Page 50 of Never Alone
"Please show me your ways."
"I have no ways."
I'd told Tessa we would go look at apartments together after my shift. The lawyer needed Noah to have a room of his own. The lawyer was right.
We hadn't heard from Nicholas since the letter. That was the part the lawyer had said to watch.
"Bullshit." Davis was behind him with the newspaper. He didn't look up from it. "The man is a Lieutenant. He has his own house. He has the face. Now he has a fiancée."
Martinez stared at him. "If a fiancée came with the rank, I would have been studying for the lieutenant's exam in middle school."
I shook my head. I caught myself smiling.
I got home a little after eight. The apartment was empty. Tessa must have taken Noah to school.
I set my bag down and went to take a shower.
I thought about the apartments while the water ran. Tessa had shown me the listings the night before. Four addresses. Two close to the bakery, two a drive. I didn't have a favorite. I would have one when I saw them.
I came out twenty minutes later, put on my gray sweatpants, and went to the kitchen to get coffee.
"Cole—oh."
I turned. I hadn't heard her come in.
She was looking at me like she'd walked into a room she wasn't invited into.
"Can you please put on a shirt?"
"Right."
For ten years, I had walked from the shower to the kitchen in a towel, in boxers, or in nothing at all on the mornings nobody had been waiting for me to be anywhere. Nobody had ever minded.
There was somebody now.
I had not yet learned to think about her before I did it.
Just another adjustment.
Great.
I went to the bedroom. I pulled on the T-shirt I had thrown on the back of the chair this morning and came back to the kitchen.
We had been to four apartments, and none of them had been good enough for me.
I'd been checking the same things at each one. Locks. Smoke detectors. The drive time from the front door to Engine 33. Two of them had old locks. One had no smoke detector in the back bedroom at all. Three were farther than ten minutes from the station.
Tessa had been looking for something else.
She started in the kitchen at every one. She put her hand on the counter. She checked which way the morning light came in. She walked into the bedroom that would be Noah's and stood bythe window. She was looking for the room Noah would wake up in.
By the second apartment, I had stopped asking her about the front door. By the third, she had stopped asking me about the kitchen. The kitchen and Noah's room were hers to decide on. The locks, the doors, and the streetlights were mine. We had sorted out which questions belonged to whom inside the first apartment of the morning.
Between the kitchen and the front door, I had been trying to be conscious about how Tessa and I looked together. I knew I was supposed to act like her fiancé. I didn't know how. I'd been holding doors, sayingwe,and trying not to stand more than a step away from her. Whether any of it read as a fiancé's behavior or a man following instructions, I could not have told you from inside it.
She'd been standing too close to me all morning. Sometimes, because the apartments were small. Sometimes, because she'd stopped tracking it. I'd been trying to concentrate on the work.
And from time to time, I let myself notice things.
