She holds my gaze.
Something warm and complicated moves in her expression, there and then quickly folded away. “It did,” she says. “It just needed a little color.”
The room goes thick for just a moment, that charged quality of two people standing close in a quiet kitchen with something unspoken sitting directly between them.
Memphis walks back through and plants himself between us with the magnificent obliviousness of a dog who has never once read a room in his life. We both look down at him, and the moment dissolves naturally into something easier.
“Pizza tonight?” I move back to the counter.
“Yeah.”
And we don’t talk about it again.
***
The movie is my idea.
Not entirely sure what makes me suggest it. It’s a Saturday night, both of us home, the desert outside, the quiet of a house that has stopped feeling empty and started feeling like something I’m not ready to name.
“Pick something.” I hand her the remote and drop onto the other end of the couch. “Something you’ll actually watch. Not something you think I want to watch.”
She smiles the smile she gets when she is deciding something and starts scrolling.
Memphis appears from nowhere and climbs onto the couch between us with the calm certainty of a dog who has decided this is his spot and dares anyone to argue with him. Moving sideways to make room, Sophia tucks her feet up beneath her on her end. Memphis settles in the middle like a large furry mediator and looks at the screen with great seriousness.
The pizza arrives twenty minutes later, and we eat it straight from the box on the coffee table, the way nobody who has a dining room table ever admits to eating pizza, and it is easy. Completely and unexpectedly easy, the way things are between us now, the way the house has started to feel.
“Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Sophia says, remote in her hand.
Looking at her.
“No.”
“You said something I’d actually watch.”
“Something we’d both actually watch.”
“I’m watching it,” she says pleasantly, and presses play before anything else can be said.
I briefly look at the ceiling, then at the screen.
Twenty minutes in, and comments are being made about the unrealistic nature of romantic comedies in general and this onespecifically. Sophia is ignoring all of them with the practiced ease of someone who has decided the commentary is simply ambient noise.
Thirty minutes in, and the comments have stopped.
Forty minutes in, Ryan Gosling takes off his shirt, and Sophia makes a small, involuntary sound of appreciation that she clearly hadn’t intended to make out loud.
Memphis looks up from the couch.
“He’s got decent abs,” Sophia says, as if this is a perfectly normal observation to make.
“Decent.”
She glances over. “For a movie star.”
“Right.”
A beat, then I reach down, grab the hem of my T-shirt, lift it in one quick movement, completely straight-faced, and display what is underneath with the calm confidence of a man who has absolutely nothing to be modest about in this department.