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“You’re awfully handsy this morning,” she says as she pours the eggs into a skillet.
“Penguins get me hot,” I run my hands down her sides and rest them on her hips. The truth is that I just need to be touching her at all times. If my hands are on her, she is real, she’s here.
“Uh-huh,” she ignores me. “See all the nice, fluffy layers in here?” She slips the omelet onto a plate and makes a point to show me her master creation, her own kitchen-based composite she made out of nothing.
“Everything is an onion to you, layers upon layers, something out of nothing.”
“Not nothing, lots of little somethings that are better together. Eat,” Emily hands me my omelet, and we sit at the breakfast bar together, watching the lightning outside.
I’m suddenly feeling pretty impressed with myself with a smart, gorgeous woman in my bed every night, our apartment filled with her moving boxes and a damn fine omelet in front of me.
She catches me smirking, so I say what I’m thinking, “All those smart guys in college had you right next to them all those years, but here you are.”
“Hmm, I guess you’re just lucky,” she teases me with a roll of her eyes.
“Nope, luck has nothing to do with it. I won.”
“Oh, that’s right, because everything is a competition.”
“Isn’t it?”
She shrugs and swallows down a gulp of coffee, “Maybe. I wasn’t exactly putting myself out there, so perhaps they never had a fair chance.”
“See, I think they never had a chance to begin with.”
“I’m glad your ego is back, and while I am not encouraging it, you’re probably right.” She starts gathering up dishes, but I put a hand on her wrist to stop her because that’s the deal—she cooks, and I clean—so she sits back down to continue.
“No one else ever stuck. They weren’t you. When I say I’m not like this with anyone else, I mean everything,” Emily waves her arms in a circle to make her point. “I don’t feel like anyone else has ever known me or accepted me the way you do.”
“I know what that’s like.”
“I know you do, and I love you for it,” she pops off her stool again and kisses me.
“I love you more.” Because this is the kind of shit that I say nowadays. I’m never going to hear the end of it from Dante.
“I don’t know about that, but I do know if you don’t stop strutting around half-naked, we’re never going to get all these boxes unpacked.
The living room is full of stacked up moving boxes, each meticulously labeled, color-coded, and organized. Emily has moved so many times in her life that she has a system and, I’m pretty sure, a spreadsheet. I know better than to mess with it.
“Tell me what color goes in what room. I’ll move them all.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m a man, Em. I lift heavy things to impress women. That’s my job.”
A few hours later, about half the moving boxes have been broken down. The rest are all in the correct rooms, and Emily has been busy unpacking while I worked out and get started on the dishes now.
She
has music on throughout the apartment and is bopping around, singing, while the rain comes down hard, the river rising outside.
Dante texts and asks if we’re partying tonight, I tell him to fuck off. I am shockingly domestic these days.
“Can I make some space in the master closet?” Emily calls from the bedroom.
I turn the music down and answer her back from the kitchen, “Yep, of course.”
She actually doesn’t have that much stuff, a byproduct of her professional moving skills, and the fact that she left most of it behind in the states when she came to Cambridge. Klara offered to sell her furniture and anything she left behind, so we had the place boxed up and ready for the movers in one day.
