Noah & Navid

Ch. 71- Home Again

*two years later...

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"Noah, my sweet, we are home." Navid put his hand on my cheek and I blinked up at him.

"Yep, yup." I sat up and wiped a line of drool off my cheek. He kissed my forehead then unbuckled my seatbelt.

"The parking is tiny here," he grumbled. I looked up to see he'd sandwiched our SUV into a small space next to a cement wall.

"You miss our oversized garage?" I asked with a hint of guilt.

+*+*+

We moved to Texas last summer. His parents came from Iran when his father's company opened a new engineering branch in the oil-centric city of Houston. We'd spent a year flying back and forth. Navid was so happy to have his parents a mere 3 hour flight away.

When the virus hit and the world shutdown, we'd decided to move closer. Navid's company had deals all over Texas and his parents' huge estate in a quiet, leafy suburb was pretty impressive. We'd found a beautiful townhouse close to them and across from a lush, green park. That was just about one year ago today.

The house had four levels and a rooftop deck that showed the city skyline. It was brand new with huge rooms, 15-foot ceilings, and shiny new appliances.

His mother had helped me choose furniture, decorations, and touches that made it feel like a design magazine. Our garage was so big and the streets so open that he'd traded his sedan for a family-sized SUV to cart around his parents and brother who'd moved with them.

We loved spending the year with his family, but the city wasn't for us. The searing heat of summer and freezing cold of winter along with a swarm of new and interesting bugs meant our windows stayed closed for most of the year. I'd always grown up with fresh air and a gentle breeze; Texas was a different world.

Aside from the isolation of pandemic life, what really broke us was a week of freezing ice that coated the city and shut down the power grid. We kept pots of boiling water on the gas stove and stayed near them most of the day, extinguishing the flames when we slept wrapped together under a pile of blankets.

We ate our emergency cans of food before slowly making our way on icy roads to his parents' home which had a roaring fireplace and stockpiles of food. His parents, coming from a part of the world where the power and water regularly failed, were better prepared.

Things didn't feel the same after that. The house didn't seem as luxurious or safe. It wasn't the right fit for us.

I tried to not complain. He'd spent 7 years in LA being a world away from his family. I knew how much it meant to him to be able to have dinner with his parents, to drop in on them randomly. I knew how happy it made his heart to see me cooking a meal with his mother and seeing her treat me better than she did with his brothers' wives back in Iran.

It was a dream he never thought possible as a closeted boy from a culture that rejected men like us. We'd come so far from the days he was scared to even hold my hand in public. We'd achieved his dream of being open with his family. They loved me, they accepted us. It was everything he'd thought wasn't possible.

I couldn't bear the thought of disappointing him. I pretended to be happy in the large home with no friends or community apart from his family. I pretended to be ok with the stifling heat that only allowed us to enjoy our outdoor time late in the evening.

I remember the day things finally changed, the day he looked at me and said, "I'm not happy here, my love. Are you?"

"I'm happy wherever you are," I'd said without thinking. It was true, but also automated and robotic.