EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Seventeen

I never made it to the swimming pool that week. Adam insisted that I go to a few classes, that he wouldn't let me uproot my life for him. I moped my way to the T station, anxiously writhed in my seat through Futurism, avoiding eye contact with Jin, and practically flew home to Adam.

Piper had left nothing but vegan food in the fridge—her latest obsession, after the green-shake craze that she had thrust upon us in the fall—and so Adam ran out to the store at one point to buy some steaks and lunch meat. I warned him, half-jokingly, that he better have eaten all of it by the time she returned. And so he did.

He beat me several times at Trivial Pursuit, which was not surprising as he knew everything about history and literature. I, in turn, taught him the definition of "Netflix and chill"—an expression he had heard before but had never actually done after so many years of restless travel.

"I want to be normal with you," he said to me on the couch five minutes after the movie started—a sci-fi tragedy about sentient robots in an unforgiving alien world. "I never had normal before."

"Will you get bored?" I asked, snuggled up against him in the glow of the TV screen.

"No," he said, but he had to think about it for a second.

"Are you sure?"

He kissed me instead of answering. He carried me upstairs just as the robot planet was being invaded by a hostile species—humans.

He was gone for several hours on Wednesday for his first in-person class. His student teaching hours were starting up soon, and he warned me they would be all-consuming. I spent the afternoon sitting in the bay window, trying to study, looking up every five minutes to see if he was back. Every morning we'd say we were going to find him an apartment that day, and every night we'd go to bed realizing we hadn't done it.

"This isn't a bed," he said to me one night, struggling to fall asleep, "it's an escape pod."

"I'll buy a bigger bed."

"I'll get a bigger one for the apartment," he countered.

"Yeah."

He went to sleep on the couch so he could stretch out, but around three in the morning I went down and collected him, led him back upstairs by his hand, and slept with his arm around me like a security blanket.

When I woke up again, the sun was shining through the curtains. I found him standing in his underwear by my chest of drawers, pulling Sage's ring from my jewelry box. "Why'd you keep this?" he asked. I couldn't tell if his tone was charmed or accusatory. Sometimes with Adam they were one and the same.

"It's stupid," I answered, sitting up a bit. "I thought I would send it back to her someday."

"It's not stupid." He turned the ring in his fingers. I couldn't help but admire his profile in the soft morning light from my window, the way a halo glowed around his smooth skin. The arch of his spine.

Then he brought it back to me in bed and slid it onto my right ring finger, the place where it used to go.

"What are you doing?" I blushed.

"It's my promise to you," he said. "To protect you. Plus I just like seeing it there." Then he climbed back into bed and I missed all my classes that day.

By Friday I had roughly ten hours worth of work to catch up on, the fridge was empty, and Robbie and Piper were due back that night.

"Morning, sleepyhead," he said, waking me with a kiss to the forehead. It had taken me several days to realize that by the time I woke up every morning around seven, Adam had already gotten up, run a lap around Boston, done an entire sit-up routine in the living room, showered, and climbed back into bed.