The apartment is late-afternoon quiet.
I'm on the couch. My laptop is on the cushion next to me — the florist project, the "organic but not like a salad" brief that I'm still finding my way into. Bagel is on the keyboard. He has been on the keyboard for twenty minutes. He's added six lines of gibberish to the mood board and I'm keeping all of them. And Poutine — in a development no one saw coming — is sitting on the arm of the couch, one paw extended, batting at my hair with the slow, appraising disdain of a queen who has decided that interacting with her subjects is no longer entirely beneath her.
On the floor by the door — my slippers. Grey. The heels worn down from months of hardwood. They're next to his boots. Next to his sneakers. In the spot that became mine without anyone assigning it.
I reach for the bag of chips on the coffee table. Barbecue. The brand from that night — the one I ate on his kitchen floor at 2 AM, whispering to his cat because the cat was the only one who didn't need me to be better than I was. Ethan buys this brand now. He puts the bag in the kitchen like it's always been there. Neither of us mentions it.
I eat them here now. On the couch. In daylight. Hand in the bag. Crunch filling the quiet.
Ethan comes out of the bedroom. Dressed. He walks past the couch and reaches into the bag and takes a chip.
"Those are mine," I say.
"You're in my apartment."
"I live here."
The sentence falls out. Simple. Neither heavy nor light. Just true — the kind of true that doesn't need architecture around it.
He looks at me. I look at him.
"You do," he says.
He takes another chip. He goes to get water. Bagel jumps off my keyboard and follows him because Bagel follows everyone everywhere and has never understood personal space and never will.
I sit on the couch. The light through the window is green-gold. The chips are warm with barbecue dust. Poutine is back on the bookshelf — motionless, almost eternal, as if the couch incident never happened. My slippers are by the door.
A chip crumb falls on the couch cushion.
I don't pick it up.
