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He looks at the laptop. Then at me.

“You okay?” he says.

“I think so,” I say.

He nods. He comes in and closes the door behind him. He sits down on the floor across from me with his back against my bed and his legs stretched out between the boxes.

“Are you?” I say.

He looks at me, and he doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the boxes, at the window, and at his own hands on his knees.

“I don’t know,” he says.

He picks up something out of the box next to him. A ceramic frog, the size of my fist, green, with a chip out of one eye. He holds it up.

“You’re moving this.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s mine.”

He looks at the frog. At its chipped eye.

“Where’d you get it?”

“A garage sale. When I was fifteen. It was a quarter.”

“What’s it worth?”

“A quarter.”

He looks at me over the frog.

“It’s mine,” I say again. “I didn’t buy it to sell it. I bought it because it was ugly and it looked sad. I’ve had it on every windowsill I ever had. I’m keeping it.”

He looks at the frog for a long time. Then he puts it back in the box, carefully, in a nest of tissue paper with its chipped eye facing up. And then he picks up a stack of mailers.

“You have too many of these.”

“I have exactly the right amount of those.”

“There are a hundred of these.”

“There are a hundred and twelve. I counted.”

“Of course you counted.”

I take them out of his hand. He doesn’t let go. I pull. He pulls. And I end up across his legs in the middle of the floor between the boxes with a stack of a hundred and twelve mailers between us. He isn’t letting go, and I’m laughing, and then he kisses me, and the mailers go everywhere.

I pull him down onto the floor.

One second we’re play-fighting, and the next, my hand slides into his sweatpants. He gazes into my eyes as I pump him a few times. Suddenly, his large hand is in my pants, and I’m panting against his lips. He kisses me like he’s starving. We’re not careful. We knock over three boxes, and he doesn’t stop until our pants are all the way off and he’s plunging into me over and over.

Afterward, we’re both putting on our clothes. I pick up the boxes that fell over.

“Berwyn says the combine invites go out next week,” he says, throwing on his shirt.