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She has a permanent side of the bed now, and next to it a nightstand with a candle that smells of fresh linen. There’s a laundry hamper hidden inside the closet that she now gets to add her clothes to. In the kitchen is a fridge with a photo-strip of the two of them from Angela and Wesley’s wedding, and above it, a photo of Kojo snuggled up next to Tim’s head in bed, Lucy photobombing in the bottom corner.
She takes it the morning after he asks her to move in with him, commemorating his home becoming their home.
Their home.
It’s a reality better than anything she had ever dreamed up in her head, back when there was only an empty drawer with her name on it and a toothbrush next to his in a cup.
Lucy smiles, running her hand along the rim of the cardboard box labeled ‘living room- FRAGILE’ and pulling it open. There are boxes just like the one in front of her in almost every room in the house waiting to be unpacked. This one is a hodge-podge of framed pictures, candles and various knickknacks wrapped in packing paper and bubble wrap.
The paper rustles underneath her touch as she begins to rifle through all of it, sorting out where she wants to place each item.
A Summer candle that smells of peonies goes right in the middle of the coffee table, complimenting the vase of flowers Tim had brought home to her the night before.
A row of books on the built-ins are now held up by a pair of bookends given to her by her grandmother right before she passed away.
A family photo of her, Tim, and Kojo is placed on the fireplace mantle. A sweet souvenir taken the night they celebrate Tim’s promotion to sergeant. They are sitting in a wicker chair together on the back patio, Lucy’s arms thrown around Tim’s neck, their foreheads pressed together. Jackson is behind the camera trying to keep Kojo’s attention with a dog treat, and Lucy is saying anything she can to make Tim crack a smile after the fifth retake.
Unwrap. Reminisce. Sort. Place. Repeat.
She’s an hour and a half and five boxes in with her steady rhythm, a bead of sweat on her brow, when Kojo’s collar jangles and his head pops up from his place on the sectional.
“What did you hear, bubba?” Kojo looks over at her, his ears standing up on his head. From the driveway Tim’s truck door closes, and the alarm system beeps as he locks it behind him. Lucy grins. “Who’s here, Kojo? Go see!”
He is off the couch before the word ‘go,’ sliding on the discarded packing paper as he makes a run for the door. The key disengages the metal bolt with a click, and the door pushes open.
What happens next, she can only hear from her vantage point amongst the boxes, but she has seen it enough to know exactly what it looks like. The ear scratches, and the belly rubs, and the way the pitch in Tim’s voice gets just a tiny bit higher and his smile cracks across his face a little bit more when he greets Kojo at the door.
It is on the list of her top favorite things. It affirms everything that she already knew when he showed up at her apartment a few years ago and agreed to take Kojo in. Tim’s a good home.
A dreamy, warm, safe…
“Hey babe.” The voice sounds fuzzy in her ears as it brings her back down to earth. She peers over the cardboard to see him propped against the arched doorway to the living room grinning—soft and playful—like she was just caught daydreaming about him. She mouths something resembling a hello, and her eyes trace his smile lines, following the trail her thumbs usually take right before she kisses him. He pushes off the frame with his shoulder, and starts ambling towards her, nudging boxes out of the way with the toe of his boots. Kojo trails behind him. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”
He makes a small hand gesture towards the living room space. She wants to laugh as she pushes herself to her feet, his eyes quickly giving him away as they dart across the living room floor. From the empty boxes that are strewn across the room, and a growing collection of bubble wrap at her feet, to the packing paper Kojo had run over, torn on the ground, and the chair pulled from the dining room so she could get to the spaces that were out of reach.
“Lying isn’t a good look on you, Sergeant Bradford” she murmurs, her eyes twinkling up at him. He gingerly tucks a stray hair behind her ear and places a kiss to her temple before pulling her into him by the beltloops of her jeans. Her fingertips reach out to cup his face, her thumbs tracing the outer edge of the smile lines she could not reach before, and she rolls up to her tiptoes to remind herself how her favorite grin feels pressed against her mouth. “I promise I am going to clean up. I’m on my last box for the night.”
There’s a snort on his end. “Oh, you thought I was talking about all of this?” His eyes make a trip around the floor again and she follows his path through the clutter. When he notices the bubble wrap at their feet, he reaches the toe of his boot forward and presses down to hear a satisfying pop. Kojo barks at the noise, and Tim looks at both of them with a smirk. “No, this is the best part.”
Lucy giggles, and buries her face into his chest. His finger locks under her chin, and he pulls her head up to look at him.
“I love you.” He leans down to kiss her this time, saving her toes the stretch. “I’m glad you’re making yourself at home.”
She has paint swatches hung on walls with blue masking tape, and boxes from Target and Amazon that are starting to show up on their doorstep every couple of weeks or so. Throw pillows have been rearranged on couches and beds, and new art has been added to the walls. There are kitchen gadgets that Tim has never heard of, and colors that he is wary of adding to his walls. It’s all a culmination of the hours she’s spent scouring Pinterest for room ideas, and the trips she’s made to Lowe’s after her shifts.
And he isn’t big on change, his house the same on the day she moved into it as it was four years ago, but they are making compromises.
Kind of.
“Wallpaper?” His eyes search hers, looking for any sign that she isn’t serious. The paint roller makes an abrupt stop on the bedroom wall, and he holds it up in front of his chest, pointing it at her. “You want to put wallpaper in our bedroom?”
She rolls her eyes and waves her paint brush back at him. “It’s just one wall, Tim. One measly little wall behind the bed.” He grumbles something underneath his breath, loud enough for her to hear the snarky undertone, and goes back to rolling paint. One of her eyebrows quirks up. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” he mutters.
Her fingers twitch around the paintbrush, holding herself back from reaching across and using him as her personal canvas. And admittedly, she is point five seconds away from it when he turns to face her again.
“I said that we don’t live in the 1900’s anymore…” he pauses, his eyes shifting between the paint brush in her hand and her hard-pressed mouth and raised brows, “Goosey.”
Goosey. The nickname her mother gave her as a child. Goosey. Her least favorite nickname, and a button that he knows exactly when to push to get a reaction out of her.
So she doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t even feel guilty when the bristles of her paint brush meet his forehead and she swipes a single stripe of matte white paint down to his chin.
She has to bite back a laugh as she stands there and watches him process, his eyes still closed in shock as the white paint drips from his chin and on to the plastic floor covering. It’s revenge in the sweetest sense. A mental image stored away for a cloudy and gloomy day. A feeling she has to hold on to when he gets her back, rolling paint from the shoulder of her right arm down to her fingertips.
His smug grin buried underneath the white paint, and his outstretched paint roller provokes her.
“Oh,” she laughs, and raises her paintbrush to swipe it across his right cheek, “it’s on, Timothy.”
His lip curls, repulsed by the name, and he accepts her invitation to battle with a roll of paint across her collarbones.
Wallpaper is long forgotten as they chase each other around the room, dodging covered furniture, and slipping on the plastic tarp. Lucy squeals every time the paint finds her skin, and Tim groans. It’s a constant fight of trying to even the score until they are piled on top of each other on their bedroom floor, both equally bathed in paint.
“You can have the wallpaper,” he breathes out, his chest rising and falling underneath her. She listens to his heartbeat as he combs his fingers through her matted hair, picking the dry paint out. “I don’t want to have to buy another can of paint.”
She has new neighbors, separated by yards and streets, and she honestly forgets what a perk it is to not have to share walls and noises with other people who are not Tim.
Sure, there’s the occasional early Saturday morning mow or the Taylor’s golden retriever who likes to bark at Kojo through the fence, but she’s getting used to it. Her ears less prone to pick up every noise, a warm body there to pull her close when she startles, her mind more content to let herself go back to sleep.
She’s no longer a nomad moving from place to place, and she wonders why she was ever hesitant to settle down in the first place.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
A finger swipes across her cheek leaving a powdered residue behind, and she turns to find the culprit in front of the mixing bowl with a cup of flour in his hand. She presses her tongue to the inside of her cheek and raises her eyebrows at him, challenging him to do it again.
“What?” He defends, flour going into the bowl and arms going up in surrender. “My sous cheff zoned out on me.”
God. It’s really hard to stay mad at him when he is standing there in an apron and calling her his sous chef. The smirk on his face tells her that he knows it too.
She bumps her hip into his, and reaches across him to grab the vanilla and pour it in. “Nothing.” She shrugs her shoulders, and turns to look at him. “I was just thinking about how nice it is to have good neighbors that we can bake cookies for.”
His smirk softens into a smile and he hip checks her back. “I know this may come as a shock to you, but this,” his hands gesticulate over the bowl, “isn’t something I would usually do.”
“No, really?”
It’s feigned shock with a heaping side of giggles. He rolls his eyes as he pours sugar into the bowl, and she rolls up on the balls of her feet to kiss him on the cheek. Her arms wrap around his waist and she pulls him into her, breathy laughter still on her lips.
“I’m sorry I’m laughing. Thank you for doing this with me.”
“Mhmm,” he hums, looking down at her.
The light above the sink dances across her face in an otherwise dim kitchen, putting a sparkle in her playful eyes. The annoyance on his face gives way to a subtle grin. She cranes her head up and he meets her halfway, softly kissing her on the lips.
He may not be the bake cookies for your neighbor kind of man, but he’s a good, steady man. The kind that mows your lawn on his day off because he knows you’re having a hard time getting around. The kind that rescues frisbees from roofs and will toss the football with your kids in the street. The kind that will answer the phone when you’re panicked that something is wrong. The kind that leaves his porch light on and passes out candy during Halloween if he’s home and leaves the bowl on the porch if he isn’t.
“You’re staring at me, Chen.”
“Sorry,” she shrugs, and plucks a couple of chocolate chips from the bowl for herself, “be uglier next time.”
“You have him, Chen,” Angela tells her over drinks one night after Tim escapes to the restroom. Lucy opens her mouth to ask her what she means, but Angela beats her to the punch. “You have him. He would do anything for you! It’s like full on Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, ‘If you’re a bird, I’m a bird,’ crap.”
And it’s her favorite thing really, to have him, to get to see the parts of him that no one else gets to see, to live in his orbit, to hold his heart.