Chapter Sixteen

"You're hogging all the Gizmo."

It took me a few seconds to realize that Orion was talking to me, and then to realize what he meant. I hadn't quite been falling asleep, but I definitely hadn't been paying attention to the article I was trying to read. (It was about the integration of Black players into Major League Baseball, except the article was old enough that it was rife with unexamined racism, and maybe it said something about my mood, but my mind was finding it more anthropologically fascinating than awful, like somewhere in the background Sir David Attenborough was observing the entire mess and being like, The American journalist attempts to report only the facts but cannot overcome his innate drive to marginalize others, resulting in a poor example of his art ...)

I looked down at Scraps. "What can I say? She likes me best."

"She hasn't seen my bed yet."

I gasped. "You wouldn't."

He was sitting in his armchair, on his laptop again, and he smiled down at the screen. "I just don't think you should get to keep all the dog cuddles just because she hasn't seen her other options."

I clutched the little bundle of sleeping canine closer. "Excuse me, I'm the one stranded far from home here. If anyone needs extra comfort, it's me."

Then, abruptly, Orion was looking me right in the eyes, his brows inquisitive. "Do you? Need extra comfort?"

In any other context, that would be flirting. And not subtle flirting either. But this was Orion Broderick, and maybe he was flirting, but there was something else going on here as well. Something that felt almost ... real.

Too real. My lips parted so I could say something extraordinarily suave and clever, get this moment back to solid ground, and away from whatever had just happened in my chest when a man who probably still hated me asked if I needed comfort.

Nothing came out.

I closed my mouth, swallowed, and tried again.

"Uhh."

"Why did you stop writing?" Nothing about his expression changed. He still looked, for all the world, like he was low-key coming onto me.

"Because I felt too terrible. Too responsible. And I never wanted to hurt anyone again."

"And did you?"

I looked away, my fingers stealing onto Scraps's furry back. "No. I don't think so. I tried not to, anyway." I'd tried to keep myself apart from everyone to make sure I couldn't do damage. I'd kept myself so far apart from people that aside from coworkers and the occasional hookup, I had no social life at all. "You have to get close to people to hurt them, most of the time."

"Do you miss it? Writing, I mean."

The magazine was still open before me. My attention snagged on a sentence that wasn't well formed. Immediately my mind supplied three better options, and I remembered what it had felt like to be so in tune with my own words that I could write for hours and not even notice time passing. I looked back at Orion. "Every damn day. All the time."

He nodded once. "Same. Sometimes I dream I'm running down the field, ball right in the zone, and no one can catch me."

"Because your feet aren't touching the ground?"

"Something like that."

For a long moment neither of us moved. Then Orion stood up. "Come on. Bring Gizmo so she can see what she's missing by crashing out here with you."

"She likes crashing out here with me."

"You have a sample size of one night. I don't think you can claim she's made a free choice."

"Rude," I said, but also I was just a little excited to see the inner sanctum myself.

You know that thing where someone's like IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT? Well, Orion's bedroom totally disappointed me. I didn't know what I'd been expecting, but it didn't give me hibernating-bear vibes or man-cave vibes or even mammal-licking-his-wounds vibes.

It was blah. Generic dark-blue polyester comforter. No pictures on the walls. Two nightstands, not matching, but only the one on the near side of the bed looked used, as in it had two charging cables on it and a couple of notebooks. I didn't think I'd actually have poked through his notebooks if he decided to take a hike in the blizzard, but on the other hand, I was glad to be deprived of the opportunity to display my true nature as a snoop.

Two unmatched dressers, but not unmatched in a turn-of-the-last-century antique, passed down through the generations way. Unmatched in a Someone needed dressers, and the first place they turned was Facebook Marketplace way. Or maybe even Alternately, they had a truck and drove around looking for anything on the side of the road with a "Free" sign way.

They were cheap and ugly is what I'm saying.

"Gi—Scraps does not want to sleep here," I declared. "Absolutely not. Too dark. It doesn't even smell like you."

The bastard grinned. "Oh yeah? You go around looking for things that smell like me? I think I'm flattered."

"Shut up, I meant dogs have a wild sense of smell, and this just smells like nothing. If it smelled like you, she might be tempted. Right, Scraps?"

The blanket-wrapped fur ball in my arms lifted her head and looked at Orion as if waiting for him to defend his bedroom.

"You have to put her down on the bed, obviously. That'll smell like me, and it's way more comfortable than the couch."

"She isn't interested."

"You're just afraid she'll pick my bed over your couch."

I was. I definitely was. Boring Kmart comforter aside, it really did look nice. The couch was not doing my spine any favors.

"Go on, Cleary. Take the risk. Don't you think she should have a choice?"

I shot him a dirty look while deep inside my guts, little delighted bubbles fizzed up. He said my name. To compensate, I turned the look into a glare. "Fine."

"Good."

"Shut up." To Scraps I said, "Just remember who saved you from the cold, okay? It was me."

"It was definitely a group effort." He was smirking again.

"I heard her first."

"Put the dog down and let her explore."

I sighed heavily and set my bundle in the center of the bed. Also, he made his bed. I liked that in a man.

Shut up, me.

Scraps sniffed experimentally and seemed to contemplate matters before she stretched and took a tentative step outside her blanket. She did a widening circuit around the blanket and eventually, after giving everything a good once-over, hopped up on the pillows, turned around three times, and settled herself right there in the middle.

"Boo," I said. "Scraps, you wound me."

That smug git Orion merely smiled like he knew this would be the outcome all along. "See? You just gotta give her options."

"Why is your bedroom so boring?" I demanded, feeling unreasonably put out by a dog choosing to lie on his pillows instead of my lumpy couchnest.

He glanced around like he was trying to see what I saw. "I don't know. I guess I really only come in here to sleep, so I haven't put much time into it."

"Only to sleep," I repeated. "That's all you do. In your bedroom."

It took about ten seconds for him to pick up on my meaning, and then, oh bless him, I was rewarded with a flush of pink across his cheekbones. Goodness. He was absolutely lovely looking when he was blushing.

"It's not exactly a prime dating pool here," he said defensively.

I gestured around. "You don't say."

"Not every guy is a judgmental bastard about other people's bedrooms."

"I mean, you say that, but I think inherently when you see someone's bedroom, you look for what it says about that person?"

"Gizmo thinks it says I like comfort."

" Scraps was sleeping in your garage in her own shit, so I'm not sure that's the confident vote you're looking for."

He narrowed his eyes. "Okay. And what would we see in your bedroom, Queer Eye ?"

Which was a fair point. "Uhh. Take the Fifth."

"Ha."

"To be clear, I at least have a duvet. Not a comforter from the Kmart ‘off to college so get it cheap' section."

"Excuse me, I got this at Target." He paused. "Or actually I think maybe I got it from Louise at the Wash and Brew when her kid was moving out. I got the pillows at Target when I first moved to Conquistos."

"Okay, let's set aside how gross it is that you're still using those ancient pillows. But you have all those quilts. They're so much nicer than this."

"Yeah, but I'm terrified of washing them, so I keep them in a bag in the closet."

"Instead of using them the way whoever made them intended for them to be used?" I shook my head. "Yeah, no, I think we might just have to Queer Eye this bedroom, dude. It's real rough." I bent down to Scraps's sleeping head. "Isn't that right, girl? Wouldn't you rather sleep on a nice bed in a nice room that didn't look like a frat house?"

"Uncalled for. My room is much cleaner than a frat house."

"Okay, that's fair. It is definitely clean. Do you fold your socks too?"

He said nothing. Suspiciously. Eyes darting to one of the dressers.

"Oh my god, you do! Show me your socks, Broderick. Let's get it over with."

"You don't have to see my socks."

I started walking over. He blocked me. "Come on, big boy, you can show me your neatly folded socks."

"Hey, I'm a modest lady, all right? I don't need some weirdo poking around in my unmentionables."

I tried to dart around him, but obviously he was both quicker and stronger than me. I tried to reach around him as well, but that just resulted in a goofy bear hug.

Uhh. Not that I minded the goofy bear hug. Entirely.

"Fine," I said, and I backed off before I could do anything else, like kiss him, or hug him tighter, or think about how good he smelled.

"I like having folded socks," he said, and crossed his arms over his chest ... almost as if he was also doing something so that he could not-do something else.

"It's very sweet. But folded, not rolled, right?"

He offered a scandalized look. "Do I seem like someone who wants stretched-out socks? No. I Marie Kondo my clothes, and it makes me happy."

I could not hold back a smile. "Did you watch her show on Netflix?"

"I loved her show on Netflix. I mean, some of the people were terrible, like any of those shows, but I loved the way she treated them."

"Right? She's made of grace, and people take her so personally. She's not telling you to burn your books and only keep two pairs of pants!"

"I know! Her whole thing is basically ‘Figure out what makes you feel good about your stuff, and do that thing,' and people act like she's a monster."

"Seriously."

"For real."

Scraps yawned and stretched across both pillows, eyeing us through half-open lids.

"I just think that unless you have an attachment to this comforter, you should have something nicer to sleep under, that's all."

"You mean to impress all the hotties I bring home to fuck?"

I rolled my eyes. "Not at all. Fuck the hotties. I mean that literally. But they don't get a vote. More like ..." I thought about it. About my own bedroom, which was a lot more dorm-like than I wanted to admit. "I don't know. I guess this isn't how I picture a bedroom in a house? You should definitely have a duvet so you can change the cover with the season. And maybe a couple of throw pillows with accent colors. And at least some framed somethings on your walls." I shot another look at the dressers. "I'm all for recycling, but you could probably throw a coat of paint on those, and they'd be brighter. I don't know. Unless you walk into this room at night and think, ‘Happy sigh, I love my space; it makes me feel so good about spending time in it.'"

"Is that what you think in your bedroom?"

I snorted. "Nope."

"So this is advice on the extreme hypocritical side of the spectrum."

"Obviously."

He appeared to consider it. "The thing is, the quilts were my grandmother's. I think her sister made them for her. So I really don't want to mess them up."

Shit. I was sleeping under Grandma's quilts? Now I was worried about messing them up.

"Yeah, but would she rather you sleep under them knowing that someday they'll eventually fall apart? Or that you keep them in a closet hoping to, what, preserve them forever?"

Orion shook his head. "You're really Kondoing me right now. I mean, I know that's true. She'd rather I use her quilts."

I nodded. "Yep. Come on."

Despite my resolve to be the best guest, I hadn't actually folded my couchnest, which I was blaming on Scraps, even though she had her own blanket and I could have just shifted her out of the way. But I shook them out now and gave them a big sniff. "I think we should wash them before we put them on your bed."

He looked distinctly unnerved. "In the machine?"

"I mean ... yeah. Look." I held up the stitches for him to see. "This is a really nice quilt, but it wasn't made by hand in the sixteen hundreds; it was made by a person with a sewing machine, see? I mean, I'm not all up on quilts, but this should hold up about as well as anything else. Probably quite a bit better than a lot of stuff you can get for three bucks at Walmart, right?" I ran my fingers over the different pieces, but I didn't really know much about textiles. "Machine wash, hang dry? Since we don't know what fabrics are in here."

"I guess we could. I'm going to be like ... really upset if it falls apart."

"Okay, well, I won't tell your great-aunt that you said that because I'm pretty sure she'd be pissed you thought she was that bad at quilting."

That at least got a smile out of him. "That's fair. She was the archetypical mean old lady. Hated kids. Had pretty much no patience for any living thing except her parrot and my grandma."

"I mean, fair. Honestly." I gave the other two quilts a good once-over, but they seemed fine as well. "I think we can wash two on gentle, but we'll need to do a second load for the other one. Do you have anything else you can throw in? Just so we're not wasting the water."

And so began a very low-intensity Queer Eye ing. Orion took charge of the laundry, uprooted Scraps to his armchair, and stripped off his sheets to go in as well. At my tentative suggestion, we also slightly rearranged things so that the bed had a view of the window (which did mean it lost one of its nightstands, but there was still enough space to get on all sides to remake it). We shifted the dressers to under the window and stuck the other nightstand in the closet.

"You can keep your porn and sex toys in here," I told him, smirking.

"Why would I keep my sex toys in the closet?" he shot back, with an expression that, again, fuck, looked more flirty than anything else. "Won't I want those next to the bed?"

"Depends on your kinks," I said airily.

He laughed. And then switched the nightstands so the other one was in the closet.

Meaning ... there really were sex toys in one of them? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

I must have been staring suspiciously at it because he cleared his throat and said, "Remember that I am a modest lady."

"You probably don't even have sex toys."

That time he winked at me. "I guess you'll never know."

"Ugh." I went out of the bedroom as much to get myself together as anything else. Did he still detest me? He seemed to detest me less. But also we hadn't actually resolved any of the things he detested me for? So did that count?

Scraps didn't even crack an eye as I flounced down on the couch.

"Are you sulking?" Orion asked in his fake-dog voice.

"She's completely unconscious."

He peeked around the corner. "Don't sulk, Queer Eye . Come help me reclaim my rug."

"Huh?"

I had forgotten about the rug.

We had to unbury it with the snow shovel, and then, because it was quite literally frozen solid, we had to basically pry it up off more snow and drag it over to the porch. Which sounds straightforward, but it took the better part of an hour, and I was sweating through my clothes by the time we managed to settle it across the railing. Note: it wasn't draped over the railing, like a wet thing; it was lying atop it like a piece of sheet metal.

"Was this the plan?" I asked Orion, who, gratifyingly, was also panting.

He wasn't looking at the rug, though. He was looking across the cleared area of driveway, which was only snow and snow and snow-covered lumps of other things, like my car.

I didn't see anything. "What? Is there a Sasquatch?"

"No. But there is wind. Hmm."

As soon as I started looking for wind, I could see it. I hadn't really noticed as we were working, but now I could see the way the trees bent and swayed over the driveway (or what must've been the driveway, except it was whited out with snow). I could hear it, too, a sound my brain had subtracted from my awareness, but now that it had been added back in, I couldn't stop hearing it.

Low, distant, almost rolling like thunder. There was a movement to it, to the wind, that was different from how I normally thought about wind. If you're standing on a beach and the breeze picks up, you can watch it and hear it blow toward you, but this felt like something else.

Like a gathering force, as if it was gaining momentum as it came closer, as the quantity of trees blowing added to it, intensified it, until it was almost upon us.

And when it was, it was freezing. Dry, snowless, but icy as fuck.

"I don't like it," Orion announced. "Wind is unpredictable."

"But isn't the storm supposed to be stopping today?"

"The snow is supposed to stop today. Or early tonight. But wind can cause a lot of damage in a short period of time."

"Like what? We already have no internet or cell service, and we can't leave the cabin."

"But we have central heat, and light, and a functional stovetop and oven, which we won't have if we lose electricity."

"Wait, the stove won't work?"

"It's electric. You didn't notice the total lack of open flame?"

"Uhh. No? Oh my god." I gulped. "Are we going to freeze to death? Or starve?"

"Relax. We'll be fine, just inconvenienced." He shot another mistrustful look at the swaying trees. "Let's go inside."

So we did. But not before I stood there a few seconds longer, listening to a suddenly aggressive wind roll toward the little cabin in the clearing. Oh shit.