Page 150 of Falcon’s Forever

After dinner the crowd spreads out the way it usually does. Some head for the bar, a knot of prospects claim the pool table, kids commandeer one corner with a deck of cards nobody bothers explaining the rules of. Falcon and I end up on the back porch with the cold coming in off the yard, my cardigan is pulled tight, his jacket draped over my shoulders anyway because apparently some habits never fully die.

"I've been thinking," he says.

"That usually goes badly."

"Probably." He leans against the rail, and there's something in his face I haven't seen there in a while, not nervous exactly, careful. "Your room."

"What about it."

"You're never in it."

True. Some nights I sleep down the hall from his, not because he asked me to give up my own space, because I stopped needing the door between us the same way I used to. I kept the room anyway, because some part of me still needed to know I could walk back into it whenever I wanted, and he never once made that a problem.

"Are you evicting me?"

"No." He looks out at the yard instead of at me. "I talked to Vulture about the land past the north line."

I go still. "You talked to Vulture."

"Asked if it was available. That's all."

"You didn't pick a house."

"No."

"Plans? Builder?" I need to make sure he’s hasn’t done everything before coming to me.

"Do I look like a man who picks furniture?"

"You look like a man who'd order the whole thing in black leather."

"That sounds practical," he says, and I laugh, and he turns to face me properly. "I'm asking if you'd want to think about it. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Whenever."

A house. Ours, close enough that this family stays exactly as loud and exactly as ours as it is right now, far enough that we get something that belongs to just the two of us at the end of a long day.

"I'd like to think about it," I say.

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"No secret construction," I add.

"I promise."

"No five-foot security fence."

"Four?"

"Falcon."

"We'll discuss it," he says, and I shake my head, and he pulls me in against his side, and I fit there the way I've stopped questioning.

"Can I ask you something?" I say, into the quiet.

"Anything."

"When did you know we'd be okay?"