“Girlfriend, let me just say,” the clerk butted in, “don’t look so scared. He’s a good man, he’s hot, he’s into you, go with the flow. He’s used to bad sheets and an old comforter, you go girl and you buy him good sheets. A man appreciates good sheets. He ain’t gonna say it but he’s gonna think it and every time he slides between those sheets he’s gonna be glad you gave that to him. We girls, we gotta look after our men. You tell him early on you’re the type of woman who finds all sorts of ways to look after her man, it’s gonna suck him in deep and he ain’t even gonna know it.”

“Unh-hunh,” a woman in line behind us muttered. “You got that right.”

I looked between the clerk and the nodding, smiling woman behind us in line and I wondered how a trip to the mall to purchase sheets had turned into a lecture from a clerk at a home wares store telling me how to suck Tate in deep. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Tate was such a badass he could probably sleep on a bed of nails. I didn’t think he would even notice new sheets.

Or, at that point, I was kind of hoping he didn’t.

Even though I thought what I thought, to be nice, I said to her, “Thanks for the advice.”

“My pleasure,” she said as Wendy shoved my purchases into the cart and started motoring toward the exit.

Even with my misgivings, I put the new sheets and the comforter (and the shams) on the bed. Standing at the foot surveying it, I had to admit, with the bedroom floor cleared and vacuumed, the dresser and nightstands cleaned off, the entire place dusted, it didn’t look bad. The room was painted a utilitarian cream. Considering Tate was a man and a biker, I bought a dark denim comforter cover and shams and sheets in what I thought was an awesome light clay that contrasted great with the indigo blue denim. They gave the room some color and made it look homier. Tate’s house wasn’t a bachelor pad, it was a crash pad. This meant it also wasn’t a home. Those sheets gave it a stamp of “home”, a little one but a definite one.

Studying my handiwork, I decided on the one hand it freaked me out; on the other hand, I liked it. Tate needed a home, everyone did.

Buster sashayed in, jumped up on the bed and stopped dead. She gave the bed a look then gave me a look over her shoulder then she delicately dropped to her side, curled into a ball and went to sleep.

Well, at least I had Buster’s approval.

I let the sun shine down on me and sipped my coffee thinking about the sheets and the amount of stuff I brought up from the hotel, in other words, all of it. I’d checked out mainly because it was stupid to pay for a hotel room I wasn’t using but also because Ned and Betty were at the height of the summer biker season and could use the room and lastly because I liked to have choice and variability of wardrobe and I didn’t know how long Tate would be gone. It would be annoying to have to keep carting stuff back and forth and it wasn’t like I had a houseful of stuff. I had a car full of stuff. I left my unused clothes in suitcases and my boxes in Tate’s garage, the rest of it I lugged to his walk-in closet. I didn’t go so far as unpacking (except bathroom stuff). I knew that was definitely crossing a line, a line I wasn’t ready for and a line I didn’t want to know if Tate didn’t want me to cross.

I sighed and tipped my head back to the sun.

Weirdly enough, outside of fretting about cleaning Tate’s house, buying him sheets and semi-moving in, life felt normal. I hadn’t felt normal, not in a long time. Not during my wandering, not during the separation and divorce from Brad, not even before that, when I knew something was not right.

But now I had work that I liked. I had friends I could trust who I could go to the mall with. I came home to a house ensconced in the quiet, wooded hills sandwiched amongst Colorado’s mountains. I ate home-cooked dinners if I was working days. I made lunch in Tate’s kitchen if I was working nights. Every morning, I made myself breakfast and a cup of coffee in a real coffeemaker that sat on a kitchen counter.

Normal, all of it… normal.

I was back in a rhythm of life.

Unfortunately that rhythm seemed surrounded by Tate but held no Tate.

That wasn’t true. The two days we had together before Tate left obviously held Tate. He took me to work and worked my shifts with me, giving Bubba and Krystal a break. Surprisingly, nothing dramatic happened during these days except for the fact that Tate took an instant dislike to Twyla; then again Twyla was instantly dislikeable and didn’t mind that one bit considering she honed her instantly dislikeable personality to a razor sharp edge. I’d had to run interference but this wasn’t difficult because Tate seemed in a good mood so, unusually, outside of scowling at her a couple of times, he didn’t let Twyla’s antics get to him.

And Tate and I working together was different when I wasn’t holding a grudge. I had fun with him and he seemed to have fun with me. He liked being with me in the bar and I knew this because he laughed a lot and he smiled a lot too. In fact, I’d never seen him do either so much as in those two days after the Wood Incident.

As for me, I liked going to the bar and saying, “Need two Bud drafts,” and hearing him say softly, “Right, baby,” or, also softly, “You got it, Ace.”

Because of these responses, I found myself hanging at the bar more often, Tate across from me, both of us leaning in and chatting, me trying to be funny just to make him laugh or smile. Me getting a little curl of excitement when I succeeded.

I also found myself ending my orders with “honey”. “A Jack and Coke and a Dewar’s, honey,” or “Four Coors bottles and a Keystone Light, honey.” I found myself doing this because, when I did, I’d always get the smile so I went searching for it.

That smile didn’t give me a curl of excitement. It made me feel something else, something comfortable and settled but very sweet. Even though, if Twyla heard me call Tate “honey”, she’d give me a hard look or roll her eyes – I was guessing Twyla wasn’t a big fan of a waitress sleeping with the boss, that said, as far as I could tell, Twyla wasn’t a big fan of much.

After my shifts, Tate and I left work together and went to the hotel together where Tate would drop me off so I could have a swim and he’d go do stuff, like pick up groceries for dinner while I swam. Then he’d come back to get me. I’d pack more stuff and go to his house with him where he’d make me dinner and then we’d go to bed and make love and then we’d sleep somehow nuzzled together, him holding me or me curled into his back or, as the night progressed, both.