When Love Creeps In

I wake up slow, the way you only do when you slept really well, and for a second I don't know where I am. Then I hear the ocean through the open window and the coffee smell drifting down the hall, and I remember. Rhys's house. Pelican Shores. Saturday morning, our third weekend in a row that I've driven down from Raleigh instead of him coming up to me.

I'm thirty-two years old and I have never once in my life slept past seven without an alarm, but here it is pushing eight-thirty and I'm still horizontal. Somewhere down the hall Rhys is humming something that might be Motown and might be a hymn, because the man cannot carry a tune and doesn't care who knows it.

I sit up and the sheet slides off and the morning air is cool on my skin. His shirt is draped over the footboard, the gray one with the little burn hole near the pocket from when he got cocky with a blowtorch at work. I pull it on. It comes down to my thighs, soft gray cotton against my brown skin, and smells like him, like the cedar blocks he keeps in his dresser, and I stand there a minute just enjoying that.

Downstairs, he's at the stove with his back to me, whisking something in a bowl like it owes him money.

"Good morning, chef," I say, and he jumps about a foot.

"Lord, Sharon. Wear a bell or something." He turns around and stops, because I'm wearing his shirt and not much else, and he does that thing where his ears go red before his face does.

"Nice shirt," I say, tugging the hem.

"It looks better on you. That's the problem with you stealing my clothes. Now I know how good they look and I can't wear them without thinking about it."

I pour myself coffee from the pot he's already set out for me, because three months in, the man has learned exactly how I take it, no sugar, splash of cream, and I lean against the counter and watch him go back to the eggs.

"You're doing the thing," I say.

"What thing?"

"The egg thing. The whole ritual. You warmed the bowl, didn't you."

He gives me a look over his shoulder. "Scrambled eggs are fifty percent technique and fifty percent temperature, and if you think I'm going to stand in my own kitchen and serve you rubber, you picked the wrong weekend to be here."

"Rhys, I have eaten gas station egg sandwiches and lived."

"And did you enjoy it?"

"Well, no."

"Then hush and let me work."

I hush and let him work, mostly. He butters the toast while the eggs come off the heat early because he's always afraid of carrying over, and he plates it all with a little parsley on top because he can't help himself, and we carry it out to the porch table where the morning is gray and soft and the beach down the block is empty except for one guy walking a dog that's clearly winning.

"So," Rhys says, after we've eaten in silence for a while, the good kind of silence. "Last night."

"Oh no."

"The lamp."

"I wasn't going to bring it up."

"You were absolutely going to bring it up." He sets his mug down. "I have known you for three months. You brought up the time I tripped on the curb outside your office within the hour."

"Okay, in my defense, that lamp was not where lamps go."

"It was where lamps have gone for six years, Sharon. It was against the wall. I turned around to get the second condom and swung my elbow right through it. Glass everywhere. And you laughed so hard you had to sit down on the bed."

"Because you were standing there in the dark holding the condom like a little trophy, completely naked, apologizing to a lamp." I'm laughing again now, into my coffee. "You said, I'm so sorry, babe, and I genuinely could not tell if you meant me or the lamp."

"The lamp gave as good as it got, honestly. It was a nice lamp." He shakes his head, but he's grinning. "Swept up glass at eleven at night with a hand towel, barefoot, because my vacuum's in the closet behind the Christmas boxes."

"And then we just, what, went back to it?"

"You told me if I cut my foot you were driving me to the urgent care in Nags Head myself and it would ruin the mood forever."

"And then you were very careful."

"And then I was very careful." He toasts me with his mug. "Worth it, though."

"Worth it," I agree, and I mean it more than I'm ready to look at directly.

I look at him instead. He's got flour on the sleeve of his t-shirt from something he baked yesterday before I got here, and his hair is a mess, and there's a wrinkle by his eye when he smiles that I've started keeping track of. I set my fork down and reach over and run one finger down his forearm, slow, over the freckles, my brown hand against his pale white skin.

"So I've been thinking," I say.

He goes still, in a way that's a little funny and a little not. "Good thinking or bad thinking?"

"Good. I think good." I keep tracing his arm, because it's easier to talk while my hand is busy. "I've been thinking about how this works. The weekends. How I pack a bag Thursday night and drive three hours Friday and drive back Sunday, and how every single time, the whole drive back, I'm already counting days till the next one."

He doesn't say anything. His coffee is halfway to his mouth and it just stops there.

"And I started asking myself why I'm doing the math," I go on, "when I could just... not do the math. When I could just be here. Or you could be there. Or we could figure out something that isn't three hours apart."

"Sharon."

"I know it's only been three months. I know the smart play is to keep it easy and casual and not scare anybody off. But I'm thirty-two and I've done the casual thing and it was fine, it was totally fine, and this is not that. This is me wanting to leave a toothbrush here and not feeling weird about it. So I figured I'd just say it instead of doing the math forever."

He sets the mug down all the way. He turns his chair toward me, and he takes my hand, the one that's been drawing on his arm, and holds it in both of his.

"You want to know something kind of stupid?" he says.

"Always."

"I've had this exact speech written in my head for about six weeks. Word for word. Practiced it while I was rolling pasta." He laughs, but it comes out shaky. "I was going