Chapter 32

She wakes you gently.

The way she does everything — carefully, without rush, with that particular quality of attention that makes even small things feel considered. Her hand on your shoulder, soft. Your name, softer.

“Hey,” she says, when you open your eyes. “I have class.”

You blink at her in the warm morning light of her bedroom.

She’s dressed. Hair done. The silver ring back on. Her bag over her shoulder and something in her expression that is apologetic and fond in equal measure — the look of someone who would very much like to stay and is making themselves go.

“Okay,” you say, voice still thick with sleep.

“You can stay,” she says. “If you want. You don’t have to but—” she pauses. “I’d like it if you did.”

You look at her.

At the room around you. Her room. Her things. The photographs above the headboard and the records in the corner and the small figures on the windowsill and all of it, all of her, and outside her windows the morning is doing something soft and grey and unhurried.

“Okay,” you say again.

Her expression does the thing.

She leans down and kisses you — warm and brief and tasting of toothpaste — and then she’s pulling back and straightening up and heading for the door and at the threshold she turns back once.

“There’s coffee,” she says. “And whatever’s in the fridge. Help yourself to anything.”

“Alysa.”

She pauses.

“Go to class,” you say.

She smiles. Points at you. Goes.

The front door closes.

The apartment settles around you.

And you lie in her bed in her hoodie in the quiet of her morning and feel so warm and so giggling inside that you press your face into the pillow and just — stay there for a moment, being ridiculous, being happy, being someone who is lying in their girlfriend’s bed on a weekday morning and cannot stop smiling about it.

The shower is very her.

You stand in it for longer than strictly necessary, partly because the water pressure is excellent and partly because her shampoo smells like her and using it feels like being held by her from the inside out, which is an absurd thought that you have anyway and don’t regret.

Her shower gel next.

You emerge smelling entirely like Alysa and feel absolutely nothing but delight about this.

The hoodie goes back on immediately.

It is warm and soft and smells right and you pull the sleeves down over your hands and look at yourself in her bathroom mirror and think — yes. This is your domestic uniform now apparently. This is simply what you wear in her apartment. The universe has decided.

The closet is the next adventure.

You open it with genuine curiosity — the curiosity of someone learning a new language, wanting to know more vocabulary — and it does not disappoint. Organised in her particular way, which is to say organised by some internal logic that is entirely hers and makes complete sense once you look at it. Darks together. Textures grouped. Things that are clearly beloved hung with more care than things that are merely liked.

You look for a while.

Then you pull out a pair of her wide-leg black trousers — slightly too long, which you fold at the ankle — and a dark striped long sleeve that is soft and slightly worn in the best way and smells like the same detergent as the hoodie.

You put them on.

You look in the mirror.

Girlfriends sharing clothes, you think, and the word girlfriends does what it always does, that warm specific bloom in the chest, and you press your hand briefly to your sternum like you can keep it there.

You fold the hoodie carefully.

Find the small notepad of post-its on her desk — pink, which makes you smile, a concession to softness in the middle of all her darkness — and take a pen and write, in your neatest handwriting:

y/n’s sleepover hoodie

You draw a small heart beside it.

Stick it to the folded hoodie.

Set it on the end of her bed where she’ll find it.

Step back and look at it.

Feel very soft about it.

Move on.

The medals are in the living room.

You’ve been carefully not-looking at them since yesterday, giving them their space, but now in the quiet of the morning with no one watching you let yourself stand in front of them properly and just — look.

They’re on a shelf you half-noticed yesterday, tucked between the records and the manga, and in the soft morning light they are extraordinary. Not just the objects — the weight and the metal and the colours of the ribbons — but what they mean. What they represent. The years they contain.

National medals. Grand Prix medals.

And then — the Olympic ones.

Two of them.

You reach out and touch one, very lightly, just your fingertip on the edge of it, and something moves through you that is equal parts awe and admiration and something so tender it doesn’t have a name.

She did this, you think. This girl who draws hearts under benches and cries at Massimo’s showcase programmes and gets shy about her manga shelf — she did this.

You think about your own skating. Your silver medal from Saturday sitting in your bag by the door. Your combination spin and your flip and the Biellmann you held too long. You think about what it would mean to be here someday — not necessarily this shelf, not necessarily these exact medals — but this level. This height.

Maybe, you think.

And for the first time in a long time, standing in front of her shelf in her borrowed clothes, the word maybe feels less like a dream and more like a direction.

You take your finger from the medal.

Look at it for a moment longer.

Then you go and make coffee.

The dishes happen naturally.

You’re washing your mug and you notice the ones from yesterday still in the sink and it just — makes sense to wash those too. And once you’re washing those the pan from last night’s ramen is right there and so is a bowl and a spoon and then the whole sink is empty and you’ve dried everything and found where it goes through a combination of logic and opening cupboards until things make sense.

The laundry is next.

You find it partly because you’re looking for where she keeps things and partly because the basket in the bathroom is clearly full and overflowing in the way of someone who has been busy and hasn’t had time, and you take it to the machine in the small cupboard off the hallway and put a load on with the detergent that’s right there on the shelf and the particular satisfaction of domestic tasks well executed settles over you like a second blanket.

Then you look at the fridge.

The grocery order takes fifteen minutes.

You sit at her kitchen table with her laptop — she said help yourself to anything, you decide this counts — and order what you need: butter, flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate chips, pasta, good canned tomatoes, garlic, the specific brand of olive oil that’s already in the cupboard so you know she likes it.

It arrives in forty minutes.

You unpack it into her kitchen like you know where things go, which mostly you do by now, and then you tie your hair back with a spare ribbon from your bag and put a podcast on low on your phone and start.

The cookies go in first.

You make the dough the way your mother taught you — by hand, no mixer, which takes longer and is better — and roll them and space them on the tray you found in the third cupboard you checked and put them in the oven and set the timer on your phone.

The pasta sauce while they bake.

Garlic in the oil first, slow and low, the smell of it filling the kitchen and the flat and probably the hallway, the deeply good smell of something being made from scratch in someone’s home. Tomatoes next, broken down with a spoon, a little salt, the particular patience of a sauce that wants time and rewards it.

You stir.

The cookies bake.

The laundry runs.

The apartment smells like garlic and butter and something warm and domestic and entirely unlike how it smelled yesterday, which was like her, and you think — maybe this is what two people smell like. Maybe this is what a shared space smells like when it’s becoming one.

You stir the sauce.

Turn the pasta water on.

Check the cookies — five more minutes.

The key in the lock.

You hear it and look up from the pot and then look back down and keep stirring because the sauce needs stirring and also because your heart has done something at the sound and you need a moment.

The door opens.

She stops in the doorway.

You can tell without looking — the particular quality of the silence, the absence of movement, the sound of the door not closing behind her.

You turn around.

She’s standing in the entrance of her kitchen with her bag on her shoulder and her jacket still on and her keys in her hand, and she is looking at — all of it. At you in her clothes with your hair tied back. At the pot on the stove and the cookies cooling on the rack on the counter. At the empty dish rack and the folded tea towel and the grocery bags folded neatly on the side.

At her kitchen that smells like garlic and butter and something warm.

At you.

Her expression does something you feel rather than see — a shift, a quality of light moving through it, something that starts in her eyes and goes everywhere. And then she blinks, once, and in the corner of her eye something catches the light.

A twinkle.

Actual, genuine, your-heart-is-doing-something warmth catching in her eye.

And her mouth does the pull — slow and involuntary, the kind of smile that happens to you rather than being made, the kind that starts because something has moved something inside you and the face simply responds.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment.

Just stands there in her kitchen doorway with her keys in her hand and looks at you like you are the best thing she has ever come home to.

“Hi,” you say, softly.

She sets her keys down on the counter.

Drops her bag.

Crosses to you.

Puts her arms around you from behind and her chin on your shoulder and looks at the sauce with you and just — stays there. Warm and certain and entirely present, the way she always is.

“You cooked,” she says.

“Almost done,” you say.

“You did laundry.”

“It was full.”

“You ordered groceries.”

“The fridge needed things.”

A pause.

“There are cookies,” she says.

“Chocolate chip.”

She turns her face into your neck.

You feel her smile against your skin.

“[y/n],” she says.

“Mm.”

“You made yourself at home in my apartment.”

“You said help yourself to anything.”

“I meant the coffee.”

“You should have been more specific,” you say.

She laughs — warm and muffled against your shoulder — and tightens her arms around you and you stir the sauce and feel her there and think about maybe and Olympic medals and the smell of two people and all the Wednesdays that led to this exact Thursday afternoon in her kitchen.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

Not just for the food.

You know that.

“Always,” you say.

You mean it the same way.