(no subject)

Bit by bit, the flat started to feel more and more like home.

Until Eddie had joined me, I had felt restless, unable to settle whenever I was alone, uncertain of how I should set things up or where I should put anything. Before he was able to officially move in, I rearranged the furniture in the living room three times and the furniture in the bedroom had been in complete disarray when he arrived. It hadn't felt right, making any of those decisions without him.

It was lucky for me that he was much better at being organized than I was. I was neat and I liked things to go in their place, I liked to make sure our belongings were put away, but it was Eddie who had made sense of where things ought to go.

I'd never had a home like this before. Even before Peter. My memories of the home where I lived with my parents were often fragmented and I could never put them together to get a real sense of what it had been like, but I knew it was small. Cold. Dirty. No matter how hard my mother scrubbed, it was never clean enough. I remembered my fingers and toes being cold all the time. Finding it difficult to sleep because the bed was hard and the draft never stopped.

This was home, though. A real home.

As I unlocked the door and came inside after a shift at the library, I put my keys in the bowl by the door, then took off my shoes and put them away in the closet.

"Hi!" I called to Eddie. "I brought food home."

I had burgers in a bag, stopping by one of the really good places on a whim while driving home.