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They’ve only been in the apartment a week.
Yesterday, she’d turned too fast in the kitchen and bumped her head on a cracked cabinet door. She hasn’t adjusted, yet, to the new environment. To everything being a bit different from her old place. To this being their place.
Tonight it’s her toe, the living room, and the new-to-them coffee table they bought off Craigslist.
It’s late. He’s asleep in the bed ( their bed) at the end of the hall, and she was just going to get a glass of water. She’d misjudged the space in the dark room and stubbed her toe.
She yelps, “Fuck!” high and loud, and then, remembering that he’s asleep, quietly, “fuck fuck fuck fuck.” There are tears in her eyes, the pain so sharp, so enduring.
“Rory?” The lights flip on.
He’s out of bed and down the hall before she’s even stopped cursing. He’s rubbing sleep from his eyes, in just an old Shins tee and boxers.
His hair is mussed.
She loves him.
“Go back to bed.” She sits down on the coffee table and pulls her foot up to inspect the toe.
“Are you okay?”
“I stubbed my toe,” she pouts.
He yawns, and crosses to sit on the couch in front of her. “This toe?” He reaches out and pulls her injured foot into his lap.
His hands are warm and gentle. He doesn’t touch her throbbing big toe, but rubs her foot. Already she can feel the pain starting to ease.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” she says. “I’m still not used to this place.”
They’ve been unpacking all week, methodically, one room at a time. His boxes, her boxes, it’s a project. The books alone. They’d started with the shelves in the office ( their office)--started with a fight over how to organize the shelves in the office--and it had ended with them having sex on his desk, and a complicated diagram of where each genre would go, and all the books still packed away in their boxes. (“At least we can agree,” he’d said around a bite of cold pizza, “that we’re not the kind of people who arrange their books by the color of the spine.” “At least .”)
“You didn’t wake me.”
He pulls her other foot into his lap, begins to massage that one, too.
“The fridge is making this noise...I can’t seem to tune it out. I’ve been lying there listening to it for two hours.”
“The fridge is on the other side of the apartment.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t sound like it.”
She slides her feet off of his lap and moves from the coffee table to the spot beside him on the couch. She fits so easily into the crook of his arm. Like a puzzle piece.
“The bedroom floor is slanted,” she whispers.
“The toilet runs for ten minutes every time I flush it.”
“I can never get the key to turn in the lock on the first try.”
“There’s a weird smell in the hall closet.”
“I think the pantry is haunted.”
Behind her, he shrugs. “I guess we have to move.”
She laughs. “It’s weird, living together.”
She’s lived with boyfriends before, sure, and these last six months, well, they hadn’t made it official, but he spent most nights at her place. But still, this felt different. A lease with both of their names on it, a space with both of their things in it. No homes of their own to slip away to, when they needed a break.
“A little weird, yeah.”
They bought the couch together, in a West Elm in Dumbo. Their first big purchase. They’d bought the bookshelves at IKEA, and the traitorous coffee table off Craigslist. The rugs were hand-me-downs from Lorelai, and all the lampshades were hand-decorated by Liz. Luke put all their furniture together last Sunday, complaining the whole time, and then stopping them when they said they’d just hire a Task Rabbit, or do it themselves.
She leans her head against his chest, listening to the thump-a-thump of his heart against her ear.
“Tell me about the fridge noise,” she says.
He settles behind her, pulls her closer.
“It’s a whirr, followed by a clunk, and then a growl.”
“The fridge is growling?”
“The fridge is growling.”
“Hmm.” She sits up. “Do you think something’s living in it? The pantry ghost?”
“I think it’s an electrical malfunction.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, she leans back against his chest. “That’s not as fun."
“I’ll call the super tomorrow.”
She yawns, and buries it against his chest. His yawn follows, into her hair.
“We’ll get used to it,” she says. Her eyes are drifting closed. “All of it. It’ll get...normal.”
“Even the smell in the closet?”
She’s forgotten her glass of water, and the throbbing in her toe. His breaths are slowing, growing longer and more even. She shifts in closer to him.
“Jess?” she says, but he’s asleep, and she’s most of the way there, too. “Love you,” she mutters.