There’s a block of one of Bridgette’s fancy cheeses in the drawer. I pull it out and open the packaging. It’s some sort of white cheese with fancy pieces of spinach or something in it. Smells like shit, but it looks just like a bar of soap once the wrapping is removed. I take it to Warren’s bathroom, remove his bar of soap from the shower and replace it with the cheese.
Ned gets decapitated? I swear to God, if that actually happens, I’m throwing away my television.
When I walk back to the living room, my phone is lighting up on the coffee table. It’s a text from Sydney, telling me she just parked. I walk to the door and open it, then make my way down the stairs. She’s making her way up, and as soon as I see the smile on her face, it makes me forget all about the decapitation I’m praying is a just a terrible prank Warren is pulling on me.
We meet in the middle of the staircase. She laughs at my eagerness when I push her against the railing and kiss her.
God, I love her. I swear, I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t signed “when” last night. I’m sure I’d still be sitting on that stage, playing every sad song I could think of while I drank every last drop of alcohol in the bar.
But not only did the worst-case scenario not happen—the best-case scenario happened. She loved it and she loves me and here we are, together, about to spend a perfect boring night at my apartment doing nothing but eating takeout and watching television.
I pull away from her, and she reaches up to wipe lip gloss off my mouth.
“Have you ever watched Game of Thrones?” I ask her.
She shakes her head.
“Do you want to?”
She nods. I grab her hand and walk up the stairs with her. When we get inside, she goes to use the bathroom and I pick up my phone. I open the unread text from Maggie.
Maggie: Yes! Found out yesterday. Got a 5.
Ridge: Why am I not surprised? Congratulations! Hope you’re doing something to celebrate.
Maggie: I did. Went skydiving today.
Skydiving? I hope she’s kidding. Skydiving is the last thing she should be doing. That can’t be good for her lungs. I start to respond to her, but I pause in the middle of my text. This is the one thing she disliked the most about me. My constant worrying. I have to stop stressing about her doing things that might make her situation worse. It’s her life and she deserves to live it however she wants.
I delete my response to her. When I look up from my phone, Sydney is standing at the refrigerator, watching me. “You okay?” she asks.
I stand up straight and slide my phone into my pocket. I don’t want to talk about Maggie right now, so I smile and save it for another day. “Come here,” I say to her.
She smiles and walks over to me, sliding her arms around my waist. I pull her to me. “How was your day?”
She grins. “Excellent. My boyfriend wrote me a song.”
I press my lips to her forehead, then hook my thumb beneath her chin, tilting her face up to mine. As soon as I start to kiss her, she grabs my shirt and starts walking backward toward my bedroom. We don’t break the kiss until she’s falling onto my bed and I’m climbing on top of her.
We kiss for several minutes with our clothes on, which I would rectify, but it’s nice. We didn’t really fall in love in a typical way, so we went from a kiss that filled us with weeks of guilt, to a three-month stretch of not communicating at all, to a night of making up and making love. We were nothing at all and then suddenly all in. It’s nice taking it slow right now. I want to spend the rest of the night kissing her because I’ve thought about kissing her like this for three months straight.
She rolls me onto my back and then slides on top of me, breaking our kiss. Her hair is falling around her face, so she moves it out of the way by sliding it over her shoulder. She kisses me softly on the mouth and then sits up, straddling me so she can sign.
“Last night feels like…” She pauses, struggling to sign the rest, so she speaks it. “It feels like forever ago.”
I nod in agreement and then lift my hands to teach her how to sign the word “forever.” I say it out loud as she signs it. When she gets it right, I nod and sign, “Good job.”
She falls to my side and lifts up onto her elbow. “What’s the sign for the word deaf?”
I make the motion for the word, sliding my hand across my jaw and toward my mouth.
She drags her thumb from her ear to her chin. “Like that?”
I shake my head to let her know she got it wrong. I lift up onto my elbow, then take her hand to tuck in her thumb and straighten out her index finger. I press it to her ear and slide it over her jaw, toward her mouth. “Like that,” I tell her. She repeats the sign for deaf with perfection. It makes me smile. “Perfect.”