Chapter 86: Taking Back Their Space
Lisa’s POV
Our home never quite felt like home for the longest time.
There were places that were mine, places that were Leo’s, and a definite invisible border separated us. We’d lived shaped the same building, but slept under the same roof, and had the same address, but still it felt like we were a million miles apart.
That line, it was starting to blur, now.
It began insidiously. One quiet evening after work, I encountered Leo in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, gazing with a puzzled look at a recipe on his phone.
"What are you doing?" I said, propping myself up against the doorframe.
He looked up, a slight smile on his face. “Something that may be either dinner or a disaster.”
"Should I be worried?"
“Only a little,” he said. “I’m making pasta.
A soft chuckle escaped me. “You know there’s nothing wrong with the pasta in the pantry, right?”
“Yeah, but where’s the romance in that?” he muttered.
“The romance?” I asked, in a sing-song tease.
Humiliation flashed across his face momentarily. “It just came out.”
“Well,” I said, pushing off from the doorframe and coming closer to him, “if we wind up crashing and burning, we’ll go down together.”
His eyes softened momentarily at that. “Together,” he whispered.
We worked side-by-side in the kitchen – me showing him what to do, him listening closely, and intermittently shuffling shoulders with me as we worked around the countertop. It was clumsy and flawed, flour dusted his dark shirt and coated my hands, but for the first time laughter broke the silence that had only ever been filled with tension and silence.
We were both a little reluctant, waiting tables, with our bent knees bent over the dictionary standing on our knees and our hands resting on the small legged table with meals which we worked for. He put his fork down with hesitance when we both took seats at the dining table with the fruits of our labour in front of us. “Moment of truth.”
"Just remember," I warned, "if it's horrible, we pretend it never happened."
He ate a portion slowly. His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “This is… actually good.”
“Actually?” I said again.
“Okay, it’s really good,” he added with a smile in my direction. “We’re a good team.”
The words he said seemed to hang in the air almost reverently.
Good team we are."
But after dinner, instead of retiring to our respective corners of the house as we used to, we migrated to the living room as a group. I snuggled in one end of the couch, naturally taking up the same place as I always had, and Leo paused for a moment, undecided. He then slowly sank down on the floor next to me. Not too far, but not right up against me either. It was tentative. Respectful. Cute in the delicacy of it all.
Isn’t it funny how your ideas about space gets all muddled when you’re stranded in a war zone? We put on an old movie – one I had always loved but never taken the trouble to watch in this house until now. As the recognizable opening motif played in the background, I experienced a long-dormant feeling there.
Ease.
Our shoulders brushed once, then again, until eventually they rested comfortably against each other. We both pretended it didn’t happen. None of us needed to do so.
But all that changed, because for the first time ever, the couch didn’t have only two invisible sides.
That quiet closeness turned into a routine in the next few days.
We started making food together more often, instead of ordering in or eating at odd hours. Not infrequently he would come home with groceries on his own initiative, not infrequently I would detect the faintest alterations he had wrought about the house — shifted a shelf, brought a plant closer to the window, added softer lighting in the hall that made nights a little less lonely.
One day as I walked past, I found him standing before it in the hallway that had been our home since that day nine years ago. It was a picture of a nondescript landscape - the right colors for the wall, that was about it.
“You hate that photo, you don’t like looking at it?” I whispered.
“I don’t hate it,” he said, still looking at it, “I just don’t connect to it.”
“In that case, why keep it?”“Then why keep it?”
He looked at me. “Maybe it’s waiting to be replaced. With something that means something to us.”
Us.
Even our bedroom — which was always the place of the most emotional separation — started to shift. Gone is the phantom line down the center of the bed. Gone is that awkward habit of turning our backs to each other without a word.
On some nights, we lie there and talk. About the work. About childhood memories. About fears. About dreams we’ve never talked about.
“I fantasized about leaving,” I told him one night as I lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. “Like, just take a bag and go to a place where nobody knew who I was or who I was married to.”
“And what of the present?” he whispered.
“Now. I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere other than here.”
“Neither can I.” He said
That one simple touch left my heart yearning in the most beautiful way.
Time and again, we never spoke. We would sit floor on our backs against the couch and share a bowl of popcorn while we listened to the rain tapping against the windows. We’d pass in the hallway and say nothing more than a smile, the other person unseen.
These instances were minor to the external world.
With every shared laugh, unintentional touch, and whispered conversation late into the night, the house quieted and softened in our Saviour. It was drinking us in, our heat, our burgeoning bond. The cold that had once inhabited every nook was beginning to give way to something new and delicate, something unmistakably like hope.
We weren’t obliterating history, you see.
We were painting over it.
One memory and one shared moment at a time.
And as I stood at the doorway of the living room that night, watching Leo arrange a few candles on the coffee table for no particular reason, I realized quietly something undeniably beautiful.
It wasn’t just his house anymore.
It wasn’t just me anymore.
It was us.
And for the first time, it really felt like home.