“I have to text all my friends...”
“Very funny,” I snorted. Then I gestured to the couch. “So is that okay? Is it alright if I set up down here, or—”
This time, it was his turn to laugh.
“Abby, you don’t need to ask permission. This is your house now too.” He spread his arms wide, gesturing all around. “What’s mine is yours. No exceptions.”
Again—profoundly touched.
I hid it well, watching with a touch of amusement as he started rambling on about all the ‘normal’ things the two of us could do. Most of them were clearly stolen from a domestic TV show, and throughout the entire process, he seemed to have completely forgotten he was naked.
It wasn’t until he started seriously considering the prospect of getting a dog, that I cleared my throat softly to get his attention.
“Nick...normal people don’t go skinny-dipping in the middle of the living room floor.”
He paused mid-rant, then glanced down without a hint of shame.
“Right that...that makes some degree of sense.” With a grin that could scarcely contain his excitement, he scooped up a towel, fastened it around his waist, and sprinted up the stairs, taking them four at a time. “Let me just get dressed, I’ll be down in a minute!”
“You do that,” I answered, doing my very best to keep from laughing.
A second later a door slammed shut, but his voice still echoed down the winding stairs.
“Don’t start without me!”
* * *
After over two years of gallivanting all over the globe with Nick, cleaning up his various messes, I had thought there was very little left that could surprise me. Very little ground we had left to cover, or things we had yet to try. I was wrong.
Nick and I had yet to have a normal day.
“This is blowing my fucking mind right now.” He leaned past me to get a better look at the screen, inadvertently covering my face with a fan of his hair. “You just type in anything you want, and they’ll find you a seller? Anything you can think of?”
Although it clearly went against his every restless instinct, he had taken to our newfound stagnancy like a fish to water—deliberately hollowing out a little crater for himself in the couch cushions, just so it looked like he had been there longer than he had. Online shopping, in particular, was a source of great entertainment and fun. Perhaps, because it was the only bit of common ground he was likely to find—Nick loved to spend money.
“For fuck’s sake,” I spat out a mouthful of his hair, “this cannot possibly be the first time you’ve done this. How have you never heard of Amazon?”
“I was always under the impression it was a river. Come on,” he reached pleadingly for the keyboard, “give it to me. Let me help.”
“You’re not helping,” I clarified, shutting down the notion. “If anything, you’re making this take ten times longer than it’s supposed to.”
He ignored me, eyes lit up with a manic glow from the screen.
“Go back to ‘patio and garden.’ I think we should buy a rake.”
“We are not buying a—” I slapped his hand as he reached for the mouse, “don’t touch that! We are not buying a rake. You don’t even have a lawn.”
“Someday I might have one.” His eyes glassed over as he imagined a million possibilities he’d never considered. “In fact—I bet that’s something we could order from here too!”
I gave him a long look, before securing the laptop squarely on my own legs.
“This was a huge mistake.”
“No, it wasn’t!” he said excitedly. “Abby, you were totally right. This is great! And very normal,” he added seriously, upon seeing the look on my face.
I let out a snort of laughter, and continued browsing for clothes.
Nick hadn’t told me where the storage space was—according to him, it was somewhere on the Eastern seaboard, but that was the only thing he could remember. Instead, he had insisted upon building up my wardrobe from scratch—his treat.