The Pillow Was a Gift

I should have known something was up when Avery gave me a pillow in broad daylight.

We’d stopped at the general store for a curtain rod, and I’d tried that particular pillow, checked the price, and put it back. The next afternoon, after I rubbed my neck one too many times in front of him, he showed up holding it by the little plastic handle.

“For me?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Thank you. I was hoping you’d see me put it down.”

“I saw you pick it back up twice.”

He let me have a whole evening to appreciate the gesture before I noticed my old pillow had vanished.

I asked Ben if he’d seen it. He looked around my cottage, presumably in case there was another bed I could have misplaced it on. Then he pointed out that he’d seen a man carrying bedding toward the greenhouse after lunch.

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Dark hair. Wearing your sweatshirt, I think.”

I walked faster than Ben could ask why I had a sudden interest in men who wore my clothes.

Avery opened the duty-room door with my old pillow tucked under one arm. His new place smelled faintly of warm wood from the greenhouse. There was a pile of familiar fabric under the window and one of my work gloves on the sill. I’d thought that glove was in the laundry. I’d lost it the week before and found it waiting on my bench one morning, tucked under the clean end of a towel. I’d taken it home and thought no more about it. Apparently somebody else had.

“Avery,” I said, “you said the new pillow was a gift.”

“It was.”

“Then why do you have the old one?”

“The new one’s better for your neck.” He looked down at the pillow in his arms. “This one smells like you.”

A floorboard creaked behind me.

I turned. Ben was in the doorway, holding the travel mug he hadn’t even had time to put down. He looked at me, then back at Avery.

“You said Avery.”

Avery looked at me. “Is it okay if I tell him?”

I stepped aside so they could see each other properly. “You can tell him anything you want.”

“I’m Avery,” he said.

Ben looked right into his eyes. His mouth opened and closed.

“So when you said you were in a meeting…”

“It ran long,” I said.

Ben put his mug down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be the windowsill beside my glove. “I’m going to give you both a minute. Then I’m coming back with a question about the number of times you made me look for you in the greenhouse.”

“Four,” Avery said.

Ben picked up his mug. “I was going to say two.”

When he’d gone, I sat down beside the blankets. A draft came right through the window frame. Avery handed me the pillow, and for a second I thought he was giving up his entire claim to it. Then he shoved the blanket up behind me so I could lean against the wall without touching the cold glass.

“You sit here like this every night?”

“Some nights.”

I had half a mind to fix the window then and there. Instead, I went back to my place and cleared all the books off my couch. Then I brought Avery over to inspect the results.

“Are you making me a nest?” he asked.

“I’m tidying.”

He watched me tuck the corners of the thickest blanket into the couch cushions.

“Can I stay tonight?”

I cracked open a can of soda. “You can stay until I finish this.”

I took my first sip. We talked about the shelves he wanted to put up in his room. Ten minutes later, I took another. Every time he thought I was done, he offered to take the can to the kitchen. On his third attempt, I put it behind my back.

“I’m drinking it slowly on purpose.”

Avery looked at my hand and then at the space between us. He lifted the edge of his blanket.

I sat down beside him. For another hour, I let the soda go flat.