“You seem spooked that I invited you over,” Fletch said to me as we pushed our way through the evening wind.

I hesitated. So far, our relationship had felt like a daydream to me. Like it wasn’t real. I had been slowly checking things I’d always wanted to do with a guy I really liked off my list. I’d taken him to the library, defaced various buildings and bus shelters. We’d put up flyers and I’d invited him over to my place for dinner. He had given me something beautiful and meaningful, which was something I couldn’t make him do.

My list was getting dangerously short. I wasn’t sure if there was that much left for us to do. It was getting to the point where Fletch was going to have to start leading the relationship if he wanted it to keep going. I only had so much inspiration and I couldn’t be inspired by a boring man.

And all the men I knew were boring.

It wasn’t that Fletch was boring. It was that whenever I let a man lead the relationship it always sucked. They didn’t have any fun ideas of things to do. They just wanted to watch the game, watch a movie, watch TV, and watch me.

I didn’t know what they found so fascinating about watching me. It wasn’t like I threw the same kind of parties for all the men I knew that I threw for Fletch. Most of them barely got to lay a finger on me. Well, I wouldn’t have minded if Fletcher put more than his fingers on me, but I was waiting to make that decision.

Apparently, he was taking me to his apartment that he hadn’t cleaned. It didn’t sound hopeful. Maybe it sounded particularly hopeless after all the work I’d done for our dinner date.

The dress was new. I had shopped for three days to find it. My hairdo took two hours. I had spent a solid hour grooming while I waited for my hair to set. I had taken three bags of old stuff to the Salvation Army to help make my apartment look tidier. Preparing the meal had taken two days and I didn’t even want to calculate how long I had been practicing my cooking for just such an occasion.

“Are you spooked?” Fletch asked me, pulling me out of my reverie.

“Aren’t you scared?” I replied.

“That you won’t like my place?”

“Yeah.”

“Shannon, I don’t want to have a fake relationship with you. What we’ve done together so far feels a little fake.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, tonight you put your best foot forward. I’m thrilled. I had a great time. You look beautiful and everything you fed me tasted amazing. The thing is,” he paused. “None of my previous girlfriends have done anything like that for me.”

I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They didn’t see me the way you do. For them, I wasn’t the guy they had to work to impress. I was a throwaway guy who they could see as a friend, fool around with when they were lonely, come to for advice when the guy they really wanted wasn’t cooperating, and I would soothe them. And Shannon, I am good at soothing a woman. You’re not getting the best part of me with your act.”

The wind whipped a curl across my face. I looked away and corrected my hair. He sounded like a disappointment. I bit my lips together and felt the downpour of my daydreams fall so deep inside me I could feel them in my ankles. Fletch was going to be the biggest disappointment of my life.

“You always want to be cast that way, do you? You want to be a girl’s second-best guy? The nice guy who doesn’t get the girl?” I stopped walking. I did not need to be out in all that wind and walk all the way to his place only to walk back again if things couldn’t go well. “Fletch, are you trying to turn the tables on me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you trying to treat me the way you think I treated Simon? Turn me into a girl who can’t really be with you, but who knows where you live and somewhere comfortable to go, but who can never be with you? Now that I’m thinking about it, you’ve never said anything to make me think we’re a couple.”

“You told me you always throw out the guys who ask for monogamous relationships,” he reminded me patiently.

“Would you have asked for one if I didn’t say that?”

His hands were in his pockets, but his gray eyes looked across at me more brilliantly than if his eyes had been made of mirrors. “Well, I’m not seeing anyone else. You don’t want a man to control you, so I haven’t asked you to reserve yourself only for me. Are you seeing someone else?”

“I’m not.”

“Then I guess we’re monogamous,” he said as his hand sprang from his pocket and took mine. In the next second, he put his arm around me and hurried me down the street. “It’s too windy to stay out here. You’re going to get an earache.”

I was a bit breathless, but he was right, I was going to get an earache if I didn’t get out of the wind soon.

“I’ll drive you when I take you home.”

The door to his apartment was situated on the side of the fragrance shop I liked. He pulled out his key and opened the door. Inside, there was a single staircase going up. My heels clanked on the stairs as he took me up to the top. He opened a second door and led me inside.

My first impression was that his apartment was big. Then I realized it was big because there were no walls. There wasn’t even a wall for the bathroom. There was a tub, sink, and a toilet against a wall, but there were no dividers, not even a single thing to indicate the apartment had been zoned.

His bed was in the middle of the room. It was half made, but only because his mattress was the size of my apartment and he was only one man, so he didn’t use the whole thing. There was a clothing rack with his clothes on it and he used a cubicle shelf with fabric baskets in it for a dresser.

He walked over to a space heater that had a pair of sweatpants draped over it and picked them up. “Take your shoes off,” he said as he made his way back to me.

I kicked off my heels, but I couldn’t see why I needed to. The floor was exposed cement and he only had two rugs. One by the tub and another on his side of the bed.

He dropped to his knees and rubbed the warm fabric of the sweatpants against my leg. I was freezing.

“Put these on,” he offered.

The heat as I slipped my feet in was unreal on my cold legs as he pulled them up around my waist under my dress.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“You just keep those on the space heater?” I asked, feeling odd.

“I do. It’s all part of the nice guy thing. I’m not just nice to women, I’m also nice to myself, and clothes on the heater are a must. At least, until summer.” He absently corrected the sheets on his bed, before flopping down on the duvet cover and giving me another smile. “Have a look around. I’ll get you some slippers if you like.”

“Har har. If I let you, I’m sure you could find clothes to replace everything I’m wearing, and I can wear them as long as you can get me out of what I’m wearing now?”

He smiled brightly. “Look around.”

I trod on the hems of Fletch’s sweatpants as I wandered around the place. I went over to the kitchen sink. His cupboards had no doors. It wasn’t a chic look. It was just old cupboards with no doors. All the dishes he had were ugly. Forget gold-tinted cutlery because nothing matched anything else he owned. Every single piece had been purchased at the Salvation Army and no attempt had been made to make the pieces match. There were brown bowls beside green ones.

The walls were exposed brick, but there were still things on the walls. The most prominent piece was a line of old license plates. “Where did these come from?” I asked, turning back to Fletch.

He had gotten under the covers. “They’re from the old cars I’ve owned.”

I glanced back at them. There were fifteen of them. “You’ve had fifteen cars?”

“I’ve had more than fifteen. Those are just how many of them had a license plate I could pilfer.”

“Why have you had so many cars?”

“I buy cars that are on their deathbeds and I drive them until they die. The car I’m driving now I’ve had for two months. I’ve got a good feeling about her. I think she might last another six months.”

“Why do that? Don’t you need reliable transportation?”

“The car I’m driving now, I paid three hundred and fifty dollars for. The guy selling her just didn’t know how to call the wreckers to get her and she still ran. If she runs for the eight months I predict, I will have spent thirty-eight dollars a month on my car payments. When I call the wreckers, they’ll pay me fifty bucks.”

“That’s less than a monthly bus pass!” I gawked.

“Yeah, except I still have to pay for insurance and gas.”

I looked at the license plates again. “Interesting hobby. Were any of them fancy? I mean, when they were new?”

“I have had a couple of BMWs and one time I had a Cadillac.”

“Are you a good mechanic, then?”

He stroked the side of his face. “I don’t really know. If I can figure out what’s wrong with it and if the new part isn’t too expensive and if it’s not too cold out, then I’ll try to fix it. Sometimes, it works out. Sometimes, it doesn’t.”

The stuff in the corner looked like a hoarder’s paradise from a distance, but as I closed in, I realized it was much more. There were wood pieces stacked on power tools and boxes with weird designs carved in the lids. When I tried to open one, I realized it was nailed shut.

“What is this supposed to be?”

“It’s a xylophone,” he said, biting the side of his thumb and looking at me curiously from under the wings of his eyebrows.

“You make them?”

“Yeah. I sell them on Etsy and eBay.”

“Will you play it for me?”

“Sure,” he said, throwing the bedclothes aside and lifting himself from the mattress. “But only if you get in the bed.”

“I have to get in the bed?” I asked cautiously.

“I’ve been warming it up for you,” he said, stepping past me and pulling a pair of mallets off the wall.

With him on the other side of the room, I approached the bed. There was no couch anywhere in the apartment. There was room for one. There just wasn’t one. So, unless I wanted to sit at a chair on the other side of the apartment, I had to climb into his bed.

I felt nervous. If I got into that bed, I was going to smell things. I was going to smell his sweat, aftershave, deodorant, detergent, and anything else. If he ate chips in bed, there might be crumbs.

Across the room, he was setting things up and moving things around. I was being stupid. He was a professional musician. I was being all fidgety for nothing. Besides, didn’t I like Fletch more than any other man I had ever dated? The sheets were losing their heat by the second.

I got in.

It was warm, just like he promised. When I took my first breath in, the scent was good. It was clean and slightly tangy, exactly the way the best men smelled. I propped myself up on the pillows and looked around the room. Fletch was not quite done setting up as he lined up xylophone boxes.

The first thing I realized lying there was that I couldn’t see a TV. Yes, I slept in an oversized closet, and sometimes I put the TV over the fake mantle when I was expecting a visitor, but most of the time, it was mounted on the wall in my little closet.

“Where’s your TV?” I asked.

“I have a tablet I watch stuff on if I must,” he replied, lifting a mallet. “This sound works better when I’m part of an orchestra or a band, but all the same... Ready?”

I nodded and he began to play.

It was hard to have an objection to such soft music, like the way rain should sound on the roof, but it never sounds the way it should. It was peaceful. I found myself thinking of meditation exercises I’d done when I used to go to yoga. I started breathing the way I used to breathe when I did my stretches. I found myself thinking of the red balloon and the spot of light. I aligned my spine and eased myself flat on my back. The bed got warmer. The music got softer.

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and Fletch was asleep beside me. I had slept for hours. I sat up and pushed the covers aside.

His hand came out and caught my wrist. “You don’t have plans for tomorrow morning, do you?”

“No. Tomorrow is Saturday.”

“Then lay down. Kiss me and relax,” he said with his eyes closed.

“Aren’t you going to ask for your pants back?”

“I told you to kiss me,” his voice cut across the darkness. “I did not ask for more. I won a big battle today, and I want the spoils, but I did not win this war.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, settling next to him.

“We’re a couple now, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“You were never going to agree to that. As far as I knew, you were going to be a woman I was seeing who could be seeing someone else on any night that you weren’t with me. It was maddening, and now that’s over. You’re my girlfriend and I can count on you not to date anyone else?”

“Yeah.”

“So, give me a goodnight kiss, the same one you’d give me if we were saying goodbye on your doorstep, and go to sleep.”

He leaned over me and when his lips touched mine, something inside me broke. It completely broke. Was it his warmth? Was it the way he kissed me? Like I was infinitely precious? Like I was his? Was it the way he tasted or the way he smelled? Was it his bed? Was it the way his voice sounded in the dark?

All I knew as he ended the kiss and settled next to me was that I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. I never wanted to go back to my apartment. I wanted to live here, where my feet were warm and where the man next to me was everything I wanted.

I put my hand over my heart. It was pounding.

I had to chill out. He hadn’t done the thing I needed him to do. I needed him to show me his idea of a good time and, consequently, of a good life. I had to calm down and let him show me more of who he was. I was just filling in the blanks he felt open with the hot excitement I felt.

I had just worked myself into a feeling of indifferent stupor when he said, his voice clipped and clear in the night air, “I won’t look if you want to take off your bra.” He turned on his side away from me.

For a second, I was stunned he had spoken to me like that. Then I realized how much it had been digging into my ribs. “Had a lot of girls up here before?” I asked unclipping the back.

“A few. I told you, I have friends who are women. They come for the backrubs and leave me for the wall slams of another man.”

“I don’t get it. You’ve slammed me against lots of walls,” I said with a chuckle as I pulled my bra out from my sleeve.

“I know. I thought I was the nice guy and she was leaving me for the domineering jerk who slammed her against walls. I was wrong. I was the nice guy who didn’t want her... or any of them. If I wanted them as much as I want you, I would have slammed them up against some walls. I wouldn’t have been able to let them go to another man. As it was, I could let them leave. I felt a bit sorry, but getting over the letdown was easier than anyone watching could have supposed.”

“Well,” I said, putting my nose in the air. “I didn’t get a backrub.”

“That’s because if I place one hand on you, things will get out of control. It’s our first sleepover. I want you to be comfortable. I want you to stay forever.”

And his voice, like liquid darkness, undid me.