“I’m pretty insulted,” he said for the seventh time in what felt like as many months, with more humor than exasperation by now, “that you’ll sleep with some random college boyfriend, but not with me.”

“You should be flattered,” she told him. “It’s just that Jason was the kind of boy you sleep with, that’s all.”

Jake scowled at her. “Oh, so I’m the kind of boy you don’t sleep with.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Leora answered.

“You’re very Leorable, you know,” he said, after a moment of trying to decide whether or not to say what was on his mind. He decided to go for oblique over sentimental.

“What’s that?”

“The opposite of adorable.”

She threw a pillow at him. He cowered in the corner of the bed, aping the human captured by apes, until they started communicating in ape noises again. Growling the words in her nearly incomprehensible ape voice, she grunted, “Would you put my pajamas on for me, and then I’ll send you home? They’re in the bottom drawer.”

It was a tremendous tease, and she knew it. Jake frowned as he reached over to the drawer where she kept her pajamas, ridiculous flannel pajamas with red and blue checkers, like something a six-year-old would wear. Fighting his own fire with all his might, he turned back around to where she was sitting half-naked on the bed, stretching out her arms for her pajama shirt. He made a face like a crazed alien ape and put the pajama pants on over her head.

Leora started laughing from inside the pants, so hard that he had to pull them back off her head so that she wouldn’t suffocate. But when the elastic waist was stretched around the crown of her head, holding her hair back from the face that never failed to fascinate him with its endless mimicking expressions, she looked at him with a gaping smile he had never seen before. Jake saw that smile and knew, as if he had seen her face projected in a giant image on a bare wall with a voice in the background reading a caption, exactly what she was thinking. That thought made him forget about feeling insulted or flattered, made him forget about how much he wanted her, because he suddenly understood that she was going to be his:

Someday, he heard a voice reciting the thought written across her beautiful forehead, you’ll be tucking our daughter into bed, and you’ll pull her pajama pants over her head and make her laugh so loud, and I’ll be standing in the doorway waiting for you to drink in my smile, unable to believe how lucky I am.