Page 46 of It's Always Been You
Me
How…do you know everything?
Emma
It’s a gift. You’re lucky to have me.
Me
No shit.
Chapter Fifteen
Gabe
“Are these…” Molly trails off, voice a little incredulous as she stands in front of the custom shelving unit that fills one wall of my living room. She runs her hand along the glass front as she studies the contents.
“All the Lego sets we built together in college? Yeah.”
“But…how?” She spins to face me, beautiful face filled with disbelief. “I can barely find two matching shoes in the morning, but you managed to keep Lego sets perfectly assembled for more than ten years?”
I consider how to respond. There are so many answers to that question. But I give her the simplest one for now.
“Building those together is one of my favorite memories.”
It was something that we used to do when our brains got tired of studying. I bought the most complicated Lego sets I could find, and I would build them while she read a book, or drew in one of her many sketchbooks, or practiced her dance routines. Her photographic memory made her freakishly good at finding pieces, so when I couldn’t find one I needed, she would find it for me, then get back to whatever she was doing. For the entire time we were together, we always had a set going. It wasquiet time we spent together, and looking back, I think it was in those quiet moments of coexistence in my dorm room and later in my off-campus apartment that we really fell in love.
Molly turns back around and stares at the Lego sets behind the glass. “But how did you preserve them for all these years?”
I take a chance that the newfound lightness that settled over Molly tonight has stuck and step up behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist. She hesitates for a second before melting back into me, covering my hands with hers and laying her head on my shoulder. With her in my space and my arms around her, I have the wild thought that everything I need in the entire world is right here. I force myself to slow down because, too soon. But I can’t resist pressing a kiss to the top of her head and loving the little sigh she lets out.
“You know I took them to my parent’s house as we finished them. After they died, looking at all the sets lined up on the shelves in my old bedroom gave me an odd sort of comfort, so I left them there. When I was ready to make the move here, I hired a company that specializes in transporting Lego sets. I was pretty worried about the Death Star and Avengers Tower since those are the biggest and my favorites, but they got them here in one piece.
Molly chuckles. “There are companies that transport Lego sets?”
I smile against her hair. “There are companies that do everything. Some people buy expensive watches. I wanted our Lego Millennium Falcon to get from California to Pittsburgh in one piece.”
“I still can’t believe you kept them all.”
I turn Molly around and cup her face in my hands. “They reminded me of you. I wanted all the reminders of you I could get, even when the remembering was hard.”
We stay like that for a second, eyes locked, before Molly throws her head back and laughs. The sound hits me right in the heart. That gorgeous, carefree laugh of hers always has.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking that I was so mad at you I very nearly had a bonfire and burned everything that reminded me of you, and there you were, preserving, like, the most fragile things on earth and keeping them in perfect condition for ten freaking years, despite a move across the country.”
I give her a wry grin. “You always were the more vengeful one.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Fuck off. Remember the time that guy in my stats class stole all the work I did on that group project and claimed it was his? Which one of us did some light hacking to punish him for that little transgression?”
I lean in and kiss her forehead. “I’m only vengeful to protect you. Otherwise, I’m a pretty happy guy.”
“No shit,” she mutters, looking down, her face turning a little red from the kiss in a way that delights me. “You’re like a fucking ray of sunshine.” She glances around my living room, taking in the space.
“I like it here,” she says, almost to herself. “It feels like you.”
I say nothing, just watch Molly as she wanders to my bookshelf, taking in my collection of comic books and graphic novels, some mementos from the years when I was building my company and a scattering of framed pictures of me with my sisters, and a few with my parents.
