Page 8 of The Year of Us: September

Reese

It took a week for me to wrangle Morgan over to the apartment. She met me there at ten on a Thursday with a stack of boxes under each arm and rolls of tape around her wrists like bracelets.

“You have a lot of shit, but you also really don’t,” she said, dumping everything in the middle of the studio.

I exhaled loudly, placing my hands on my hips and surveying the space. It had been mine for so many years, and I’d accumulated so many memories, but I realized I wasn’t attached to a single thing in the space. I had my clothes, I had my pictures, and back at the house, I had Cory.

What else could I really want?

But if that was true, why was the prospect of packing everything up and moving in so overwhelming?

“This is a lot to digest,” I muttered, flopping back onto my bed and covering my eyes with my forearm. The Rolex abraded my temple. “I think I’m doing this backward.”

“If by backward you mean you should date someone in the same city as you for a while before actually giving up your apartment and moving in with them, then you are doing it backward.” Morgan grinned at me and taped the bottom of a box. “But he’s a good one.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“And you love him.”

“I do,” I said.

“So, what is the real issue with the hesitance?”

I groaned, rolling onto my stomach and burying my face in the pillows that smelled more like him than me these days on account of the way he marked my sheets with his body like a cat when I was at work.

“I’m not hesitant when I’m with him,” I told her. “It’s when I’m not with him that I start to second-guess it all.”

“Why?”

“If I knew, I would be helping you pack already.”

“This sounds like one of your kink things.” She taped another box and set them side by side, open and ready to receive my belongings.

“How so?”

Morgan puffed a breath out, inflating her cheeks on the exhale and gesturing vaguely in the direction of where I imagined her brain lived. “Like, he makes it okay, right? Isn’t that a thing?”

“Kind of, but not like?—”

“Being with him gives you a space to be safe,” she steamrolled my interruption, “and when you’re not with him, you lose sight of the safety. Like you don’t have object permanence.”

“Cory isn’t a cucumber in my fridge.”

“Your fridge has never seen a cucumber in its life,” she teased, folding her legs beneath her and sitting in the middle of my apartment. She’d gotten more boxes made, and there was barely room for us and them, and all of my things I wasn’t even sure I cared about anymore.

“I don’t forget about him when he’s gone,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Morgan crawled to the bed and tugged her way up my body until she reached my wrist. She hooked her finger under the watch and used it to haul me into a seated position.

“What do you think this is for?” she asked.

“How do you know what it’s for?”

“Cory and I are friends, dumbass. Whether you meant for that to happen or not.”

“Oh, I know.” I shook her off. “I’ve felt ganged up on from the first moment the two of you met.”

“Because we both have your best interests at heart,” she countered. “And I like the way you look when you think about him.”

She pulled me onto the floor, into the mess of her boxes.

“How do I look when I think about him?”

“Like a little cartoon. Your pupils turn into hearts.”

I snorted, reaching for a stack of books that I’d shoved against the wall.

I arranged them carefully into one of the boxes.

Even if there were things in my apartment I decided to get rid of, it would be easier to bring it all to Cory’s and do it there.

He was more attached to my things than I was, and I doubted he’d want me to part with any of it. Maybe that was more…

Maybe that was so I wouldn’t feel so assimilated after moving in with him. So I would still have my own things and my own memories in the foundation of the life we were trying to build together.

“Do you think things with him are foolish?” I asked.

“In what way? But also no.”

I huffed a laugh. “I met him in January. We only spent one weekend a month together until the summer, and then he was here and now…”

I trailed off, pushing at one of the empty boxes.

“Do you think it’s foolish?” she asked quietly.

I talked myself through every truth and lie and hope that lived inside of me when it came to my relationship with Cory. All the things I’d thought it would be from the first night to last night, and all the turns and twists we’d walked together.

“I don’t,” I finally answered.

My best friend scooted closer to me, covered my knee with her hand, then yanked me down so my head was cradled in the nest of her lap.

She finger-combed her way through my hair, then after she was satisfied with the lack of tangles, she traced a soft half-moon across the arc of my cheekbone.

I closed my eyes and sank into the comfort of her touch.

“It’s okay to be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” I lied.

“He’s not going to leave you,” she said. “He’s not going to change his mind and move back to New York.”

It was almost a preposterous thing for her to say.

Of course, Cory wasn’t going to leave me.

For as much as I’d given up to make things work with him, they’d come easy in the end.

Every concession had made perfect sense.

And it had to be the same for him. No sane man would walk away from his whole life, his entire career, for a fling across the country.

“You’re right,” I eventually said, rolling onto all fours before pushing myself back onto my ass. I made grabby hands for some magazines behind Morgan’s back, and she handed them to me with an arrogant smile. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon packing my apartment into boxes.