The Ex Talk(99)

Dominic brightens, that lovely smile spreading across his face. He’s been doing that a lot since I asked him to move in a couple weeks ago. “Our,” he says, and it might be my new favorite word. “I like that a lot.”

It takes us a few hours to load everything into the U-Haul, with a break for some Thai takeout we eat on the floor after realizing we maybe shouldn’t have packed up all the chairs first.

“Ready to say goodbye to this place?” I ask as we stand in the doorway, giving it one last look. The walls are bare, everything either packed in the truck or donated to Goodwill.

“Truthfully? I’ve been ready since I moved in.” He hooks his arm around my shoulders, drops a kiss on the top of my head. “But I’m really glad this is the reason it’s happening now.”

In the truck, Dominic flips through the radio presets, panic flashing in his eyes when one of them turns out to be 88.3 FM. I haven’t been able to listen to PPR since I stormed the offices during their pledge drive three months ago. Not yet. It helps that Kent was let go, but there are still too many grim memories attached to it.

So I surprise both of us when I say, “Leave it,” before he changes the station.

“You sure?”

I swallow around a lump in my throat and nod. It’s the top of the hour, so we listen to an NPR newsbreak. And damn if those NPR voices aren’t still the most soothing journalistic lullaby.

A few seconds into a local story from Paul Wagner about Seattle’s housing market, I bail. “That’s about all I can handle for today,” I say, switching the station to Jumpin’ Jazz with Paloma Powers. Apparently I like jazz now. Human beings really are capable of change.

Steve is waiting to greet us, pawing at our legs until he’s received a sufficient amount of pets. Then I give him a new chew toy to keep him occupied while we unload boxes of Dominic’s clothes, toiletries, and cookware.

“How did you manage to sneak this in?” I ask, holding up a collectible glass box with a Beanie Baby inside. A white bear with a heart on its chest.

“We hold on to Valentino for a few more years, and we’ve got it made.” Dominic taps the box. “This guy’s gonna put our kids through college. I can feel it.”

After we’ve emptied the truck, I stand back and take a look at my living room—our living room. We have plenty of rearranging to keep us busy for the next few days, but I don’t hate the moving-day messiness. We swapped my TV for his larger one, draped a fringed blanket of his across the couch. One of Ameena’s Blush ’n Brush landscapes is hanging in the hallway next to a framed photo of Dominic and me hiking on Orcas Island. Even though we’ve taken plenty of photos since then and we weren’t officially together in that shot, it’s still my favorite one of us.

The guest room, too, is looking much less sad. Along with the VITTSJ? bookshelf, we added a vintage lamp from his parents’ antique shop, and we have plans to paint the whole house together once we’re a bit more settled. We might host Ameena and TJ or Dominic’s friends from college, many of whom he’s rekindled relationships with, sometime soon. There’s a novelty: guests for the guest room.

This house used to feel like some adulthood status symbol. Maybe I didn’t have the rest of my life figured out, but I had these walls and windows, these objects without memory. That was all they were: things I hadn’t attached meaning to yet. It became a home long before Dominic and I decided to move in together, and Steve helped, but more than anything, I think I just needed time to learn to love it on my own terms. I grew into that love, into this place, and I can’t believe I wanted to rush it.

We’re so wiped that we’re in bed by nine o’clock. Our new larger dresser will arrive next week, but for now I like the way Dominic’s clothes live next to mine. All of this is new to me, and I tell him as much when we slide beneath the sheets.

“It’s going to be good, though,” he says. “I can’t wait to learn all the weird things you do when you’re alone.”

“They can’t be worse than you wearing a blanket as a cape and pretending to cast spells on Steve.”

“That was one time! And I really thought you were still in the shower.”

I snuggle closer, laughing into his shoulder. His arms come around me, a thumb stroking the space between my shoulder blades. It hasn’t sunk in that we get to fall asleep together like this every night, that I’ll wake up next to him every morning.

“I love you in this house,” I say. “I’ve thought so since the first time you came over. I was too scared to say anything, but you just felt so right here. It was the worst, feeling all those things and not knowing if you were feeling them, too.”

He grasps me tighter. “I was. I was feeling them so much that it killed me to leave. It killed me to leave every time.”

Even now, hearing that does something to my heart. “Can you believe we hated each other a year ago?”

“I think you mean a year ago, we were on our third or fourth date. I believe that was the one where I demonstrated some of my raw sexual energy.”

“I might need a refresher,” I say, but he’s already rolling me on top of him, his hands on my hips, and together we discover maybe we weren’t that exhausted after all.



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