Meeting Him Again

Adjusted

A/N - this chapter is slightly shorter so the next one is gonna be a bit longer to compensate

I yawned, stretching out my toes and feeling them brush against Harriet's shin. I rolled into her, smuggling into her shoulder, unaware that she was awake. I exhaled slowly, pushing the stale air of sleep out of my lungs, ridding myself of the sordid tendrils of respose.

"Morning, sunshine," the woman laying next to me chimed up out of nowhere.

"It doesn't have to be, wife," I muttered.

A laugh shook her, and I flailed my hand half-heartedly to express my discontent. "We have to move," she whispered into my ear.

"No, we don't," I responded dryly.

"Why not? Don't we have work to do?"

"Yeah," I grumbled, "but the dude writing us is really incapable of following a plot so it's just gonna be a chapter of fluff."

"What?"

"What?"

Harriet pulled her arm over her body and wrapped it around me, shuffling closer to me in the bed. She planted a kiss on my forehead and relaxed further.

"Maybe you're right," she said, staring distantly up at the ceiling before moving her eyes down to mine. A smile cracked across her face, lighting the whole room up like a bag of lightbulbs had been dropped, turned on and in a translucent bag, on to the bed. She lifted my chin up so that I was lying in a mess of her limbs with my neck fully extended and let her lips brush against mine momentarily. When she pulled away, I followed, hopelessly lost in the promise of Harriet; that smug little grin only widened as she ran her thumb over my cheek. "Maybe anywhere other than here isn't ideal."

A row of fitting cubicles lined one wall, blue curtains hanging from rails just above head height and sweeping the floor with every mindful push of adults and exited or violent throws from teens. I sat on the square stools lining the other side, a selection of already bought clothes sitting in a paper bag between my legs and assorted possible options hanging over my arm. I lent my head back against the wall, exhausted from hours of being on my feet.

Just as I was about ready to take a nap, Harriet came bursting through the curtain. Luckily for me, she was back in the clothes she'd arrived in: a pair of my converse poking out underneath an old pair of Harold's jeans she'd cuffed at the ankles and wore a thick black belt with to desperately try to pass the fact she was drowning in them off as "mom jeans", a fashion that had become popular around the time zone they were in. She wore a red hoodie that we'd bought primarily on this little shopping spree so that she didn't look like she was carrying a tent on her shoulders in an old one of my husband's.

Harriet chucked one pile of clothes on me to buy and dropped the others into the "worn-but-not-buying" basket.

"We quite done?" I asked.

"Yeah, yeah, we're good."

"Most of these jeans are men's," I noted, flicking through labels. Harriet had decided she liked the mom jean look and had tried on a few straight leg styles - some of the cuffing was still evident.

"Pockets," Harriet responded, shrugging. "Just a capitalist means of making you buy a bag. Sexism at its finest: for profit."

"No species is perfect," I reminded her, a little too loudly. A few people glanced at me skeptically. "For instance, ours forgets that some are primitive in their space exploration. Shall we head to the tills?"