Page 71 of Flogged By the Ferret
"I want to stay in this house with a bathroom that doesn't look like it was last renovated during the Carter administration. These are not contradictory positions."
Nero's hand paused in his hair. "The bathroom was renovated in 2019."
"By who?"
"Me."
"That explains everything."
Nero looked down at him. Amani looked up. The grin was there. Not the reckless weapon from the bar, not the sharp-edged dare from the club floor. A softer thing. A Sunday afternoon thing. The grin of someone who was lying on a terrible couch in a house with a bathroom he hated, picking a fight with a ferret who was reading a paperback around him, and who was happy. Quiet, sturdy happiness. The happiness of someone who had earned it.
"The tile is fine," Nero said.
"The tile is mauve, Nero. Mauve. In what universe is mauve tile acceptable in a bathroom?"
"It was on sale."
"Of course it was on sale. No one in the history of home improvement has ever paid full price for mauve tile. Mauve tile is what happens when a store can't sell something and marks it down until someone with no aesthetic sense walks in and says, sure, I'll take forty square feet of that."
"Forty-two."
"You measured?"
"I installed it. I know exactly how much there is."
Amani reached up and touched Nero's face. Thumb tracing the cheekbone, steady hand, clear eyes. The gesture had become a habit, something he did without thinking, the way Nero's handfound his hair without thinking. The small, unconscious rituals of two people who had stopped performing for each other and started just being.
"Hey," Amani said.
"Hey yourself."
"I'm glad you ordered a screwdriver."
Nero's mouth curved. "I'm glad you put an umbrella in it."
Amani pulled him down and kissed him. Slow. Coffee-flavored. The kind of kiss that happened on couches on Saturdays when there was nowhere to be and nothing to survive and the only thing on the schedule was this. Nero's book fell off his lap and neither of them picked it up.
Outside, the sprinkler made its arc. The sun moved across the floor. The bread machine sat on the counter. The pillow was on the bed and the hoodie was on the door and the quiche dish was in the sink from four nights earlier because Amani kept saying he'd wash it and kept not washing it and Nero had stopped asking because the dish in the sink was evidence of a life being lived in this house by two people who were still learning how to do it and the learning was slow and imperfect and exactly right.
Not everything was fixed. It wouldn't be. The ranch was still there — behind his eyes, in the corners of rooms, in words that landed wrong, and touches that came from the wrong direction. It would be there for a long time. Maybe always.
But always meant different things. Always was Nero at the end of the bar. Always was the screwdriver with the umbrella. Always was the door that stayed open, the hand that stayed steady, and the voice that said ‘your pace, your choice, I'm right here.’
Always was a terrible couch, a sacred pillow, quiche at four in the morning, a lion who was still learning how to be a lion again, and a ferret who would follow him to Mars.
Here I am, Amani thought. Not the person before. Not the person during. The person after. Still becoming. Still here.
He kissed his ferret again. His ferret kissed him back. Their Saturday went on. The quiche dish stayed in the sink. The sprinkler made its arc. And the house, with its mauve tile and its terrible couch and its sacred pillow, held them both the way it always did — quietly, without complaint, and with the door wide open.
The End
