Page 75 of The Wedding Forecast

‘The apartment is not big or impressive,’ he says. ‘I should warn you.’

‘I live in Hayley and Luke’s spare room. So my bar is low.’

‘Well, push it a bit lower,’ he says, standing at his door, hesitating. ‘It’s small.’

‘Wait. Okay, I’m ready. Expectations are as low as they can be, but the baseline is the fact you live in New York.’

I hope he has a bedframe and not just a mattress on the floor. I hope he has sheets. I hope he has toilet paper. These are my three wishes to the dating genie.

He opens the door, and the apartment is definitely small, just three rooms, or two and a half, the largest part being a nice, open lounge/bedroom space, with a small adjoining kitchen and a tiny bathroom. I was expecting sparse, dingy, maybe grotty, but it’s cosy and lived in and full of things. Lovely things. It’s full of character. There’s a nice bed with a wooden frame, and sheets. A rug on the floor. A big, round mirror. He has a desk covered in piles of papers, a hanging rack for clothes—there’s no wardrobe—and two bookcases full of books, with more stacked in a couple of piles on the floor. There’s a couch, and his laptop set up on a coffee table in front of it. There are lots of homey touches, like a cosy throw rug and green cushions on the couch that match a green lamp and a set of checkerboard-patterned mugs hanging from hooks. One wall is covered in framed movie posters.

‘See, it’s not much,’ he says.

‘I love it,’ I say. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

‘I lived in the worst places for years in LA, just absolute hellholes, and when I finally started making a bit of money, I vowed I would make my place feel like somewhere I actually wanted to be. Well, actually, my sister told me I had to after visiting me, but I agreed with her.’

I think back to when I had the studio apartment, in my darkest days after the breakup, and how this was how I wanted to fix it up. I couldn’t pinpoint at the time what I wanted, but now I know it was this. This feeling of a place very specifically belonging to someone. A home.

I look at the movie posters. La Dolce Vita, Toto the Hero, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The Last Picture Show, The Man From Snowy River, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sullivan’s Travels, Parasite, That Thing You Do, Chungking Express, Rear Window, Inside Llewyn Davis, Past Lives, Ikuru, The Babadook, When Harry Met Sally, Raising Arizona, Jerry McGuire.

‘I find bare walls depressing,’ he says, watching me. ‘I’ve had the posters for years. I finally decided to get them framed.’

‘I like it.’

‘I grew up on movies. I’m the youngest: my sisters would go out and Mum and I would have movie night together on the couch.’

‘That sounds so nice.’

He grew up in a household of women. It doesn’t make sense why my mother and Bobbi seem to make him uncomfortable. Or maybe it does. He’s been out of that household for a while now. He’s been alone, motherless, for a long time.

‘Jerry Maguire?’ I say.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It doesn’t fit with the others.’

‘Excuse me. It’s Tom Cruise’s best performance. A Cameron Crowe classic.’

‘I’ve never actually seen it.’

‘That’s outrageous.’

I turn to his bookcase.

‘Wait. That’s not fair. Don’t judge anything there.’

‘I don’t judge other people’s books.’

This is not entirely true.

‘Good.’

There are novels—a bunch by women, thankfully—and nonfiction and books on film and acting. I see my book there, and I try not to think about what that might mean. He brought it home. He kept it. I swallow, tuck that thought away for later, and move on, scanning further along the shelf. It’s exposing, letting someone into your space. It feels wonderfully intimate, to have all of his things around me. I want to look at everything, dig into it all, touch it and turn it all over in my hands.

He moves closer to me.

I look up at him from my spot kneeling on the floor. Should we listen to music, put on a movie, sit on the couch? I pick up a random book, then put it back on the bookshelf.