She begins stripping off her layers, and as much as I want to watch her, the desire to survey her house takes precedence over my unexpected lust. I do a slow circle in spot, taking in the details of her messy, cramped living quarters. It feels like a study in contradiction: she lives with wheels beneath her, always restless, always ready to be on the move, yet this trailer is a home. She’s nested here, accumulated a life. There is an unmade bed on one end of the trailer, a stack of what looks like unfolded clean laundry in the corner. Shelves overhead house dog toys and boxes of treats, half-finished macrame projects, mason jars with rings of cold brew crusted to their bottoms.

On the other end of the trailer is a kitchenette with cookbooks stacked on every shelf, bulk ingredients in glass jars, a stand mixer and a food scale, a small trail of spilled flour. There are prints on the walls, succulents behind the sink, the smell of dog and body sweat, of peppermint tea and freshly baked bread, always bread.

It is both fixed and transient, restless and grounded, subtle control amidst unbridled chaos. In short, it’s Jack.

“I can’t believe you live in an Airstream. It’s so…” Romantic, I don’t say.

Paul Hollywood comes bouncing back inside, and Jack closes the door. The dog circles three times and flops down in a fluffy bed on the floor packed with half-chewed stuffed animals. “How are your feet?” Jack asks me.

I groan. “Still frozen and sore. And I think there’s a good chance several of my toes have detached and are just rattling around inside my boots at this point.” We’d walked three miles to get here, across the Burnside Bridge, where she’d held me in her arms and whispered the words to “White Christmas,” then on through the neighborhoods of Southeast Portland. “How are yours?”

She shrugs. “I’m not worried about my feet.”

“Oh, really? Miss ‘Fuck the Snow’?”

“Sit down,” she orders, pointing to the bed behind me.

I sit down. On the bed. On her bed.

I wait for the alarm bells to go off in my brain. The signal that usually tells me it’s too much, too fast. The alert system that tells me to flee when people get too close before I’m ready. This isn’t me. I don’t follow a woman home after a single day together, but for some reason, over the course of a few hours, I feel like I know this woman better than I’ve ever known anyone.