Chapter 10: Boxes, Biceps and Bad Intentions

Moving Day began with a lie, for most honest thing for anything in my life to start at this point.

"It's only four boxes , "I told Anthony, standing on the curbing in front of my dorm at nine a. m.. "I really don't need the van."

"You have a desk lamp and a cactus ," Anthony said, brushing a hand over my cheek. "You need the van."

He had rented one, indeed, a battered white one with a sunken door, and brought donuts and a hand truck as well as a playlist called Moving In With My Boyfriend (Happy Energy); he looked like a golden retriever at a pageant. I took up my cactus, felt the old trapdoor in my stomach give its familiar twitch.

"Help is on the way, by the way," he said, already checking his phone. "I asked Lucas, he said yes."

I dropped the cactus.

It landed, fortuitously, upright in its pot, which I took as an ill omen. "You asked your friend Lucas to help us move?"

"He's my oldest friend. He's got the biceps." Anthony frowned. "Is that a problem? You two seemed fine at dinner."

"We seemed,"I said cautiously, "like two people who had survived dinner."

At 9:07 Lucas Hale rounded the corner in a gray tee shirt, the cuffs of which he had rolled up to reveal a pair of forearms corded with muscle; he was carrying three paper cups in a cardboard tray. He handed one to Anthony, kept one he kept one for himself, and, advancing to me, offered me the third with an adroit little gesture.

"Oat milk, two sugars," he said, quite unperturbably.

I stared at the cup. "I never told you that."

"No,"Lucas said, "you didn't."

I took the cup. It was precisely the way I liked it; it was the way I'd ordered coffee for three months in a body I didn't recognize, without asking myself how my mouth knew the recipe.

"Twelve percent."the system droned. "Please stop staring."I took a very long draught of my coffee.

---

The couch was Anthony's idea, and was a crime.

His apartment was on the fifth floor of an elevatorless building and the couch was an heirloom of his aunt's-- a monstrosity of green velvet, the weight of a small horse. It was Lucas and I who got the stairs, and Anthony who went ahead with the hand truck, saying that he would show us, from the higher ground, the way to turn.

"Left a little,"Anthony shouted, from the vicinity of the third landing. "No, your left! Lucas, tilt it, tilt it! You're scraping the paint!"

"I'm tilting ,"Lucas growled.

"You're not tilting!"I am going to throw him of a balcony,"Lucas muttered, addressing me.

"I'll hold his legs."

He glanced across the couch and for half-a-second his mouth turned up. There was a real smile, fast, wicked, and it landed where the others had, under my ribs, as sweet as a pillow thrown at me.

Then we reached the turn

and the landing was cramped, the couch was noncomformist, one bulked against the rail and the other against the wall, and in my attempt to pivot, with all my weight in my toes, I found myself pressed between the armchair and a very warm and very firm torso. Lucas's hands were braced against the cushions on either side of my hips; his nose was an inch away from my collarbone; I could smell soap, and cedar and the clean, briny taste of coffee.

"Stop wiggling," he said, in a sound that had dropped half-an-octive.

"I'm not wiggling. The couch is wiggling."

"Then tell the couch to stop."

"Are you two alive down there?"Anthony barked.

"Yes!"I shouted, a little too loudly.

Lucas's breathe fluttered into my hair. He was looking down at me, not at the couch; his pupils were big and unreadable. I could feel the beat of his pulse where out wrists were locked together, fast and sure and in time with mine.

"You're blushing,"he said, almost inAUDIBLE.

"It's the exertion."

"Of course."His thumb moved --once-- against the inside of my wrist. "Exertion."

"Affection," the system said, strangled. "Sixteen percent."

"It was twelve!"__

"I am recalibrating in real time!"

We managed to bring the couch up to the fifth floor eleven minutes later, both of our hair damp with sweat and silent.

---

The fifth floor had a long, carpeted hallway with six doors, and at the end of it stood a man holding one of them open. He was thin, and sandy-haired, and perhaps twenty-three, in a gray hoodie and specs with the sort of mild pleasant visage that you forget as you do the same on everyone you see. He gave us a friendly little wave.

"You must be new,"he said to me. "Theo. I'm in 4B, just below. Heard you were coming, just thought I'd pitch in with the carrying."

"That's so nice,"Anthony said, arriving right behind us. "Thanks, man! I'm Anthony. This is Lucis. And this is my boyfriend."

"I know," said Theosmiling. "I've herd a lot."

Something small and cold brushed against the back of my neck. I told myself it was nothing. People in apartment building gossiped; that was nothing new. But Theo's eyes stayed on my face a second too long, bright and curious behind the glass lenses, the way a man might when he finds a familiar coat on a stranger. When Lucas, a little coolly, inquired as to how long he'd been living there, Theo responded with the easy affability of the well-practised lie, "Oh, about a month."

"Beautiful," said Lucas, his voice still. He hadn't moved. Theo was appraised by Lucas' gaze, as was usual, lightly, from behind the eye.

We unloaded the boxes, and Theo pitched in, and was skilled at it; quick, and happy. He took the cactus, he took the lamp. When I came up the last flight of stairs with the kitchen box, he was waiting there, and reached out and took it from my arms.

"Heavy,"he said, grinning. "Ceramic. Careful, the blue mug's at the bottom."

I smiled, and thanked him, and walked three more steps before I stopped dead.

I had packed that box myself. I had placed the blue mug at the bottom, swathed in a sweatshirt, because it was the only thing I owned that I truly loved. I had not told anyone, not even Anthony or Lucas or the system.

"Hey,"I said, turning back around. " How did you know about the mug?"

But Theo was already gone, his plucky footsteps echoing down the steps and the hall went silent.

"Warning,"the system said, softly, and for the second time in two days, there was no cheer in its voice at all.

"What?"

"The previous occupant," it said, "has just carried your box."