Chapter Text
12 months together (January, Year 3)
Spring cleaning, in January, no less, was not how I’d expected to spend our one-year anniversary. And okay, it wasn’t our actual anniversary until the next day, but still. And yet, there we were. It had started the previous afternoon, when we’d gotten back to my house from the airport and Chris had asked why some of my Christmas gifts from him and his family still hadn’t been put away - books stacked on the kitchen table, the gorgeous cashmere sweater he’d given me folded on top of the dresser, along with a few other sweaters and tops I often wore to work, all but one of Millie’s new toys still unopened - and I’d made the mistake of telling him I just had too much ‘stuff’ at the moment and didn’t have places to put all my new things without just shoving them onto a shelf or into a drawer haphazardly, which I certainly didn’t want to do.
Before my husband had died, we’d been in the habit of purging things twice a year or so; each time we traded out clothes for the changing seasons we filled bags to donate, and he cleaned out the bookshelves regularly because, ‘ They’re books, not trophies ,’ making a stack that I then went through, determining which ones were appropriate for my classroom library and which ones just needed to go. He also made me throw out a kitchen appliance or tool every time I got a new one, which, considering how much I liked to cook, was fairly often. I hadn’t done any of that in the two and a half years since he’d left for the deployment that had taken his life. And two years isn’t that long, in the grand scheme of things, but in my tiny house, the stuff started to pile up, especially after Chris and his family had spoiled me at Christmas.
Chris’s response to that explanation was to drop his stuff in the bedroom and declare that we were ordering pizza (Chinese the second night) and cleaning out my house. His own house - both of them, actually, the one in Boston and the one in L.A. - was pretty minimalist. Comfortable but sleek furniture, carefully curated memories here and there, and an office in each city with a tidy desk and bookshelves that were well-stocked, but only with books he either hadn’t yet read or would actually read or reference again. And while he almost certainly went through more clothes in total than I did, he rotated them regularly, keeping only a few favorite staples and items his stylist had picked for future events or encouraged him to keep for rewearing (in different combinations, of course) in the future. He insisted he was going to help me do the same. We were going to go room-by-room, figuring out what I really needed to keep and either donating or throwing out everything else. He was convinced I could even manage to get rid of some of my furniture, especially in the living room. Downsizing was a good thing, he told me, and insisted it was a great time to pare down to only the items I really needed, though he didn’t really explain what was so great about the timing.
“Tough love, baby, tough love,” he’d told me the first time I’d tried to convince him to let me keep something I really, really didn’t need, based solely on ‘sentimental value.’ (It really wasn’t all that sentimental, or special, I was just having issues letting things go.) The only exception, he told me right off the bat, was anything belonging or emotionally attached to my late husband. He said it wasn’t his place to question what I did with my husband’s belongings and that he wasn’t going to disrespect either of us, my husband or me, by pretending it was. The ironic thing about that was that I’d actually gone through his things shortly after he was killed. I’d kept only the things with true sentimental value to me, almost all of them fitting into a scrapbook I’d made or a designated drawer in his old dresser, and everything else I’d either given to one of his parents or his sister or I’d donated. That certainly wasn’t because I was cold-hearted or because I was trying to erase him from my life or my memories; the things I had kept meant the world to me. It was because looking at his running shoes by the back door or his old college textbooks - one of the few things he refused to get rid of - on the shelves next to the many novels on my to-read list caused me more pain and anxiety than I could possibly deal with and actually expect to be able to get out of bed every morning.
Chris was determined that we were going to get through the whole house in those first two evenings, because the third day of his visit was our anniversary, and though we weren’t planning to do anything special on a Thursday, he said the cleaning shouldn’t be hanging over our heads on ‘our day,’ and we actually did have plans for the weekend. Before he took me to work that second morning - we typically did it that way, him driving me to and from school in my car when he visited so that he could get out of the house if he wanted - he’d asked me if any rooms, closets, cabinets, etc. were off-limits for him to go through. I told him no, and we came home from him picking me up on that second day for me to find that he’d gone through all the bedrooms and the attic, making piles in each room. We’d done the office and the living room together the first night and he said he was too scared to touch my kitchen, so he left that for me to deal with. The guest bedroom and master bedroom had been easy; the guest room really didn’t have anything to begin with, aside from a bed, nightstand, and small television, having been vacant since Victoria moved out (and unused altogether since Chris stopped sleeping in there). That closet had been used for my husband’s uniforms, so it had been empty for a long time, except two formal dresses I didn’t want to squeeze into my ‘real’ closet. The master bedroom was just as sparse. My husband had used that closet for his civilian clothes and I hadn’t taken it over once he was gone, so all there really was to go through was my dresser, which was all underwear, gym clothes, and a junk drawer that I agreed to let Chris dump straight into one of the bags of things to throw away. That only left the kitchen, the small third bedroom - which I used as my dressing room since the master was also small - and the attic - which, after Chris had brought down the summer clothes I was storing up there, was almost all Christmas decorations that even he said should be kept. He sent me into the kitchen and headed into the bedroom, where he’d also dumped the clothes from the attic, to begin sorting clothes into piles by season and function. ( “Come on baby, I think I can tell the difference between your work clothes and your weekend stuff.” )
I was standing on the counter pulling coffee mugs from the back corner of the top shelf of one of the upper cabinets - I really did have too, too many - when he called from the bedroom.
“Baby?”
“Yeah!” I pulled my head from the cabinet and started moving the mugs I’d pulled forward down to the counter, by my feet.
His voice got closer. “I have questions.”
“Okay, I’ll try to have answers.”
“You-,” he stopped short in the doorway to the kitchen and dropped the box he was carrying so he could reach up and let his hands hover just behind my thighs. “Whoa whoa whoa, calm down up there, Killer.”
I swatted at his hands. “Stop, I’m fine.”
“This afternoon I watched you trip on the carpet in your classroom. Not a rug, the actual floor.” I craned around to roll my eyes at him over my shoulder. “Just-just hold on a second.” He came a little closer so he could rest his hands on my hips, not missing the opportunity to pass them over my ass along the way. “Okay, turn around.” I tried to object but he glared at me. I rolled my eyes again and huffed to make sure he knew how ridiculous I thought he was being, but I started to turn between his hands, dodging coffee mugs as I went. “Slowly! Alright, c’mon.” He tightened his hands on my hips and held me as I lowered myself to the floor. I did lean forward and brace my hands on his shoulders, partly to humor him and partly because, though I would never admit it to him because doing so would only make him more smug, I did kind of love his strength and the way he was using it to support me as I lowered myself to the floor. “I got you.”
“I didn’t need to be gotten , you know,” I told him, even as I rested my hands on his chest and leaned into him. “I was fine .”
“Whatever,” he swatted my butt then turned and bent over the box he’d brought in, “I just feel better when your feet are on the floor, clumsy girl.” By the time he turned back around, a stack of t-shirts over his left arm, I was sitting on the counter he’d just pulled me off of, kicking my feet (which were very much not on the floor) lightly against the lower cabinet and smirking like the little snot I was intentionally being. “Brat,” he deadpanned, shaking his head and pulling the top t-shirt off the stack on his arm and flicking it at me.
I grinned. “You love me.”
“For some reason.” He pretended to ignore me when I pouted at him, but when I audibly whined he leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to my pursed lips. He tried not to smile as he backed away to lean on the island I used as a coffee counter and when he failed at that he looked down to study the shirt in his hand. “Anyway, South Carolina is your alma mater.” He held up the shirt he’d flung at me, a black one with the university’s logo on the front pocket area and a huge white silhouette of a gamecock on the back.
“Yep.” I nodded just once. “And that’s not a question.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m getting there.” He stuck his tongue out at me and I returned the gesture. He draped the shirt over his shoulder and pulled the next one off the stack to hold it up, the same way he’d done the first time. The second shirt was royal blue, UK logo taking up the entire front, the image of Rupp Arena filling the letters. “You grew up in Kentucky, which means by law you have to worship either UK or Louisville basketball.”
I nodded again and couldn’t help but grin at his use of my own words regarding my fandom of a school and team that was not my alma mater but that I had grown up supporting. “Correct.”
“Okay.” He repeated the process of placing the shirt on his shoulder and pulling up the next one, this time navy and orange. “And Brody just graduated from UVA.”
“Three for three,” I made my voice a little sing-songy, clearly teasing. He ignored me and went for the next shirt, a maroon racerback tank.
“So,” he drew the word out and paused for effect, “Virginia Tech?”
I grinned, that time completely unconsciously, and my voice went a little soft. “Julie. It was my Christmas gift her freshman year.”
“Uh-huh. And …” he held up the next shirt, royal blue again, a big, white, somewhat abstract logo on the front.
“That’s Washington and Lee. Emma brought me that one when she came home for fall break as a freshman.”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, shaking his head a little, more amused than annoyed. “Okay.” The next shirt was a darker blue, Old Dominion University.
“Porter.” I named another former student, a young man Chris hadn’t met but whose name he recognized from listening to me talk about different musicals I’d overseen.
“And Mississippi State?” The seventh shirt came off the stack.
I grinned a little wider, remembering the young man who’d graduated two and a half years earlier, a student who’d practically stumbled into the theatre program as a lighting technician his sophomore year as a last-minute favor and had ended up helping run the program by the time he was a senior. “Curtis. Also, one of my kids from Louisiana played football there until a couple years ago. CJ, I worked with him as an eighth grader. He’s actually with the Broncos now.”
“C …” Chris’s face lit up, “Morgan?”
“Yeah!” I bounced a little on the counter; it hadn’t occurred to me that Chris would be familiar with him, though it really should have. I loved watching football, but he actually followed it. “He was the sweetest kid. And that smile, it’s impossible not to be happy around him.”
From the look on his face, I wasn’t sure he’d even heard the last bit of what I’d said. “He’s on my fantasy team! He’s the reason I beat Downey last week!”
I laughed. “Well, I’m sure he’s happy to have helped.”
“Yeah, I’m definitely happy.” He trailed off and his hundred-yard gaze told me he was thinking about his win. He actually shook his head to bring himself out of it and picked up the next shirt, again, blue, with a red and white logo. “Okay, anyway, I don’t even know what school this is.”
“Oh, Louisiana Tech.” I actually reached out to touch that one. Honestly, it had gotten buried under all the others and I had forgotten it was even there. “Ryan, my very first adopted kid ever, sent me that one. But lots of my kids from my time in Louisiana went there.”
“So I guess that also explains,” he bent to pull a purple shirt from the box, “this one.” The gold and white LSU logo glared back at me when he held it up.
I turned up my nose a little. “Ugh, yeah. It’s rough, but I had quite a few kids end up there.”
He shook his head as he pulled yet another shirt from his arm. “Okay, this one I actually got a little excited about, but … MIT?”
“Drake.” Another name that probably only barely registered to him; there had come a point, earlier in our relationship, when he’d stopped asking for details every time I mentioned a name he didn’t recognize and just assumed it was one of my kids.
He sped up the process, grabbing the next shirt and calling out the name without even holding it up to me. “And Columbia?”
“Gah,” my right hand flew to cover my heart, “my sweet, sweet girl Jordan.”
The twelfth and final shirt came off his arm. “Shenandoah? I don’t even know where that is.”
“It’s in the Shenandoah Valley, western Virginia. Abby.”
His arm finally empty, he pulled all the shirts from where they now rested on his shoulder and dropped them unceremoniously back into the box. “Okay, baby,” he sighed and came to hook his hands behind my knees, pulling them apart so that he could stand between them, “this is ridiculous.”
“They’re my kids.” I rested my hands on his shoulders and traced my thumbs up and down the sides of his neck and gave him my best puppy dog eyes.
He opened his mouth to say something and I brought my eyebrows a little closer together, tilting my head to the side and sliding my hands behind his neck to link my fingers together there. He closed his mouth and dropped his chin to his chest. “There’s absolutely no chance any of these is going in the ‘donate’ box, is there?” he asked me when he lifted his head after a couple seconds.
My face went from pitiful to if looks could kill in a fraction of a second.
His hands flew up defensively, palms out to me. “I’ve literally seen you wear two of them.” I knew he was referring to the Kentucky and Carolina ones.
I protested. “I wear the Tech one to the gym a lot! That's what it's for!”
He dropped his hands, letting them fall to his sides, his fingers brushing my calves. “Okay, three. Out of,” he looked down into the box, “you know what, I don’t even know. There are more I didn’t even bring in here.” He lifted one hand to gesture toward the room he’d been working in.
“Some of them aren’t the right size,” I explained, “turns out teenagers, especially teenage boys, aren’t great at estimating that. And I’m sorry,” I brought my hands back around to his front and held onto his shirt at his collarbones, tugging so that he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, “but there is absolutely no way I can rep any SEC school that isn’t Kentucky or Carolina, no matter which kids go there.” I shrugged at the end as if to seal my point.
He brought his hands back up to my knees then ran them up the outsides of my thighs to my hips. He went even farther, curling his hands around where my backside met the counter, and pulled me just to the edge. Out of habit I crossed my ankles behind him. “So, just to be clear, you can own them, but you can’t wear them. Is that the gist?”
I lowered my chin to look up at him through my lashes. “They’re from my kids. I can’t get rid of them.”
He shook his head at me, but brought a hand up to tuck my hair behind my ear. His fingertips trailed along my jaw, lifting my head back up, until he could trace my bottom lip with his thumb. “You’re a mess, baby girl.”
I leaned forward to drop my forehead to his and his hand slid into my hair. “I know,” I agreed, and he chuckled before using his hold on me to tilt my head forward so he could kiss me.