Here I Am, There You Are

I walked through my work’s garage with a skip in my step. It had been a great day for me that day. I woke up feeling rested, I set a new record time running with Olive, my shower was at the perfect temperature, almost all the traffic lights were green on my way to work, and then my day at work itself was amazing as well. I had amazing coffee, a good lunch, a meeting with people who actually did the work they were expected to, and an awesome project that would come up in a few months. I couldn’t wait to tell Jack all about it.

Usually, I’d wait until I was back home to call him. This time, however, I dialed his number as soon as I drove out of the garage. I did it handsfree on bluetooth in my car, of course. I wasn’t going to risk getting a fine and risk my life. There was no way I was letting anything get between me and this good mood.

“Hey!” Jack chirped down the phone after I listened to a few loud dial tones.

“Jack!” I shrieked back in excitement.

“What’s up?!” He tried to match my tone.

“Well, I’m in my car–”

“Rach! You’re in your car? Get off your phone!” Jack scolded, seemingly very serious and a little worried.

“No, don’t hang up!” I stopped him with a whine. “I’m too excited to tell you stuff to wait until I get home. I promise I won’t crash.”

“Make sure you drive safe, though.”

“Just let me tell you what I want to tell you. The sooner I get to, the sooner we can end the call.”

“So, tell me!” he urged when I waited for him to say something back.

“I’m moving back to LA!” I cheered.

“What?!” he gasped.

“I’m moving back to LA!” I repeated, feeling all of my excitement finally spill out.

“No way!”

“Yes! The position for editor-in-chief opened up and it was mine for the taking.”

“Oh my god.”

“I won’t actually move for another three months. I’ve got to finish stuff here, and they’ve got to round things up there, but after that, I’m back,” I told him so he wouldn’t get too excited just yet.

“You already accepted it?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, of course I did. I didn’t need to think about it.”

“Is the job any good though? Don’t get me wrong, I want you here, but only if you’re happy.”

“It’s even better. Higher wages, and it’s the same job but at the headquarters, so I’ll have a larger influence.

“Holy shit…” I heard Jack take a deep breath in. “We’re actually going to be together again.”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t stop smiling. “I was also thinking about that. But, I just stupidly sold my house–”

“You can move in with me!” Jack suggested without skipping a beat.

“About that… I’d love to, but it would be over a two hour drive from your place to work because of LA traffic.”

“Oh…” The disappointment radiated from his voice.

“I’ve come up with an idea though,” I started to slowly say. “But I’m going to need you to be onboard with it.”

“What is it?”

“How would you feel about getting a place together? Like, properly get a new place together. Something we both love and can travel from.”

He was silent for a second, making me fear the worst. Was this another situation where he didn’t want to leave things behind? I didn’t mind moving in with him, but having to travel four hours a day just to get to and from work didn’t seem like something I’d want to do the rest of my life.

“Yeah,” he finally answered.

“Yes?”

“Yes, let’s get a place together.” He confirmed. “How do you want to do it? Do you want to come to LA so we can look together? Or should I go look at places myself and you can see them online?”

“I was thinking of taking a weekend and a few days off to come down. I just need you to tell me when you’re there and free.”

“Okay, yeah, I’ll figure that out and text the dates to you.”

“Okay.” I literally couldn’t wipe the grin off my face. Jack and I were finally starting our lives together. “That’s all I wanted to tell you for now.”

“Then we’ll end the call here so you can drive safely. Are we still on for FaceTime later tonight?”

“Umm, yes, obviously.”

He chuckled deeply. “I’ll see you later, then. I love you.”

“I love you,” I told him back.

Before I could end the call, I heard him shout into the air, obviously thinking the call had ended already, “fuck yeah!”

I giggled to myself and drove the rest of the way back home feeling absolutely ecstatic. Jack and I had already been together for over two years now, forgetting about the six months we broke up. If you did consider them, then we would have been together for almost two years. We still had our old anniversary, and we’d still tell people we were together for two years. Who cared about technicalities? But it was time to finally move in together.

I never wanted to rush it before the break up, but I sure as hell was ready after. If we hadn’t been in different countries, we would have been sharing a place by now. We talked about it often enough that that was certain. What else would have happened, I did not know.

That stupid smile was still on my face when I entered my appartment.

“You look happy,” Sascha commented from my couch with Olive at her feet.

That was all that was needed for my smile to drop immediately. “Oh no.”

“What?” She sat up a little out of worry.

“No.” I pouted, suddenly feeling very upset.

“What’s wrong?” Olive stood up as well now, feeling the change in Sascha’s demeanor.

I just walked up to her and fell on the couch. After putting my head on her shoulder, I wrapped my arms around her to hug her. I had completely forgotten about the fact that I was actually going to leave everything here behind. It didn’t mean that I suddenly started to regret ever saying yes to the job. That wasn’t it at all, I would still have taken it. But that also didn’t mean that I was happy to be leaving.

“You were just so happy!” Sascha sighed.

“I know.”

“Tell me why you were happy, maybe you’ll feel better again,” she tried to cheer me up, not knowing at all what this was about.

“I’m happy and sad for the same reason,” I confessed. I wanted to tell her everything about the next step Jack and I were going to take, but I also knew I wasn’t going to tell her everything forever.

“Okay, so tell me, then we can work through it together.”

“I got offered a job in LA,” I started telling her.

“Oh.” She nodded, probably seeing where this was going, but not wanting to assume.

“I accepted it,” I informed her. “And I was on the phone with Jack–”

“Did that shithead screw up again?”

I quickly sat up so I could talk to her face to face. “No! No, not at all! We’re going to get a place together. Like, he’s going to move out of his apartment and we’re going to move in to a new place.”

“That’s great, though!” She tried to hype me up.

“And I was happy. But I just remembered that you’re here, not in LA.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“But you’re my best friend.” Now my frown didn’t want to move.

“I know, Rachel. As much as I wish Jack would have moved here with you so we could have all been friends, it’s not the way it is. If you guys can have a whole relationship long distance, then we can stay long distance friends,” she reasoned.

“I’ll miss our movie nights.”

“We can still have movie nights. I’ll come over and keep you company, especially when Jack’s gone. Just make sure your new place has a bedroom for me.”

I started to laugh a little. “Noted. You can be our thirty year old kid who lives with us.”

“Sounds like the dream,” she grinned back. “Now, tell me all about you and Jack.”

––––––––

A few weeks later, I had flown out to LA. Jack was waiting for me at the airport and he greeted me with the biggest hug and most loving kiss he could give in public. He wouldn’t shut up about how excited he was the entire drive back to his place, where I was staying for the entire trip.

Before I flew out, we had a look online to see what we would possibly be interested in. It was all over the place, we didn’t know exactly where to start and what to look for. So, instead, Jack just set up an appointment with a real estate agent for us to be shown properties. All we had was our budget, which they were going to work with. Obviously, we weren’t multi-millionaires, so we couldn’t afford to live in the most expensive areas of LA, but we could definitely live a little more than comfortable.

Until now, moving in together meant that one of us would move in with the other, so all we expected was an apartment that already existed. Now, however, we got to find something completely new. Neither of us had any idea of what we wanted.

We got to see around seven properties on the first day. It was a lot to take in and process, and definitely a lot to remember. They were all so different yet they also all blurred together. We had modern houses, rustic apartments, starter homes, and everything in between. LA was a mess of different aesthetics, but I still didn’t know what tickled my fancy.

“God, I thought this would be so much easier,” Jack breathed out loudly and he placed a coffee mug in front of me and sat down across from me with his own.

We were at his round kitchen table after just coming back from our appointment. The real estate agent would constantly ask what we thought about something. But, quite frankly, we had no real strong opinions. I guess we both just expected to like a place and that that was it, much like the other times we moved by ourselves.

“I know,” I sighed, almost feeling like we were going to need more than just two days to view places. However, I had given it some more thought in the car back, and believed I had found our problem. “But then again, we don’t know what we want.”

“What do you mean?” He furrowed his eyebrows and took a careful sip from his hot drink.

“Okay, well, what do you want from our next home?” I asked him, secretly hoping he’d come with a very elaborate answer, meaning he was just finding it difficult to find something that checked all the boxes.

He shrugged and glanced over all the leaflets we had scattered around the table with pictures of the houses and apartments we saw. “A place we can live together.”

“But what do you want from it?” I repeated. “House or apartment? How many bedrooms? A place we can immediately move in to? How many bathrooms? How big? What style?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, thinking over all the questions I just asked. “Oh… yeah, no, I don’t know.”

“I feel that,” I sighed loudly, hoping that a place would stand out to me when I looked down at all the pictures again. But then I got an idea. I gathered them all together and put them in three piles. “Let’s start with what we want in the future.”

I pointed to the first pile. Here, I had put the two studio apartments we saw. They were nice, like really nice. It was more than just a bed, kitchen, and bathroom. Well, technically it wasn’t, but it looked amazing. The curtains all closed with a single push of a button, the kitchen had all the newest technology. I would have loved to have a place like this back when I was twenty-three and couldn’t afford it.

“The studio apartments,” I explained to Jack. “The perfect place to live if we’re both gone a lot, which I don’t think I will be. We won’t be able to have any guests, though. Dinner would literally be in our bedroom, and nobody can stay over. That means your brother or sister wouldn’t be able to visit, or your parents, or my parents and siblings. We just wouldn’t have the space.”

I then moved my hands to the next pile I had made that consisted of three places. They were all very similar, just in different areas and slightly different in the way they looked. You had a very plain simple one, but also a very modern one on the second-to-last floor on a highrise. “Here we have the apartments and condos. It’s a lot like the places we both have now and had before. We can have friends and family over because we’ll have a spare bedroom. But… there are only two bedrooms, which I’ll explain in the next section.”

Then came the next and final pile. These places were out of the busy part of the city, had a garden, and were significantly larger, but also generally more expensive. Especially the ones with a nice view that were only built recently cost much more. “So, the houses. They seem massive now, like we’ll need some roommates or something. But, it is a place we can definitely live in for ages, if not forever. We’ll have a guest room for our friends and family, but we’ll also have the space for kids if we want them. We won’t have to move again for that. If we decide to go to an apartment with two bedrooms, we’ll have to move if we do go down that road. Or, we just won’t have guests staying over anymore.”

“Huh,” Jack nodded and reached out over the table to twist his fingers with mine, “that’s a good way to go about it. The future.”

“It all depends on what we want.”

“Yeah,” he agreed yet again, but still didn’t give a hint towards what he envisioned. “I never really thought about that before. All this time, I was more focused on actually one of us moving so we could be together. I never thought about what would happen after that.”

“I haven’t either,” I told him so he wouldn’t feel guilty about it. “But, I am going to say not these.” I pushed away all the studio apartments. “I’d like to have Sascha or family stay over occasionally, especially when you’re gone.”

“And I’m not gone all the time anymore, we need the space.”

“Exactly. But what else do we want?” I was happy we agreed on that, but I also didn’t want to be the one to now choose between the other two categories.

It wasn’t just choosing where we wanted to live. This was so much more. I always knew that that I wanted to get married and have kids, which just made the whole blow of not getting a date to weddings so much worse. I loved my career and everything, but in the end I wanted to have a family. Some people liked to disagree with me, that I worked so hard, but I didn’t care. I wanted the whole cliché marriage and kids thing.

“Well…” Jack started very slowly. We both didn’t know what the other wanted, but we were going to have to talk about it someday. “I… I think… I’d… I think– No, I know, I’d like to get married to you and I’d love to have kids.”

“Really?” I could feel myself almost want to cry as a smile crept onto my lips.

“Of course. I want to be with you forever, and that includes getting married and starting our own family.” He gave my hand a squeeze.

“I want that too,” I confessed.

“Well, then, I say…” He used his arm to swipe away the three apartments, so that the houses were the only information booklets we had. “All in.”

“Damn, that’s hot,” I breathed out and brought my mug to my lips and I stared at Jack. His hair was messy and he was wearing his glasses, but there was a fire burning in me.

“I’ll fuck you on this table right now.” He winked back, semi serious and semi jokingly.

“The table?” I raised an eyebrow and put down my mug again. “Where we eat? That’s disgusting.”

“You don’t complain when my dick’s in your mouth.”

“Okay, you just ruined it.”

“What?!” He acted all defensive.

I stood up and took my coffee with me. “I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.”

“No, Rachel!” he whined and slouched in his seat. “I’m sorry. We’ll have perfectly normal vanilla sex in bed.”

“You’re digging yourself a grave here,” I laughed over my shoulder as I started my way to his bedroom.

He let out a frustrated cry and wouldn’t take his eyes off me.

“Are you coming or what?” I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him, my hand against the doorpost.

“Huh?” He pushed his glasses up his nose.

“I was considering a shower.”

“Oh.” He jumped up from his chair as quickly as he could and ran after me.

I barely got to put my coffee safely down on the dresser before he pushed me up against the wall and pressed his lips against mine.

––––––––

The next day, Jack and I were back out with the real estate agent, looking at new properties. This time, however, we knew what we wanted. Jack had called after our shower so they could find more places that would cater to our needs. We didn’t need to see any studio apartments anymore, we wanted a place where we could raise a family and grow old in. And they had quite a few places to show us.

It was all down to our personal taste.

At one point, we found ourselves in yet another contemporary house. It was all based on cubes and rectangles. The walls were white, black, and gray, which was the only fitting colour scheme fitting for a place like this. The garden had a large concrete and wood patio, high quality artificial grass, and even an infinity pool that looked out over the view. Apparently it was a ‘little out of our budget’, which made complete sense, but it was a place that made you go speechless.

“What do you think?” Our real estate guy asked as we completed the tour and were back in the entrance hall.

I opened my mouth to give my opinion, like I had done at all the other places, but I decided to keep my mouth shut this time. Nobody said anything, but I realised it myself. I was always the first person to say something. Jack never got to say the first word. It was so wrong. By giving my opinion, I was most definitely influencing his. He always agreed with me, which was strange. It would make sense if it happened occasionally, but it happened everywhere.

Still, Jack was looking at me to say what I was thinking.

“What, don’t look at me.” I raised my hands up in defense. I had a strong opinion about this one, but I wanted to know how Jack felt. We had to both like the place we were going to spend a lot of money on. “What do you think?”

“Oh, well,” he seemed shocked that I was making him go first and scratched the back of his head, “I mean, it’s nice. Like, honestly, it’s really nice. Not everybody can get a house like this. But… I don’t know… it just doesn’t feel right, if that makes sense? Like it wouldn’t be home?”

“No, I get it.” I nodded, glad that Jack was on the same page as me. At first, when he was saying positive things, I was afraid. I started rethinking all the other places we’d been to. But it didn’t seem as bad now. “It something to show off to family and friends, but it’s so impersonal. Like, really beautiful, but just cold.”

“Alright,” the real estate took in our answer, obviously wanting to have sold this to us, but also determined to find something we liked. “Well, I’ve got one more place to show you.”

We got in his car for him to take us to the next place. He had been driving us to all of the places out of convenience. We had no idea where they all were. It was also the perfect opportunity for us to check out what the surrounding neighbourhood was like. The final one we went to was up on a hill again. It wasn’t on the side like the previous one, though it was more on the top.

“This house is under your budget,” the real estate agent told us as he turned into a driveway, “but it also does look it. It needs a lot of renovating.”

He almost said it like it was a bad thing. But he was right. The grass was unruly, you could barely classify it as grass with the length it was at. However, it wasn’t just the front porch that looked unkempt, so did the house. Pastel yellow paint was peeling from the wooden panels and tiles of the wood were dislodged. The porch was starting to look green from weathering. Maybe it was just the outside that didn’t get the loving it needed?

No, no it wasn’t. The house looked just as bad inside. It was completely empty. Wallpaper was coming loose from the walls, the floorboards looked beaten and not in a cute rustic way. Parts of the vertical bars of railing on the stairs were even missing. However, the actual rooms the place had weren’t half that bad.

Once you entered through the front door, you came into a small hall with stairs to the left side. Just in front of it, there was an indent in the wall, making space for a cloakroom. Going through the archway, you entered the living and dining room that had a fireplace, and the kitchen through a door to the right. To the left was another room that could technically be used for anything. A bedroom, a study, or even another living room.

I leaned towards Jack as we were looking around the living room, following the real estate agent while holding hands. “I actually don’t hate it.”

“Yeah… me neither…” he replied in a hushed tone, also surprised that it wasn’t that bad.

Up the stairs back in the hall, you’d come up to the bedrooms. The one all the way at the end was obviously the master bedroom. It had an ensuite bathroom and a large built in closet. There was another bathroom out in the hallway and three other bedrooms, each varying slightly in shape and size. The condition of the house up here was just as bad as downstairs.

“There’s still a backyard if you’d like to take a look,” the agent told us as he brought us back to the middle of the house and pointed at the glass panel doors. “It’s a mess, though.”

“No, I’ll take a look,” I answered and took Jack with me to go see what it looked like while the agent stayed inside.

We stepped outside, and I was actually shocked. The grass was even worse here. Plants were growing all over the place. Nature had fully reclaimed this area.

“Huh.” Jack stopped in his tracks.

I looked at him with wide eyes and couldn’t help but start laughing. Right in front of us was the most amazing view I had seen yet. This wasn’t as forced as all of the others ones we had seen. All other houses cleared out the entire backyard and pushed the swimming pool or porch as far to the end to bring all focus to the city you could see for miles. Here, however, there were still trees framing the picture.

But that wasn’t all. There still was a swimming pool to the right. Granted, it was green and in desperate need of a cleaning, but it was there. Then, to the left was an old gazebo and a small pond. This property was much larger than I had expected. And somehow it was still way under our budget.

“Oh my god,” I gasped, still not able to form any words, and looked back at the house. It looked so neglected.

“It reminds me of home,” Jack commented.

“It’s like the houses back home, but in LA,” I added. My brain was saying that this house would be a waste of money and a horrible undertaking, but my heart was falling in love with it.

“Is it bad that I like it?” He looked around himself, still holding on to my hand.

“I like it too,” I confessed. “It’ll need a lot of work, but we could make this look amazing.”

“We can hardly go in there and tell him we want it, we’ll seem insane.”

“You’re right. We’ll just have to act partially interested and then make an offer in a few days like we thought about it.”

“Yeah, let’s do it.” He pressed a kiss to the side of my head and we went back inside.

I put on my poker face, acting like I was still observing the place and it’s many faults. The real estate agent was on his phone texting someone, but put it away as soon as we came back.

“What actually put it in such a bad state?” I asked out of curiosity. One, it was nice to know. Two, it made me seem like I was judging it. And three, any information that could help us knock the price down was useful.

“An elderly woman used to live here by herself after her husband passed away. At her age, she couldn’t keep the house up. Once she passed away herself, the house became property of her children. None of them want it, though. It was already in a bad state back then, and they don’t have the money to renovate it.”

“So, not a murder house,” Jack joked.

“No, definitely not a murder house.” The agent shook his head with a chuckle.

“Yeah.” I couldn’t help but grin as I already started getting ideas of what we could change and how.

––––––––

We did buy that house. To say my parents were shocked was an understatement. They understood the appeal, but they thought we were insane to actually fix it up. It was a lot of work, they were right about that, and it was a lot of money, but Jack had managed to get the owners to take an offer that was much lower than the listing price. They wanted to get rid of it, so they eventually did accept it. We almost couldn’t not buy it at that price.

It was in the most beautiful and optimal location. I could get to work in about forty-five minutes in busy traffic while the airport was an hour in the other direction. Jack could easily travel and I could easily commute every work day. However, there was one small problem. It was going to take a while before we could actually move in. The whole place needed renovating and fixing up. So, for the time being, we still lived together in Jack’s apartment.

I had either sold or given away a lot of my stuff, and practically everything else was put in storage. The day I moved in with Jack, I literally just had two suitcases with my clothes and that was it. I didn’t bring my coffee machine or decor for us to get into fights about. It just wasn’t necessary. We were going to make our new house our home with a mixture of both of our stuff and new furniture.

For the first few months, I still needed to drive for around two hours to actually get to work. It was horrible getting up at 5:30 every morning, but eventually it just became part of my routine. I’d get up before Olive was even awake and Jack would only briefly start stirring when I pressed a kiss to his cheek and got out of bed. It was his responsibility to take Olive out on walks. However, occasionally Jack wouldn’t be home, and then I’d be up at five in the morning, looking like a zombie. Luckily, he was at home more often than not those long four months.

The floor had been taken out of the house and had been replaced with reclaimed wood. Although the floor that already was in it was technically old by itself, they was also hazardous to walk on. There were random splinters and parts missing. But we still liked the look, so we used wood from an old barn.

The archway from the entrance hall to the living room had been taken out. We replaced it with some nice white sliding doors that had panels of glass, just so we could separate upstairs from downstairs if needed. The kitchen left over from the 70’s had been completely stripped away and replaced with a nice new kitchen that had white cabinets and black countertops and a nice large island in the middle. Upstairs, we were also redoing the bathrooms, getting rid of the dirty mess that it once was.

We had gotten the outside of the house redone as well. The yellow paint had all been sanded off and replaced with a fresh coat of white paint. Not only did we also redo the roof since we found some leaks up in the attic, we also made sure to get the whole place insulated so the house wouldn’t get too warm as the sun beamed down on it. Then, we had also started fixing up the front yard, cutting all the way-too-tall grass and sweeping the driveway. Slowly but surely, it was all starting to come together.

It was still surreal that this was actually going to be our home.

I decided to repaint the walls in the bedrooms upstairs myself. There were multiple reasons why I decided to do so. First of all, I wanted to try out multiple samples before I choose one. Second of all, we were already spending so much money on getting people to do things, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to save money on things like this. We weren’t going to cut corners on structural or electrical aspects, but things like painting didn’t need a professional, especially since the walls were still fine behind the wallpaper. And third of all, I really enjoyed painting. I was nowhere close to being an artist, but I did love it.

Our bedroom had this amazing light coming from the windows. One was on the side facing the view so we’d get to see it every morning when we’d open the curtains. The window was quite large since we had a slanted roof and there was no attic above our room. It was a dream come true for me.

I had already finished the wall our bed was going to be pushed up against with Jack a week earlier. We had taken the old wooden floor planks, prepped them, painted them white, gave them a distressed look, and then screwed them into the wall. Since I worked normal days in the week, I could only work on our house every weekend. So, all the other walls still looked dirty and grey.

I was busy painting all of our walls a white with a slight cream undertone, when Jack decided to come over and take a look as well. He had been out with friends almost the entire day, so I was all by myself in the new house.

“Rach!” I heard his voice yell from downstairs.

“Yeah!” I shouted back, running over to my speaker and turning down the volume.

“Where are you?!”

I only moved a few steps back to take a look at the wall I had only painted half of. It was the last wall I needed to do in this room. “Here!”

“Where’s here?!”

“Here!” I called yet again.

“Rach!” I heard Jack groan loudly. “Just come downstairs.”

I rolled my eyes and put down my paint roller. My footsteps crunched on the protective plastic I had put down so I wouldn’t accidentally spill the paint on our new floors. I walked down the hallway and the stairs to find both Jack and Alex in the entrance hall.

“Alex, hey!” I exclaimed in surprise. I hadn’t seen him in months, since the last time I visited Jack on tour, which was when I just moved back to LA. After that, he had never been gone for long enough for me to fly out.

“Hey!” He greeted me back and we pulled each other in a hug.

After we broke away, I quickly pecked Jack on the lips. He gave me a sorry look. “Have you been surviving all by yourself today?”

“You know, I’m actually having the time of my life right now,” I told him. He snorted, thinking I was making a joke, but I really wasn’t. “No, I’m being serious! I know it’s sad, but it’s actually really fun.”

“God, haven’t I ever entertained you properly?” Jack shook his head, clearly not just meaning any version of ‘entertain’. He very specifically meant a certain activity couples would often do in (but didn’t limit to) the bedroom.

Still, I couldn’t just ignore his not-so-subtle innuendo. “You haven’t been nearly as entertaining as painting a wall.”

“Damn it, Rach, don’t embarrass me in front of Alex!” He stage-whispered to me.

“Oh, right!” I nodded, acting like I had completely forgotten a promise we had made before. “Alex, did I tell you about how Jack is a sex-god?”

“Gross!” Alex scrunched up his nose in disgust and took a step back. “I’m only here to drop off Jack and see your new place, not hear about your sex life! I’ve got to go in a bit!”

“Ah, I didn’t know we were going to give a tour today.” I raised my eyebrows at Jack, trying to keep it light but really just wanting him to text me if he was going to ask people over. I didn’t mind him asking anybody to check the place out, but I would have tried to finish that wall if I knew Alex would be here.

“We’ve gotta show off all the work you’ve done!” Jack tried to compliment me so I would forget about it and started slowly moving us to the living room.

“The work we’ve done,” I corrected him.

“Rachel’s done most of it,” Jack nodded at Alex, knowing he couldn’t win this fight from me. “She’s been working with the architects, looking at furniture, and painting the walls. She’s the reason this place doesn’t look like trash anymore.”

“Dude, stop trying to suck up to me!” I whined, causing Jack to laugh. Something told me that he was only laughing because I called him ‘dude’ again. It occasionally just slipped out. Years of calling him it couldn’t be taken back.

We showed Alex around, or at least as much as we could. It was just empty rooms really and we avoided the backyard. We hadn’t even started on that yet. It was the least of our priorities. Still, Alex seemed very interested. He’d listen to what Jack had to say about things we changed and he’d occasionally add his own comment, comparing it to pictures he had seen from before we got started on fixing it up. I just liked watching Jack get all excited about it all while occasionally answering questions myself.

We were just leaving our bedroom when Alex wondered out loud, “why do you even have so many rooms? Do you need all this space?”

I shared a look with Jack. We could hardly just say ‘yeah, we’re planning way far ahead in the future. It’s for after we’ve gotten engaged and after we’ve gotten married and after we’ve had more than one kid.’ So, I just shrugged to act cool. “It is too much space. We’re turning two of them into guest bedrooms and one’s for Jack’s guitar stuff.”

It was the truth. Two were going to be guest bedrooms and we were just going to see what would happen with the smallest (but not tiny) room. For now, the plan was to use it for guitars and stuff Jack kept from fans. We would later see which one we’d turn into a nursery or a kid’s room or whatever. We weren’t that far down the line yet. Our life together was just starting.

“That is assuming you’re going to have so many guests over you need two bedrooms for them,” Alex whistled and started going back down the stairs.

“Oh, fuck off,” Jack groaned and nudged him softly in annoyance.

Alex left after that. He really only had a few minutes to look around before he had to go to a meeting. Jack, however, had left his car back at the apartment, so he hung around and decided to help me finish painting our room. Well, ‘decided’, he didn’t have much choice. I had to finish it and he had nothing better to do. He was the one who told Alex to bring him here instead of back to his apartment.

I was using the roller to paint the last wall while Jack was going around removing the masking tape on the wall we had done last week. My speaker was blasting music again and we barely said a word to each other. It was just a relatively nice calm moment. There were no awkward silences in our relationship, there hadn’t been any for a long time.

While I was painting the last untouched square, I was starting to get excited. We were only so close to actually moving in here. I couldn’t help but start dancing along with the song that started playing. It was the perfect upbeat song that pushed me to speed up the process and finish the painting.

Once the second chorus came around and I was done, I spun around to face Jack to find he had his phone pointed at me and had already long realised that I was dancing.

I used the handle of the paint roller as a fake microphone and began to sing along, pointing at him. “Well I could see/You home with me/But you were with another man/I know we/Ain't got much to say/Before I let you get away.” As there was a short instrumental break, I pumped my arms along with the music and flipped my hair before staring right at Jack and wiggling my eyebrows. “I said, are you gonna be my girl?”

However, he didn’t take the camera off me as soon as I was done. I dropped the roller on the tray I had been using and covered my face with my hands. “Stop filming me!”

Jack just started laughing and stopped recording me. But he didn’t immediately put his phone away like I expected. He was tapping away, making me realise that he didn’t just take that video for personal amusement, he was either sending it to someone or posting it somewhere.

“No! Give that to me!” I charged at him with a yell, trying to grab his phone out of his hands.

He just held it up out of my reach. I wasn’t that much shorter than Jack, but it was just enough for me to not be able to take it from him. My fingers almost brushed the bottom of the phone as I was standing on my toes and he was completely stretched out. Our chests were up against each other, almost all my weight on him since I had to use a hand on his shoulder to keep my balance. Once I realised it wasn’t going to work, I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him down to get our lips to meet in the middle.

I kissed him with full force. I was excited, happy, and down to get down. He kissed me back with just as much eagerness and slowly dropped his arm back down. After he stuffed his phone in his back pocket, his hands went down to my waist. I was pushed further into his body, making some necessary contact. We had to take a step backwards so we wouldn’t fall over. If we hadn’t been in a room full of wet paint, Jack would have steadied us on a wall by now. Instead, we were in the middle of the room, his hands roaming around my body until they started pushing off my paint-covered zip up hoodie. In return, I went straight for it, and tugged on his belt to get it undone.

Just as I was about to start on the zipper, the doorbell rang.

I broke away from our heavy kiss and put my forehead against his chest while laughing. “I’ll get it.”

He sighed loudly, but let me go. “Alright.”

I ran downstairs to see who it was. This wasn’t the first time I heard our doorbell, but we weren’t expecting anybody. Usually it was just contractors coming in, but it was the weekend now. I was curious to see who would ring our doorbell now. Honestly, I just expected it to be a delivery guy or something, even though I wouldn’t know why we’d get post here. However, when I opened the door, I saw an older woman who was probably in her 60s or 70s.

“Hi!” She greeted with a friendly smile. “I’m Carla. You don’t know me, but I’m your neighbour across the street. I saw your car standing out on your driveway, so I decided to come introduce myself. I hope that doesn’t scare you off.”

“Oh, no,” I immediately said to put her to rest and held out my hand for her to shake. “I’m Rachel.”

“We were wondering when somebody would finally move in, this place has been empty for years!”

I opened the door further, feeling like there was another tour coming up. “Well, we technically haven’t moved in yet. It’s been a lot of work to make it livable, but we’re almost done.”

“Yeah, I saw!” Carla nodded enthusiastically. “It’s such a delight not to have to see the overgrown front garden and peeling paint anymore.”

“It was such a shame to see it all breaking apart,” I agreed. “When we were viewing it, we both felt like it could be turned into something so nice.”

“Oh, you’re moving in with your husband? Kids?” She asked me, only now realising that I was clearly saying ‘we’ and not ‘I’.

“No, we’re not married or anything, no kids,” I told her and held up my left hand as if showing no ring would proof it, “but we’ve been together for three years and have known each other for twenty.” I then stood to the side, feeling like this conversation wasn’t going to be a short one. “Come in if you’d like.”

“Thanks.” She stepped in and looked around. “But twenty years? That’s a long time. I only knew my husband for three months before we got married.”

I chuckled and closed the front door, suddenly remembering how I had left Jack upstairs. We definitely couldn’t go up there now. “Yeah, we met each other in middle school, but we didn’t really become best friends until high school.”

“That’s fascinating,” she smiled and touched the new sliding doors we had put in place. “I love these doors, much better than that weird archway they used to have in here.”

“Thanks.” It was the one thing I absolutely hated about this place. Everything else was perfect (except for the wear and tear). When I found out that arch wasn’t needed for structural support, I was so glad. “I’d offer you something to drink, but we haven’t even tried turning on our fridge yet.”

She chuckled and shook her head. “No, that’s okay. You should actually come over for a drink at ours. I’m sure Abel would love to meet you. If you’re not doing anything else right now.”

I was a bit shocked that she was inviting us over now already. On one hand, I knew what Jack and I were getting into earlier, I was the one who initiated it after all. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t say no now without an actual excuse. I didn’t want to seem rude and start off on the wrong foot with our neighbours. It was going so well already.

“Yeah, I think we can do that, we just finished painting our bedroom,” I accepted her invitation before going to the stairs to call Jack. “Hey, Jack! Our neighbour is here! Come down!”

“Okay, give me a second!” He shouted back.

I could only imagine him being completely naked upstairs waiting for me. It’s not like he often did that, surprise me by being naked that is. He only did it once as a joke. We were watching a movie in bed and I went to get a glass of water. When I came back, he had stripped off all his clothes and done a generic ‘sexy pose’. Although it worked that time, I made clear it wasn’t going to work other times.

Luckily, ‘a second’ literally just meant a second. Jack came down holding my hoodie. His hair was still messy from before, but it wasn’t overly obvious. It just looked like he had a busy and rough day. Nothing but the opposite was true. I subtly fixed it as he introduced himself to Carla. Just a bit later, we were following her out of our house and into hers.

Things were really looking to be great.