"Are you going to be weird about it? When I move in?"
"Define weird."
"Like, sad. Moping. Sitting in the garage pretending to work while actually staring at the wall."
"That's oddly specific."
"Because that's what you do. You sit on the garage stool and pretend to fix things."
"I fix plenty of things."
"You fixed the Sportster. Singular. Everything else is sitting and reading. Jason told me."
"I'm between projects."
He rolls onto his side and looks at me. The lamplight. His face, the bruise finally fading, yellow-green now, almost gone. His eyes dark and warm and clear.
"I'm going to miss sleeping here," he says.
"You can sleep here whenever you want."
"I know. But I need to sleep there too. At the apartment. I need to know I can."
"I know."
"It's not about wanting to be away from you."
"I know that too."
"It's about knowing I can be alone and be okay. That I won't fall apart without someone holding me."
"Dev, you slept in a laundromat chair and got up the next morning and went to work. You can be alone and be okay. You've been doing that your entire life."
"But I was surviving. I want to know I can be alone and be more than surviving. That I can be alone in my own apartment with my own kitchen and my own window and be... happy. By myself. Without needing someone else's arms to make it okay."
"You will be."
"You don't know that."
"I know you. That's enough." I close my book. "And for the record, you'll be three miles from the bar. You're not moving to another continent. You'll be here for dinner, and book club, and cooking lessons, and Saturday mornings. The apartment doesn't mean you disappear."
"Promise?"
"The dragon mug will be on the bar. Your stool will be at the counter. The blueprints will be in the garage. Nothing changes except where you sleep. And even that's negotiable."
"Negotiable how?"
"My bed misses you already and you haven't left yet."
"Your bed is a twin mattress on a frame that creaks every time we move."
"It has character."
"It has a structural problem."
"Same thing."
He laughs. The real one. The full brightness. And I think about the apartment on Birch Street, and a house with bookshelves four months from being real, and the fact that everything I want is right here, in this room, arguing about my mattress.