I’d never had my own space. Never had my own room.
The first apartment I moved into after I left St. Jerome’s was just an efficiency that I shared with four other people. Whoever went to bed first grabbed the futon, and the rest crashed in sleeping bags or cushions on the floor, stepping over each other to go about our business. The ones I had after that had bedrooms, at least, but they were always overcrowded, never quiet, and never had any real privacy. I’d developed the habit of roaming the city pretty early.
At first it wasn’t just to escape my roommates, but also to revel in the freedom of being able to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, after the limitations at St. Jerome’s. I’d leave the apartment with my keys and a book and walk around for hours, learning new parts of the city I’d lived in my whole life by moving through them.
When it was cold, I’d just walk, sometimes stopping in the library or the train station to get warm. When it was nice out, I’d sit in a park to read until fatigue or fear drove me back home again. A few nights I tried sleeping in the parks instead, wishing that the restfulness I felt while reading could be pulled over me like a blanket when I slept. But it wasn’t a good idea, and after waking up to someone kneeling over me with a knife and a desperate look, I never did it again.
When I went home with dates who lived alone, I’d relish the peace and quiet. And the shower. Once, a few years back, when my roommate Kyle got bedbugs and we all fled the apartment, I stayed with a guy I’d slept with a few times and he told me I could stay long term if I wanted. But it had quickly become clear that he wanted some kind of live-in sex toy, and that was never gonna be me, even if his shower did have a steam setting that made me feel like I was at a spa. Well, what I assumed it felt like at a spa.
The first time Rhys had brought me to the Sleepy Hollow house, he’d laughed at me because I kept thinking I saw things out the windows into the wooded backyard, kept jumping at noises.
“You sleep in a room with people walking through it all the time and can doze off on the subway or on a park bench, and you’re startled by a birdcall?” he’d teased, poking me in the side but pulling me close.
“Whatever, I got lost in Central Park once and there were just trees and squirrels and birds and it was scary as shit, man,” I’d said. “Someone could be coming at you from any direction. I kept spinning around, expecting to find someone standing right behind me. Nature’s freaky.”
I’d gotten used to it since I’d moved in. Mostly. I wasn’t even sure what I was afraid of here. There was a sense of frightening possibility in a landscape where people weren’t watching. It unnerved me. In the city, there were so many eyes on everything that you didn’t have to worry someone was walking up behind you with a giant ax.
Here . . . it seemed like anything could happen.
I nuked a frozen burrito and flopped onto the couch. My phone rang just as I sat down.
“Hey!” I said, and Rhys’s happy drawling, “Hey, babe,” made me feel warm.
“You make it to your folks’ okay?”
Rhys’s first show the next night was in Charlotte, so he’d stopped in Raleigh for the night to see his parents and his sister.
“Yep, we just had dinner, and I’m heading out to the tour meeting in about an hour.”
I ate my burrito—molten on the outside, ice cold on the inside, like always—as Rhys updated me on his family.
His mom had adopted a new puppy and his dad pretended the puppy annoyed him but was clearly in love with it. Morgan was planning to ask her boss for a raise, and Doug said if her boss didn’t go for it she should look for something else. Tommy informed everyone that he wanted to be called Captain TomTom and that he was a robot superhero that gained bursts of superhuman strength by being fed cupcakes. Sarah said cupcake and looked so hopeful that Rhys’s mom had driven to the store to get some.
“Typical evening at the Nylands’,” Rhys concluded. Between us hung the unstated Not that you’d know, since you still haven’t met them.
“Your mom’s such a softie,” I said.
“It’s true. Give her something to rescue, feed, or lecture, and she’s pretty much in her glory.”
“I see where you get it from,” I teased.
“I’m only a softie for you, babe.” His voice was low and fond. “Anyway, how are you?”