Instead of covering up, I flip the switch on the conversation and my lady parts. “What are you doing up?”
“Do you have to ask?”
I roll my eyes at the stupid pad of sticky notes in his hand. “Those things are driving me nuts.”
“There are a few things I got out of the garage if you’re feeling up to reminiscing about life.”
It beats writing to the Bullet Man. “What things?”
“Come on, I have the box in the bedroom.”
My heart pangs at the location. I haven’t been in there since the day I agreed to the undercover mission.
“Do you want me to get it?” he asks, picking up on my hesitation.
“No.” I drop the pen inside the notebook and shut it before tossing it on the crumpled-up blanket beside me. “Let’s go sticky some things.”
“Don’t you need that to log them?” He dips his head toward the cursed black book from country music hell.
Swiping it in my arms, I follow him down the small hallway full of picture frames on the wall, hung with no particular design. It’s beautiful. Our whole life is here. The picture from the precinct calls to me—the one where our cheeks touched, and the symmetrical smiles on both our faces came from the instant click between kindred hearts.
“Remember…” His voice floats to my ears like music on ear phones. Loud and overcoming my ability to think, singing words that swarm around looking for traces of an ache and promise to blast them away. “First day we met … I told you we’d be forever, and you knew I wasn’t lying.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. There’s a reason why I’ve barely stepped foot in this hall, and it’s not because Tyler’s room neighbored ours. It’s this Romance Hall of Fame—a museum of our history—filled with artifacts describing our beginning and nestled in front of our present. A fucking hallway worse than sticky, layered cobwebs, or melted marshmallows on fingers—which is on the photo third down from the right.
Damn sticky shit everywhere when I decided to make smores in a skillet and ended up with hot sugar and gelatin all over my fingers… Kace licked it off one finger at a time.
Kace taps on the glass of a larger picture of me, looking like a wet dog and wrapped in a thermal blanket. Kace snapped that shot after I fell through thin ice during a Christmas getaway in Vermont, right before he purchased the pink neon hoodie. “You had never skated on a frozen lake.”
“And I’ll never skate on one again. I was sick for two weeks.” His mouth on my fingers—the way his tongue had slicked over and gently sucked my clean—makes me sweat. My palms, because the dampness between my thighs is not sweat.
“But I took care of you.”
I lean over and snatch the sticky notes from his hand and squeeze my thighs, waiting for the feeling to surpass.
“Don’t even think about slapping one of those on each of these. That’s cheating.”
He knows me too well. “How so?”
“The works already done for you. The point is to remember the moment.”
That’s the issue. Every moment worth remembering has him in it. “I wasn’t going to anyway. Just on this one.” Maybe, I could get away with two or three here. “And this one.” I point to the picture of the first time he told me he loved me. “My first time at an Indian restaurant.” Another one followed by a very long stint in the bathroom of my apartment back then. The picture is of him, sleeping on the floor just outside the door.
I stick my final note for the hall on the picture of us on Halloween. Our first, and weirdest, Halloween together at Frank’s house. The party was food-themed, so everyone dressed up as something edible-ish, lots of creative liberties were taken, like Cool Whip bikinis and Valentine candy. Kace and I went as a cupcake. He, the cup, wore a T-shirt with an empty glass, and I wore a cake one, with frosting on my face … which he later licked off, but that was a dangerous road to go down right now.
“We take way too many pictures.” I turn around to face him.
“Not lately,” he reminds me.
“So you have more Memory Lane things?” I don’t know how much more of us I can take tonight.
He clears his throat, a tad annoyed with my evasion tactics. If flat-out ignoring topics I don’t want to deal with is considered a tactic. “It’s just the stuff your mom brought when we moved. You never got to go through it.”
We had bought this house after getting engaged; I was about five months pregnant with Tyler. We decorated together but never finished. We always ended up cuddled together, watching TV and relaxing. So, a lot of the stuff is still in storage containers in our garage.
I enter the room; the scent of his cologne fills the air. It’s tidier than the rest of the house, which makes sense, considering he doesn’t spend a lot of time in here. Minus the last week, he mostly just came home to sleep and check on me.
Since it’s been his room longer than it’s been mine, I wait for him to set the tone. For a moment, it feels like we had traveled back in time, to the first night I slept in his apartment. I felt out of place, as I do know.
He carries the box out from his closet and puts it between the TV and the bed. I take a seat on the floor next to it and place my notebook beside it.
“We never got the bench thing you wanted for the foot of the bed,” he says randomly.
That’s because we had put it on the wedding registry. The thought weighs down my heart and anchors it to the pit of my stomach. I avoid his scrutiny by opening the box and retrieving the first item: a ragged doll that didn’t even belong to me.
The next was a leather-bound book of my favorite childhood story about an ant in the snow. I tag it with a sticky note as my dad’s voice plays out in my head.
It still soothes me.
“You’re smiling,” Kace points out.
“This is my favorite book.” One of the first memories that was mine and not one I shared with him. I know the story by heart and imagined reading it to my children one day—the same children I’ll never have. “Want to see?” I hold the faded hardcover book, with worn binding, out to him.
He takes it and gently opens the old pages. Taking a seat on the floor beside me, he reads the book while I explore the box, pulling out an old Santa note my father wrote. I release a sad laugh, catching Kace’s attention.
His furrowed brow beseeches an explanation, so I hand him the framed letter. “This was one of my most valuable possessions as a kid. I had Santa’s signature.”
Kace chuckles as he reads the short four-line note, written on regular loose-leaf paper. “He spelled his own name wrong.”
“Nah, everyone else just wasn’t spelling it right. For three years, I spelled his name like that, and when my teacher corrected me, I very adamantly protested her errors, because Santa himself told me how to spell it.”
“Bet that went down well.”
“I had to stay after school and write his name five hundred times, the right way.”
“She landed herself on the naughty list.” Kace holds it up. “Let’s put this up in the hall.”
That’s precisely where it belongs, but did I belong here, with him? Plucking another item from the box camouflages my trembling fingers. The fuzzy material, which once lulled me to sleep as a child, feels like sandpaper, rubbing at the skin on the palm of my hand. “I was going to give this to Tyler.”