“The lawn is fake,” he explains. “The owner is insistent that we keep this outdoor space.”

I look around the living room, at the bookcases that span from the floor to the ceiling, with a sliding ladder connected to the upper lip. His couch is a vibrant blue, and clean, with bright multicolored throw pillows. On the other end of the room, closer to the front door, he has placed a folding card table and set it with a linen tablecloth, placemats, and a tiny centerpiece of gourds and cranberries. I must have walked right past it when I came in, so excited and nervous I didn’t even notice.

“Your place is so nice,” I whisper, tucking my hair behind my ear. Elliot watches it slide forward again anyway, and swallows. He probably knows I wore it down for him. “Tell me about your novel.”

“High fantasy,” he says, looking around at his bookshelves. Then he looks back at me and his eyes shine with restrained amusement. “There are dragons.”

“So you’re writing porn?” I joke, and he bursts out laughing.

“Not exactly.”

“That’s really all you’ll give me?”

Smiling, he takes my hand again. “Let’s finish the tour.”

Through a door on the other side of the living room from the kitchen is a tiny hallway. To the left is his bedroom. To the right is his bathroom.

The bathroom has a small tub and no shower, just a smooth hose attached to the faucet and hanging limply downward, a neck bent in defeat.

“You don’t have a shower,” I say, walking back out and feeling the sudden intimacy of being in his space. It’s all so quintessentially him: sparse furniture other than floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with books.

Elliot watches me as I lean against the hallway wall. The space is tiny, and he seems to fill it with his height and the solid width of his chest.

“I don’t know if I could handle only having a bathtub,” I babble.

“I call it a shath,” he says.

“That sounds dirty.”

I’m staring at his chest but hear the smile in his voice: “I think that’s why I call it that.”

He takes another step closer. “It still feels surreal to have my own place. Like it’s some small miracle that I live here alone. It’s so different from how I grew up.”

“Do you like living alone?” I ask.

He hesitates for the duration of three pounding heartbeats in my ear. “How honest do you want me to be here?”

I look up at him. Oh. I think what’s coming will probably wreck me, but I ask for it anyway: “I always want you to be honest.”

“Okay,” he says. “In that case, I like living alone, but would rather live with you. I like sleeping alone, but would rather have you in my bed.” He reaches up, running a finger over his lip, thinking about his next words, and his voice comes out lower, and quieter. “I like having friends over for Thanksgiving, but would rather it just be the two of us, doing our first Thanksgiving as a couple, eating turkey off the bone, cuddling on the floor together.”