Unpacking Us

The house smelled like cardboard and somebody else's paint choices, and Alina stood in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips and decided she loved every square inch of it. Boxes climbed the walls like they were paying rent, the couch wore a bedsheet like a ghost at a costume party, and the only thing they had actually unpacked so far was the coffee maker, which she considered a reasonable act of triage. Three years of dating Warren, of driving between his place and hers with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, and here they finally were, two adults old enough to know better, tripping over bubble wrap at seven in the evening. She was fifty-four, she'd spent thirty years in banking, and she had never once felt this giddy about a house.

And that was what she kept circling back to, the thing the boxes made her think about. There was something about a half-unpacked house, all that bare carpet and those big naked windows with nothing but sheet curtains, that made her feel exposed in a way she found herself wanting more of. She and Warren had always played this way, ever since that fundraiser in Phoenix three years ago when he'd caught her eye across a silent-auction table and spent the whole weekend pretending he wasn't looking at her legs under the table. He was a retired firefighter, fifty-six now, two years out of the job, with forearms that still said he'd spent thirty years hauling hose, and he had figured out almost immediately that she liked being looked at and that he liked doing the looking. Their whole relationship ran on it.

"You're doing that thinking face," Warren said from the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel. "I know that face. That face usually costs me money or dignity."

"Neither," Alina said, turning around slow, which was itself part of the fun. "I'm just appreciating the house. All these windows. So much light."

"Uh huh," he said, and his eyes did the thing they always did, a slow trip down and back up like he had all the time in the world. "The light. Sure. I'm making a coffee run, the creamer's still in the cooler in the truck. Want anything?"

"Actually, yes. Go to that place on Maple, the one with the little almond croissants, and get me two, because I burned about nine hundred calories pretending to carry that dresser." She fished cash out of her back pocket and he waved it off, which she loved, and then he kissed her quick at the door and said he'd be twenty minutes, maybe thirty if the line was long, and she watched him pull the pickup out of the driveway and thought, well, thirty minutes was plenty.

She locked the door behind him mostly out of habit, then stood in the living room and listened to the quiet. One lamp on, the one Warren had dug out of a box marked BEDROOM MISC and stuck in the corner without plugging anything else in, warm light over the cleared patch of carpet where the rug they'd bought years ago and never had room for was finally unrolled. A rug, an empty room, a big window facing the street, and thirty minutes. Anybody with a pulse could see where that was going, and Alina had never once in her life claimed to have a slow pulse.

The neighbors were mostly boxes and strangers at this point. They'd been moving in for four days and she'd traded hellos with exactly three people, a woman with a stroller, a guy who'd complained about the mailbox placement, and a man named Evan from next door, forty-eight maybe, silver at the temples, who had helped Warren wrangle the sectional through the front door on Tuesday and had lingered afterward the way men do when they're being polite but also maybe not only polite. He'd shaken her hand and held it half a beat longer than the handshake required, and Warren had caught that too, she'd seen him catch it, and neither of them had said a word about it, which somehow said everything.

So she took her hair down first, shook it loose the way she did when she wanted to feel like herself and not like someone who approved loan applications. Then she sat on the edge of the rug and took off her shoes, and her socks, and she was still wearing the paint-splattered flannel she'd had on all day, and she decided the flannel stayed, because there was something about a flannel shirt and nothing else that made her feel like a pinup in a truck stop calendar. She left her jeans folded on the box marked OFFICE, set her bra on top of them, and lay back on the rug on her stomach, propped on her elbows, ankles crossed and lifted behind her, facing the big front window with her bottom turned toward the door.

The lamp caught her just right. She knew it caught her just right because she checked, tilting her chin and glancing back toward the corner like she was her own photographer, and the light ran warm across her shoulder and down the curve of her hip. Fifty-four years old, two kids grown and gone, a body that had earned every stretch mark and soft spot it had, and she still felt like the most interesting thing in the room. She usually was, in Warren's opinion, and his opinion was the only vote that counted, though she had to admit the idea of a second vote, an undecided voter maybe, was doing something pleasant for her.

Because here was her honest little secret, the one she'd confessed to Warren on their second anniversary with her face in a pillow: she liked being seen. Not by everybody, not by anyone who hadn't earned it, but the risk of a window, the idea that Evan next door might glance over while taking out his trash, that the mover with the tattooed forearms might catch a flash through the door on Thursday, made her skin hum like a struck tuning fork. Warren had gone very still when she told him, then grinned like Christmas had come early, and ever since he'd been her director, arranging her, daring her, standing behind her with one hand between her shoulder blades saying slower, baby, slower, let them wonder.

She heard the mailbox clack at the curb and her pulse jumped, which was ridiculous, because it was probably just the mail. She wiggled her hips once, purely for herself, and reached for her phone to check the time. Fourteen minutes gone. She had maybe sixteen minutes to lie there being gorgeous and shameless before her boyfriend came home with croissants and found his girlfriend naked on the rug with the curtains open, and she intended to spend every one of those minutes well.

The evening light was doing something generous out the window, the street going gold, a car passing slow enough that she pressed her palm flat to the carpet and waited, half disappointed and half relieved when it just drove on. Evan's kitchen window was dark, his car absent from the driveway, and she made a small note of that for later, the way she made notes for later about everything now, because they had a whole house to fill and a whole life to fill it with, and she had made Warren promise to let her bring him all her ideas, the nice ones and the filthy ones, and he'd promised, and he was a man who kept his promises.

Headlights swept the driveway. Keys, the jingle of them, the deadbolt turning, and Alina arranged her smile the way she arranged everything else, slowly and on purpose, and waited.

Warren came in with the paper bag and stopped dead in the doorway, croissants and the takeout lo mein forgotten somewhere around shoulder height, and Alina watched his face do the thing it did, the slow widening, the eyebrows climbing like they were riding an escalator. "Well," he said, setting the bag down on the nearest box without looking at it, "somebody got started without me."

"Somebody got inspired," she said, rolling onto her side so the flannel fell open the way she wanted it to, showing him exactly what she had on underneath, which was nothing and also everything. "I was thinking about you the whole time, if that helps."

"It helps," he said, and his voice had gone low and warm, the voice he used when he was taking his time, and he leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed like a man settling in for a show he had paid good money for. "Don't stop on my account. You were doing something with your hair when I looked through the window."

"I was posing," she admitted, and felt her cheeks go hot, which was absurd given the circumstances, fifty-four years old and blushing in her own living room while wearing a shirt and a smile. "Warren, I've been thinking. About the whole being seen thing. I want more of it. I want an audience, a real one, and I want you to be the one who arranges it, because you're good at it and because it's hotter when you're the one holding the door."

He came into the room then, slow, and knelt down beside the rug, and kissed her forehead the way he did when she told him something true. "Okay," he said. "Okay, baby. We'll figure out who, and we'll figure out how slow, and nothing happens that you don't ask for first. You know that."

"I know that," she said, and unbuttoned the flannel all the way down, one button at a time while he watched, because she had learned over three years that Warren liked the watching almost more than the having, and she liked him liking it, so everybody won.

* * *

They ate dinner that night on a box marked KITCHEN ?? because the table was still in the garage wrapped in a furniture blanket, and it turned out to be the best meal they'd had in the house so far, almond croissants and cold takeout lo mein eaten off paper plates with their knees knocked together under them. Warren tore his croissant in half and said, casually, the way a man says a thing he has been chewing on for hours, "So. Evan."

"Evan," Alina agreed, and waited, because she had learned that Warren got there eventually and rushing him was like shaking a vending machine.

"He carried a third of a sectional up our porch steps on Tuesday and then stood in our living room making conversation for twenty minutes while you were in the kitchen, and I don't think he was making conversation because he loves cardboard boxes." He took a bite, chewed, watched her over it. "And I saw you watch him watch you, so let's not do the dance where we pretend neither of us noticed."

"I noticed," she said, and set down her fork, and felt the humming start up in her skin again just from saying it out loud. "He's got nice hands and he's got that gray coming in and he laughed at your terrible jokes, which means either he's kind or he's smart, and honestly both work for me." She reached across and took Warren's hand. "But I don't want to just flash the guy and ruin it. I want it slow. I want him to wonder a little first. I want to wonder a little too."

"So we invite him to help unpack," Warren said slowly, working it out the way he worked out fire ground problems back when that was his whole job, one piece at a time, out loud. "Thursday maybe. We've got a garage full of boxes and a man next door with nothing but free time and good forearms. He comes over, he helps, the curtains are open, and whatever he happens to see, well." He shrugged, and the shrug contained an entire dirty novel. "We're still moving in. People see things when you're moving in."

"And you'd be there the whole time," she said, not a question, just wanting to hear it.

"Every second," he said. "Holding the door, directing traffic, being the lucky guy who gets to take you to bed after. That part's not negotiable and it's not for him anyway, it's for me." He grinned, that Christmas grin. "We take it slow. We see how you feel with him in the house. If it's too much, we close the curtains and he carries boxes and goes home and