The bed was a place we slept, but also a place we lived, after having made love, naked, our bodies entangled, chatting and sleepily stroking each other’s chests, hair, arms, backs. And also before we slept together, full of anticipation, sometimes lazy, uncertain of whether we could be bothered—sometimes we just talked, that was sometimes enough, but usually we still wanted each other. We ate in bed, drank red wine, neglected to brush our teeth, woke up with blue teeth and laughed at each other. But we even tolerated each other’s morning breath, inhaled that as well, deep into our lungs, because we wanted to be completely filled with each other.

And we talked. His bed became the site for all our conversations and all his plans. Because he made plans, more and more plans, more and more often. He asked me about the future, about my expectations, about my wishes, and he searched through all my answers, sort of casually, for the points where they coincided with his wishes and expectations.

“How do you see it? How will we live?” he asked.

“I don’t know . . . a garden, maybe?”

“I’ve thought about that too. A big, old wooden house and a garden. And apple trees. I want to have a lot of apple trees, don’t you?”

“Sure, if you pick the apples.”

“And on the hillside, maybe all the way up in the mountains, we will have a bench and we will sit there when we get old and look at the view.”

“A bench?”

“Yes, I’ll build it myself.”

He imagined us sitting on a bench together when we get old. What a cliché, I thought, and I liked it.

“We will live by the fjord,” he said, “then you can keep Blue there. You can go sailing while I putter in the garden. And pick apples.”

“Nice that you remembered the apples.”

He laughed and then he went on talking about us, that he wanted us to have a progressive distribution of labor, where he wore the apron in the kitchen and made applesauce and I came home with the fish. He said he wouldn’t be angry if I ended up making more money than he did, and he was clearly proud of his own generosity: I will allow you to bring home the bigger paycheck.

He talked and talked, had so much to get off his chest. “There’s so much I don’t understand,” he said. “It’s only after we became a couple that I’ve been able to bear thinking about all the things from my childhood that I don’t understand.”

“What do you mean,” I asked.