile behind his coffee cup.
Nobody says anything.
We leave around eleven to get Melly some of her clothes from her apartment.
I drive one-handed because I don’t want my other hand back. She’s holding onto it.
I park outside her building and help her out of the truck because she’s swimming in my sweats and the hem is dragging. She rolls her eyes at me, and I kiss her temple at the curb because I can now.
I walk her up.
Penelope is on the couch reading when we come in.
“Oh, hey,” Penelope says, and then she rearranges her face when she sees me.
“Hi, Pen,” Melly says.
Penelope lifts her eyes over the rim of her glasses for exactly one second, gives me a look that contains an entire welcome and an entire warning in the same expression, and goes back to her book.
We walk into Melly’s bedroom and shut the door. Melly walks straight into her bathroom and shuts the door.
I sit on the edge of her bed and look around. Her bed’s unmade from yesterday morning, the comforter shoved down to the foot. There’s a stack of textbooks on her nightstand with a half-empty mug of tea on top. A small, framed photo of her and Mila in high school. A candle that smells, faintly, like the way her hair smells. Her hairbrush. A scrunchie. A receipt. A pen.
I get up and straighten her comforter. I don’t know why. I’m not the kind of person who makes other people’s beds. I’m barely the kind of person who makes my own. But my hands are doing it anyway, smoothing the corners, fluffing the pillow she sleeps on.
