Author's Chapter Notes:
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Their first house together is a yellow split level with green shutters and aluminum siding. It’s ugly, but they stand in the driveway while it rains and smile, because it’s theirs and it’s now and it’s something.
She’s five months pregnant and she jokes in her soaked yellow sundress, “I look like this house,” before turning into him with her arms going around his waist tightly, her face half in his chest. He just laughs and kisses the top of her head and looks at the green front door of their new house and then at the sign swinging in the wind of the oncoming summer thunderstorm. It says, ‘SOLD’ and he finally feels like he’s accomplished something.
She walks barefoot across the kitchen floor for the first time and then spins around to smile at him and say, “I like it here,” while reaching out for his hands. And then he’s kissing her with her back against the counter and telling her that he loves her over and over until she’s laughing uncontrollably.
He asks her what’s so funny and she tilts her head back, knocking it against one of the kitchen cupboards. She says, “Nothing. Can’t I just be happy?” He gets out a muttered, “Yeah,” before kissing her again with his hands resting on either side of her slightly swollen belly.
They don’t have all their furniture yet so the living room is just a big open space with the TV sitting in the middle of the floor. He orders a pizza and covers her spot on the floor with pillows from a box labeled ‘BEDROOM STUFF’ and the fact that there are boxes filled with their things and not just his things or her things makes him feel a little dizzy.
She comes down the narrow hallway from the bedroom now in sweats and a tank top that stretches over her stomach and makes him love her even more. Her hair’s been taken out of its bun and hangs loosely around her shoulders. When she sees the pillows he’s laid out for her, she smiles down at him appreciatively and sits next to him. Her shoulder nudges his a little when she does and he likes that it still feels like that whenever she touches him.
He flips through the five or six channels they get since they don’t have their cable set up yet. She finally takes the remote from him and turns it off and pushes the left over pizza they had for dinner out of the way and pulls him down onto her bed of pillows. They stare at the ceiling- their ceiling she reminds him with a poke in his side- for hours until the room is completely dark and they’re both falling asleep. He turns to look at her half closed eyelids and she reaches out a hand to his cheek and says really quietly, “Welcome home,” before closing her eyes the rest of the way. Her hand falls a little and comes to rest on his neck as her breathing becomes steady and deep.
He kisses her palm and then stands, bending down to hook one arm under her knees and the other under her back. She wakes up a little, enough to wrap her arms tightly around his neck and bury her face into the collar of his shirt. He has to kick the bedroom door open with his foot and then he gently puts her down on the bare mattress. They’d been too lazy earlier to put sheets on so he rummages through the box labeled, ‘BEDROOM STUFF 2’ and pulls out a thin cotton sheet, drawing it over her.
He slides in next to her kisses her shoulder, her neck, her jaw. And in her sleep, she scoots back against him a little bit, a contented noise in her throat.
He has trouble sleeping and ends up just staying awake to listen to the rain on the roof and memorize the sounds the house makes during those late hours and how the tree outside the bedroom window casts moving shadows on the floor and how she says random things softly in her sleep and at one point reaches back and grabs onto his hand for a second before letting it go.
He gets up and walks around for a while, too. He stumbles over a box in the hall that’s sitting outside of the second bedroom and it’s labeled ‘NURSERY STUFF’ and it’s mostly full of gifts from the baby shower her mom threw for her the week before and the blanket her grandma made for her when she was a baby and books on parenting and baby names. He thinks they should paint the walls a soft green and put the crib by the window. He thinks they’ll have to get one of those rocking chairs so they can sit with the baby in the middle of the night. He thinks four more months seems like too long of a wait right now.
He comes back to the bedroom and she’s awake now. He can see her eyes shining in the dark where she’s lying on her side, facing the doorway. He stands there and looks at her as she smiles sleepily at him. She rubs her eye with her left hand and then pushes her hair back from her face, stretching a bit. She says, “Where have you been? Come back to bed,” and crooks a finger at him, giggling a little.
He walks around the bed and slides between the sheet and the mattress. Then she turns to him and says, “I’m hot. Could you open the window?”
He groans in mock frustration, but gets out of bed and crosses the room to crack the window just a bit. On his way back over to the bed, he walks into yet another box that’s sitting by the corner of the bed. This one is bigger and heavier and hurts his shin a little and in the streetlight that streams through the window he can see that it’s labeled, ‘OUR STUFF.’
He lifts the sheet once more and climbs back into bed. She turns to face him and says, “Thank you,” with her eyes still closed and her arms go around his waist and his go around hers and they pull each other closer and she kisses him slowly, blindly finding his mouth before they say goodnight.
It’s still raining a bit outside and the wind brings the smell of rainwater and wet grass and summer and new beginnings.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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