Romance In A Column

chapter twenty-one,

    They asked her where home was but, tripping on her feet, she thought what a little word 'home' was.

    Because she's seen the sunrise from the fire escape of the unoccupied apartment three floors up from hers, where the view was eye-level with the skyline, every summer day since she'd moved into the complex. The weather still holds onto the cool scrape that the nighttime blankets the city with for a few, measly hours and dew gives a healthy hue to the overflowing plants lining the next-door window.

    Because she sat at the subway station and leaned her head against once upon a time glossy tiles laded with graffiti only tourists ever stop to stare at and hummed under her breath at the cover some street musician performed; sometimes to himself, sometimes to an audience.

    Because she's walked within the herd of suits that shepherds herself into the building where Let Be Honest headquarters is located besides a woman that murmurs good morning to her children through her earpiece between chews of an energy bar. Thick rings of concealer under her eyes, she always smiles goodbye at Eryn when the elevator's doors slide open on the second floor.

    These places are the quintessential life of Eryn Sallow.

    Though one may be cold against her pajama clad legs; though one may be grimy and a huddled space where her words are far way even to herself; though one is an ephemeral instance in a less lonely existence; they're places she finds ease in.

    It's oddly comforting, she learns, her feet dangling on the edge of the ladder that wraps around her building. To know these almost-homes she's created hold intangible pieces of herself that, when her apartment stops feelings like hers, she's got somewhere to turn for that feeling – like staring in a shatter mirror and seeing a fragmented reflexion of features she's grown into – her knitted blankets and picture frames and petite hills of books give to her habitable shoebox.

    Wren's car parks on the narrow alley that's nothing if not an empty patch of gravel bracketed by Eryn's building and the neighboring one. She doesn't remember much of the call; doesn't remember the excuse she'd told. But she knows somewhere along the almost homes, his name hummed through her soul. Inharmonious, unrefined like a note wrung out of an unstrung guitar. It wasn't discordant, the stammering sigh of the chord, but charming.

    An amateur's debut, she'd call it.

    There's a phrase, Eryn recalls, that stands behind how lovely things done by amateurs are. There's an unbidden passion to be found behind the actions of people that lack the study of the art but nevertheless try. Sometimes, there's no success to be had. But what a lovely thing it is to love with enough fervor to be seen as a fool while at it.

    And perhaps that's what Eryn has grown into where Wren is concerned. A fool who gazes at a man while the New York skyline winks at her a flirtatious smile.

    It took too many steps for her taste but it wasn't long before she found herself planting chaste kisses on his cheeks; on his nose; on his chin and, softly, on the bow of his mouth while her palms cupped his jaw.

    There's a part of her that titters with hesitancy. Besides that (admittedly fantastic) date and brief conversations through texts, they hadn't really had the opportunity to fall into a routine of intimacy.

    For a moment, Eryn felt as if back in college when she waited for her lover to draw the margins of their situationship. The first steps weren't hers to take, he always said. But those lines were traced with chalk which easily gave way to his booted feet whenever it suited him.

    "I missed you, too," Wren greets in light amusement. His hands find her waist with the same ease a drunk finds the neck of a bottle and her taste meets his tongue richly like a businessman's bourbon and she sinks with relief into his chest.