Page 196 of The Girlfriend Clause
“Hmm. I say furniture.”
She couldn’t receive deliveries at her place, and she didn’t have much space to put it together, so she’d had the chest of drawers sent to mine instead. I’d told her I’d buy her whatever solid piece she needed, but she’d just looked at me with that pretend long-suffering look of hers and insisted she wanted the IKEA one.
Fair enough.If we could survive assembling something called aMALMtogether, we could probably survive mostthings.
I walked into the living room, noting the box on the floor. I slit the tape cleanly and folded the cardboard back along its creases so it stayed open without tearing. The panels came out first and went against the wall in descending order of size, edges aligned. After that, the fittings—screws, dowels, cam locks—tipped into the upturned lid and separated into groups. I set the Allen key beside my right knee, exactly where my hand would reach for it without looking.
“Bloody hell, Liam, are you assembling drawers or planning an invasion?”
“Mock if you like,” I said. “You’ll still get functional furniture.”
She kissed my head and watched as I unfolded the instructions and laid the page flat against the carpet. The diagrams suggested a simplicity that the parts did not immediately support.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“You can open the wine if you like,” I said. “Shouldn’t be long.”
I tried the first configuration, then adjusted it once, quietly. The cam lock resisted.
“Sure I can’t hold something or put something together?” she called from the kitchen. “I’ve done this a few times before.”
“Got it, thanks, babe,” I called back.
“I knew your engineering degree would pay off eventually.”
I aligned the panel again, inserted the dowel, and tightened the cam carefully, just as the printed instructions described. I found systems worked when you respected their order.
She walked back into the sitting room in bare feet and stood next to me, watching.
“I think that piece actually belongs with this thing,” she said, picking up one of the panels.
“Babe… could you just—” I had them in order for a reason.
The joint shifted half a centimeter and stopped, held in a position that was neither assembled nor loose, simply… incorrect.
“Did they not cover this at Oxford?” she asked, with an innocent smile.
“Right after the class on elevator safety mechanisms,” I muttered.
She took the panel from my hands, turned it once, and pushed the joint together until it seated cleanly.
“There,” she said.
I stared at it.
“Right. Of course. That was… my next move.”
“Obviously,” she said. “I just saved you time.”
She handed the panel to me and floated back toward the kitchen with her wine.
“Give me a shout if you get stuck again,” she called over her shoulder with a smirk.
We managed another drawer before abandoning the effort entirely, which felt like a reasonable level of adult responsibility for a Friday evening.
Ten minutes later we were on the sofa in our matching Snuggies, sharing a tub of Häagen-Dazs and pretending we hadn’t both been thinking about getting back into bed since the moment we left it.
She tucked her feet under my leg without asking and settled against my shoulder like it was the most natural place in the world to be.
