Sam has moved Priya four times in six years, which means he knows things about her that boyfriends don't get to know. He knows she owns a shocking number of extension cords. He knows she packs books flat, not spine-up, and will die on that hill. He knows that in every apartment, on every shelf of every closet, there has been one box labeled MISC in her fast slanted hand, and that it is always the same box, softening at the corners now, and that she carries it herself. Never lets him take it. He stopped offering during move number two.
Today the apartment is Dev's, and the boxes are only hers, and that's the whole story of why they're here.
Dev is being decent about it, which somehow makes it worse. He's gone to his brother's for the day so she can pack without an audience, and he's left coffee filters out on the counter next to a note Sam didn't read and Priya read twice and folded into her back pocket. The place has that terrible loudness empty rooms have. Every strip of packing tape screeches like a bird.
"You don't have to talk," Priya says, wrapping wine glasses in Dev's newspaper. "You're allowed to just lift things."
"I'm a full-service operation. Lifting and remarks."
"The remarks are why I feed you."
They work. This is the thing they know how to do, the two of them — the choreography of it, her wrapping, him stacking, the tape gun passed back and forth without looking, like line cooks, like surgeons. Six years of this. Two of her boyfriends, one of his girlfriends, four apartments, and always this: Sam and Priya, moving her life in and out of rooms other people own.
By four o'clock the light is going amber and the bedroom's done and it's just the closet shelf, and he's taller, so he reaches, and his hand comes down with the MISC box, and the softened bottom corner gives out.
It doesn't spill much. A rubber-banded stack of photos. A phone from two phones ago. A ticket stub gone silver with time.
And a hoodie. Gray, wrecked at the cuffs, a bleach comet across the left shoulder from the night in his first apartment when they tried to make their own cleaning spray off the internet and nearly gassed themselves and laughed on the fire escape until the neighbors complained.
His hoodie. He'd looked for it for a year. Six years ago.
The tape gun is very loud in his hand and then he sets it down and it's very quiet.
"So," Priya says. She has gone extremely still, kneeling there in the closet doorway with the ticket stub in her hand, not looking at him. "Okay. So don't make it a thing."
"It's been in every apartment."
"Don't make it a thing, Sam."
"Priya." His voice comes out wrong, low, like furniture dragged over wood. "It's been in every apartment."
She looks up at him then, and her eyes are doing something complicated, defiance and misery and a question, all of it at once, and this is the moment, he understands, this is the door that has been standing in every hallway of every apartment for six years, one inch open.
He doesn't remember crossing the room. He remembers her standing up into it. The kiss lands crooked, her mouth catching the corner of his and correcting, her hand fisting in his shirt like she's angry about it, and then it isn't crooked at all — it's deep and certain and terrifying, her back against the counter, his hand finding the warm skin at her waist where her shirt has ridden up, her breath going ragged against his mouth, six years arriving all at once. She makes a small sound against his teeth that he will hear for the rest of his life. Her fingers are in his hair. The counter edge, the amber light, the smell of cardboard and her shampoo, her hips tilting into his, everything in him pulling one direction like water finding a drain —
— and then he tastes salt.
He pulls back. She's crying. Not prettily. Both at once, wanting and crying, her hand still holding his shirt like she'll fall.
"I moved out of his place today," she says, wet, furious with herself. "Today, Sam. The tape's still screaming. What is wrong with us."
"Nothing's wrong with us." His thumb moves along her cheekbone, taking the tear with it. His heart is going like a dryer with shoes in it. "Our timing's garbage. It's always been garbage."
She laughs, horribly, into his collarbone. He holds her in the amber light with the whole apartment in boxes around them, and wanting her is a physical weather he just stands in.
"Not like this," she says finally, against his chest. "Not as the getaway car."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it. I felt you mean it." He feels her laugh again, better this time.
He takes the last box down himself. From the sidewalk he looks up and she's at the window, small in the empty rectangle of it, one hand raised, and he can't read her face from here.
He's got the van in gear when his phone buzzes on the dash.
The hoodie stays with me, it says. And then, before he can type anything, three dots, and then:
When, then.
Not a question mark. Like a date she's daring him to name. Sam sits in the loaded van outside her old life, grinning like an idiot at a phone, and starts the engine, and starts thinking about apartments — the fifth move, the one where the box labeled MISC finally gets unpacked.
