New Favorite

by lowriseflare

He's never lived with a girl before. He's still sort of figuring it out. Seasons 11 and 12.

Winter

Neela offers to buy him a beer after work, which he thinks is sort of odd, since they've been roommates for three weeks now and have done exactly nothing together except nod at each other in the hallway. "Sure," he says cautiously, hanging his lab coat on the hook inside his locker. He's never lived with a girl before. He's still sort of figuring it out. "Sounds great."

Great might have been an overstatement, but two Yuenglings later he's thinking she's not bad company, really. Wound a little tight. But she's smart and sort of weirdly funny, and she was down for extra jalapenos on the nachos, which he appreciates. They skip from topic to topic: the guys in his band, whether she watches Lost, a woman who went into labor with quads in the ER this morning. Neela shudders a little. "Bloody quads," she says. "Can you imagine?"

"What?" he asks, digging a loaded chip out of the pile between them. "You don't want kids?"

"I certainly don't want a litter."

Ray nods. "Well, four is a lot."

"Four is a pop ensemble." She's very quick. "Plus I don't think I'd be much good at it."

"At parenting? I don't know about that." He tries to picture her as a mom, her freakishly polite little pod children named things like Basil and Hugo. "I want lots. Not for a long time. But someday."

"Of course you do." She goes at the nachos with gusto, the cheese stretching out in long gooey strings. "It's easy to say that, if you're a boy."

"Meaning?"

"It's just different." She shrugs. "Go ahead, have a child. Nobody will expect you to stay at home and sing it Barney all day long."

"It?" he asks, smirking a little.

"You know what I mean. The baby. Him or her. I'm serious!" she says, when his smirk turns into a full-on laugh. He thinks it's funny how worked up she gets about things, how she's always kind of spoiling for a fight. "How many stay at home fathers do you know?"

Ray considers. "Lewis's husband stays home."

"That's one. And Lewis's husband is a goon."

"All right, all right." He takes a swig of his beer. "When we have our kids I'll stay home and raise them."

Neela stares at him with such unadulterated horror you'd think he suggested she procreate with Morris. "I'd sooner perform a hysterectomy on myself."

"Doubtful," he fires back, though actually he doesn't doubt it at all. He just wants to piss her off a little. He doesn't know what it is about Neela that makes him want to get a rise out of her all the time.

It works: she narrows her dark eyes, annoyed. "You know, not every girl is impressed by you."

Ray nods seriously. "About three-quarters."

"You really are obsessed with yourself, aren't you?" she asks. "You know, I told Abby this stupid exercise was hopeless, but she--" Neela breaks off suddenly. "Never mind."

"What stupid exercise?" He cocks his head to the side, a thought occurring to him. "Did Abby tell you you had to buy me a beer?"

"What?" Her eyes get very wide. She looks mortified, but more than that she looks busted. It's kind of amusing. "No. No, of course not. I just--we're sharing a bathroom and we haven't spent much time together, and--no."

"She totally did."

"She did not!"

"Mmm, yes she did."

"No, she didn't!" Neela rests her forehead in her palm, sighing. "Fine. Yes. Yes, she did. I'm sorry."

Ray laughs. "It's okay." He kills the bottle, nods at the bartender for two more. "But I'm warning you, Roomie, before you know it you're going to be wanting to buy me a beer every night of your life."

*

"What if you were drunk?" Abby wants to know.

"What?" Neela makes a face. They are sitting in the cafeteria; they were going to run across the street, but it's raining again. "No. There isn't enough tequila in the world."

"What if you were both drunk?"

"No!" She glances over her shoulder. She feels like he's going to walk in any second, though she knows for a fact he's downstairs in sutures. But she made the mistake of mentioning his tendency to parade around the house without his shirt on, and now Abby won't let it go. "Stop it, will you?"

"Come on, you're both drunk, and you accidentally stumble into the wrong room, and you think--" Abby is starting to laugh, amusing the daylights out of herself. "You think, bollocks, Ray, I've never found skinny, copiously tattooed guitar players attractive before, but suddenly--"

"Will you keep your voice down!" God. Living with him invites every possible embarrassment, she swears. Just the other night he came home early and caught her waxing her upper lip and listening to Jewel.

"What? Jeez." Abby takes a sip of her coffee. "Nobody can hear me. He's objectively sort of hot, is all I'm saying. Don't be such a priss."

"I'm not prissy, I'm British. And I'm never until the day I die, even if I am so drunk I float away down the Chicago River, even if he is so drunk he needs his stomach pumped, going to have sex with my roommate." Neela stands, tossing her empty cup into the bin. "Come on, let's go. Someone must be bleeding somewhere."

*

There's legit nothing in the fridge except ketchup, a six pack of Goose Island, and something sticky that spilled, so they go to the 24-hour Shaw's on the way home from work. It's March, and still freezing. Ray buries his hands in his coat pockets as they cross the parking lot. Neela just got off a double so she's totally slaphappy, keeping up a running monologue about the merits of Smart Start over Raisin Bran, how obnoxious Wendell is. She won't let him push the cart. "I'll do it," she tells him, when he pulls one free from the nesting row.

He holds up his hands in surrender. "Be my guest," he says.

She is so weird.

Here's what he knows about her, two months into this bizarre sociological experiment: she snores. She has a long and varied list of pet peeves including but by no means limited to women in commercials eating foods in a sexy way, bad grammar, and the manner in which Ray loads the dishwasher. She likes lame girl music. Like, really lame. Mariah Carey lame. He hid her CDs in the oven, where he knows she'll never find them, though he supposes she's in for a surprise if she's ever possessed by a demon and compelled to preheat the damn thing. She runs three miles every morning. She thinks he's a moron.

He already knew that last one, actually.

She starts to fade in the freezer aisle, which is bad because that's where most of their groceries come from. "Stay with me, kid," he instructs, when she folds her arms on the pushbar of the cart and rests her forehead on top. Her scrub-clad butt sticks out at a funny angle. "Waffles or minibagels?"

"Waffles," she decides, after a moment of apparently laborious consideration. She looks like a little kid. "I'm tired."

"I know. Newman's or Mama Celeste?"

Neela sighs loudly. "Mama Celeste is rubbish."

"She's always spoken very highly of you. Chocolate chip or Neopolitan?"

"Neopolitan. No, both. Are we finished?"

Actually he wanted to go to the deli counter, and they're low on toilet paper again, but in another second he's going to need to sling her over his shoulder and carry her to the car. "Yeah," he says, nudging her gently out of the way and pushing the cart toward the checkout. "Let's go home."

Spring

One-thirty in the morning, and he's on the bloody guitar again.

Neela sighs noisily, flipping her pillow, rearranging her limbs. She lies there for awhile, fuming, listening to him plink away out there like the thinks he's John freaking Mayer.

Actually, he's playing a John Mayer song.

Ray loathes John Mayer.

There must be a girl here.

Oh, for God's sake.

Neela pulls the covers over her head. She names all the bones in the human body. She hears a high-pitched giggle, thus confirming her theory. Finally she digs around until she finds a bra--one thing about living with a boy is she can't even go to the blasted toilet in the middle of the night without worrying about putting on an impromptu peep show--and opens the door to the living room. Ray is sitting on the couch with not one, but two blonde women. Neela stares.

"Hey, Roomie," he says, smiling like he's truly happy to see her. "What's doin'?"

Sometimes he honestly just annoys the shit out of her by being alive.

"Can you please stop it?" she says. It sounds shrill, which makes her even crabbier. She hates when her voice gets like that, like she's a German hausfrau in some sort of European farce. That's not how she actually is, it's not. He brings out the shrew in her. "I'm on at seven."

"Oh! Yeah, totally." He nods with enthusiasm. He's very drunk. "Sorry."

"Thank you." She slams the bedroom door with more force than is really necessary.

"Who's that?" she hears one of the blondes ask.

Neela flops back into her bed. "I'm his common law wife!"

*

The night after Gallant leaves Ray gets home from work and finds Neela curled in a ball on the couch. She's still in her pajamas and she's staring at the TV, which wouldn't be unusual except the TV isn't on. "Hey." He squints at her. "Are you crying?"

"What? No." She shakes her head quickly, swiping at her face. "No, no, I'm fine."

She is so full of shit, but he plays along anyway. "Allergies?"

"Yeah," she says, looking grateful. "It's that time of year."

"Pollen, and all."

"Right."

He flops down next to her. The couch is warm from her body heat, and he wonders how long she's been sitting here. "Got an EpiPen in my backback, if you need it."

"You don't use an EpiPen for seasonal allergies."

"You don't use an EpiPen for boyfriend-related emo, either."

"I'm not emo," Neela snaps. "I'm not painting my nails black and singing backup in a certain band I won't name." Then she sighs. "I don't even know if he is my boyfriend, Ray," she says miserably. "I don't know what I'm doing. I was so up and down all day yesterday, and now I just keep thinking about him going back to that horrible place, and every terrifying thing that could happen there. I am not the sort of person who is equipped for this kind of relationship. I'm borderline obsessive-compulsive. I'm terrible at feelings."

"Well." He knows she's vulnerable and all, but it seems wrong to lie. "Only sort of."

She huffs out a little laugh. "Wanker."

"Yeah."

They sit there for a minute. He thinks she's calming down a little but then she starts to cry again, little hiccups shaking her shoulders. "Sorry," she says, trying to get herself under control. "Sorry."

"Hey, it's okay." He glances around for a tissue, though he doesn't think they've bought a box since they moved in, and eventually he settles for an extra roll of toilet paper from under the sink. If she was anybody else he'd put an arm around her, but with Neela it's different. He thinks of jellyfish, of things you're curious about but probably shouldn't touch. "Want me to leave you alone?"

"No." She sighs again. She looks wrung out, like a washcloth. "You can stay."

Ray wonders sometimes what it would be like to have somebody like Neela love you, to be the object of all that energy. He doesn't actually think he'd like it, but he's not entirely sure. "You hungry?" he asks. "I can make meat sauce."

"Yeah," she says, blowing her nose. "That would be good."

*

Finally she girds herself enough to go to one of his gigs. She's been making excuses since they moved in together, and Neela likes to think that she's not fundamentally incapable of the niceties one performs when one lives with another person.

Also all the shows she watches are over for the season, so it's not like she has anything better to do tonight.

"I'm too old to be here," Abby says, glaring at the stamp on her right hand. She's in a snit over Jake and his internship placement, all sulk and heavy sighs. "Also, I don't have enough of my face pierced."

"I know, I know." Neela inhales as they squeeze past a a couple of girls in pleather, earning two lungs full of cigarette smoke for her trouble. "I just have to show my face and then we can leave." She orders a vodka and soda from the bartender, who hands her what can only be described as a Dixie cup. She rolls her eyes, but downs it. Desperate times, and all.

Ray's band goes on around nine o'clock, drums and guitar solos, his stupid saucer-sized belt buckle catching the light. They're not bad, she supposes, if you like that sort of thing. It's all a bit shouty. The only lyrics Neela can make out have to do with amphetamines and ovaltine, or some such nonsense, but the tune is rather catchy and she and Abby bop around a bit and make exasperated faces at one another. "Which one did you make out with?" Abby yells, over the noise.

Looking at Brett is mortifying, so Neela looks at Ray instead. He fits here, she'll give him that. The swagger that looks so laughable in the halls of County sort of makes sense on the stage, and if she's seen him hesitate with a scalpel in his hand tonight he is all confidence, fingers splayed on the neck of his guitar. Every woman in this club is eyeing him. She thinks he was probably the most popular boy in high school, the one all the girls wanted to date.

Neela always found those boys vexatious.

He finds them when the set is over, looking sweaty and actually rather exhilarated. "Lockhart! You came!" He makes a big show of glancing Neela up and down. "Hey, Roomie." She wishes she'd worn a sweater. "You look good."

"Bite me."

He bares his teeth. "So what'd you think?"

"It was very nice."

Ray makes a face like she's told him he was bloody awful, which frankly she should have, even if it was a lie. "Very nice?" he asks. "Ouch."

"Oh come on, Ray," Abby tells him. "For Neela, 'very nice' is practically gushing. Seriously. If I were you I'd be embarrassed by all that praise."

Neela ignores them; she squints at him in the pinkish light. "Are you wearing eyeliner?"

"Yours, actually."

Oh, Jesus Christ. "Is this the first time?"

He makes that face he always makes, pouting his lips like a platypus. "I want you to think long and hard about whether or not you want me to answer that question."

Her ears are ringing when she and Abby finally make their escape, the spring air cold and refreshing on her face. "Well," Abby allows, blinking in the florescent light of the El station. "That was actually not as bad as I thought it was going to be."

"Yeah." Neela swipes her card and pushes through the turnstile. "It was worse."

Still, she hums that stupid song all night long.

Summer

They've got a gig downtown on Friday and a bunch of people come back to the apartment once it's done, crowding into the living room, spilling into the hall. There's a near-miss with the lava lamp. Neela's working nights this cycle, so there's nobody around to regulate, and it gets loud enough that their downstairs neighbors bang on the ceiling once or twice. The sun is starting to come up by the time everybody clears out and okay, Ray leaves the living room kind of messy, but he'll get to it in the morning. Probably even before she gets home.

He wakes up around eight with a screaming headache. His eyes feel like they're full of sand. Neela is back from work; she's knocking around loud enough out there that he can tell she's pissed. Whoops. Ray tries to remember if he picked any of the potato chips up off the floor, but he falls back to sleep before he can figure it out.

The apartment is quiet when he wakes up again a couple of hours later, but when he finally hauls himself out of bed and comes out into the living room, he's met with a crash of biblical proportions.

Holy shit.

Ray blinks. It takes him a moment to realize what happened--that Neela has stacked every single empty (or half-empty) beer bottle in the apartment at an angle against the base of his bedroom door, so that when he opened it--well. There's beer everywhere, probably thirty longnecks rolling all over the place. It smells like the floor of a bar.

He stands there for what must be a full minute, contemplating the carnage. Then he laughs, he can't help it. Because it's so fucking annoying, but like...vaguely awesome, too.

Huh.

Anyway, the next night he duct-tapes her door shut for revenge.

The night after that, she uses a screwdriver to take his door off the hinges.

"You're not going to think it's so funny next time I bring a girl home," he shouts, when he sees it laying on top of his bed. Neela turns the music up.

He spends the next day trying to think of a way to top her--installing a dozen padlocks, maybe, or a peephole going the wrong way--but in the end he just stops by Antonia's on the way home and picks up a pepperoni and sausage pie. "Peace offering," he tells her, dumping it on the table.

Neela cocks her head to the side, smiling demurely. "Are we in a fight?"

"Shut up." He motions for her to move over, plopping next to her on the couch. "I'm out of door tricks."

"Quitter," she says mildly, and they sit and eat their pizza.

*

Michael calls from Kabul, the connection tinny and wavering. "Hey, Doc," he says. "How's it going Stateside?"

Neela smiles. The sound of his voice is reassuring, even from an entire world away. She likes to think about him thinking about her, the old-fashioned quality of their correspondence. It feels very civilized, if such a thing is possible when he's smack in the middle of such barbarism. She likes his steady heart.

So she tells him about work, a couple of interesting cases she's encountered. She read somewhere that you're supposed to keep your tone light when you're talking to soldiers abroad. She wishes she was good at telling jokes.

"How's the roommate?" he asks, toward the end of their conversation. Michael always gets a sort of strange tone when he asks after Ray, which is silly.

"Absurd as always," she replies. "He's mad. His band is full of idiots. People traipsing in and out all the time. The bathroom is filthy. I keep waiting for the reality cameras to show up."

"Sounds like fun," Michael says, in a voice like he's wondering when she's going to move out.

Neela feels sort of crummy when she hangs up, though in theory she hasn't said anything she wouldn't tell Ray to his face. Still, she knows she's painted a lopsided picture: Ray has his moments, after all. He puts the seat down. He's a decent enough cook. And he secretly knows all the songs from Cats by heart, so that if you get him drunk enough and ask nicely he'll play them on his guitar.

Also, she rather likes his crooked teeth.

Not in a romantic way.

She walks around the house for awhile. She feels guilty, which frankly isn't unusual, the small hard knot of it in her gut. She thinks perhaps she'll bake cookies. That would be a nice thing to do. There's no reason for him to know she's atoning for anything. There's a roll of Pillsbury chocolate-chip in the fridge that she was intending to eat raw, but she peels back the wrapper and spoons it onto an aluminum tray instead.

She opens the oven to stick the pan in, and finds the Norah Jones CD she's been looking for since February.

*

It was a hundred and four degrees today, so when Ray gets home and finds Neela laying faceup on the living room floor it totally freaks him out in the second before her eyes pop open. "Oh," she says. "You're back."

"Jesus Christ." It takes a minute for the adrenaline to wear off; his heart is banging away in his chest a little harder than he'd like to admit. "The hell are you doing?"

"Cooler down here," she tells him.

He stares at her for a moment, blinking. "You are fucking batshit insane, do you know that?"

"Well, it is." Neela manages a little shrug. "You should try it before you judge."

"You should go buy an air conditioner."

"You should give me two hundred bucks of your paycheck."

Well.

She has a point there.

He comes over and lies down a couple of feet away from her, his back against the hardwood. He wouldn't call it breezy, but there's at least a little more air down here. Also, more dirt.

They breathe in tandem for a minute. He looks over at her. She's wearing a tank top, and perspiration is glistening on the rise of her chest.

He sits up so fast he gets lightheaded.

"You all right?" Neela props herself on her elbows. She looks alarmed.

"Yup. Fine. Good." He nods. "You want to go to a movie?" he asks. "It's air-conditioned there."

"That sounds lovely, actually."

He gets a giant soda at the theater, chewing the ice cubes until they melt.

Fall

She asks him once, about his dad.

They're walking home from work, brown papery leaves crunching under their feet. It's that time of year where every nice day feels like it might be the last one, so when it hit sixty-five this afternoon she convinced him to skip the El. It's kind of a hike back to the apartment, but Ray doesn't really mind.

"My dad?" he asks, stalling a little. "Well, he's not as good-looking as me, I can tell you that right now. But apparently we had a very handsome mailman, so."

"I'll bet." She bumps his shoulder a little; their pinkies brush. He can feel her waiting. Ray doesn't talk about his dad in any detail pretty much ever, and he tries to figure out how to explain it to her. He actually thinks it's weird that he even wants to try: lately he gets the feeling they've gone from roommates who hang out on occasion to friends who happen to live together, and it's sort of an awkward transition. He's never invested this much time in a girl he wasn't actively trying to sleep with.

Actually, he doesn't think he's ever invested this much time in a girl, period, but that can't be right.

"My dad is...not a good guy," he says eventually.

Neela nods but doesn't say anything; they walk another half a block. She's gotten better at this, he thinks. She's a lot less of a bulldozer than she used to be. Ray shrugs. "He's not an alcoholic or anything. He's just a dick. He lives in Las Vegas. I don't know."

He must not sound as casual as he means to, because she glances at him out of the corner of her eye. "Was he violent?"

"No, not really," he says, but he doesn't want to lie, so he shrugs again and makes his 'not a big deal' face. "Once or twice. But he did the run and done thing when I was like eleven, and that's kind of that." He wills her not to say she's sorry. "I mean, we talk at Christmas and stuff. He's not, like, the specter in my life."

"Well, no, I'm the spectre in your life."

"Exactly."

Neela stops walking. It's gotten a little colder, and the wind is blowing her dark hair all around. "That sucks," she tells him.

"I mean, yeah." He shoves his hands in his pockets, feeling weirdly naked. "Anyway. Do you have plans for tonight? Zoe's gonna come by."

"Oh." Neela bobs her head and gets this look on her face like she's concentrating very hard on not rolling her eyes. "Yeah, sure, of course. I can be scarce."

Ray makes a face. She hasn't exactly made it a secret that she thinks Zoe's sort of vapid, but whatever, we can't all date the Platonic ideal of a human specimen. Sometimes Ray has to bite his tongue to keep from reminding her that the thing about the Platonic ideal is that it doesn't actually exist.

"It's freezing," she says a few minutes later, folding her arms like she's got a bone to pick. The sun is gone; a couple more weeks and they'll have to turn the clocks back, dark at four o'clock. "Whose stupid notion was it to walk, anyway?"

Ray laughs. "Pain in my ass you are," he says, but he digs his jacket out of his pack and tosses it to her, and they take the El the rest of the way.

*

She makes him come back inside the ER after Zoe's father has at him like that. He doesn't want to--he's embarrassed, and she doesn't blame him--but she's worried he's broken a rib, or worse. "Don't," she warns, when Chuny's eyes fly open, questions all over her face. "Just call up to x-ray, will you?"

"Ooookay."

Curtain three is empty, so Neela brings him back there to repair his busted face. Part of her wants to say I told you so but the other, larger part of her was so terrified by the sight of that madman beating on him that she needs to wait for her hands to stop shaking before she can suture him up. "Relax, you," he mumbles, when he notices. He's sitting on the gurney, and he nudges at her ankle with the toe of his boot. "I'm fine."

"Mm-hmm." She doesn't know what to say other than that. She's incredibly rattled; there is a rushing inside her head. "Just hold still."

It's close to three by the time they get home; she stops at the Jumbo-Mart for coffee and a trashy magazine. She's going to be a wreck tomorrow, but there's nothing to be done about it now. "Why don't you sleep on the couch?" she suggests, once he's changed his clothes. He looks very young all of a sudden, sweatpants and bruises. "I'll stay up for a bit."

He eyes her coffee cup, her US Weekly. "What are you, worried about me?"

"No," she says immediately. "But if you die from an intracranial bleed I won't be able to afford the rent."

"Well," he says. "That's a fact."

So he lays down and she sits on the floor beside him, her back against the front of the couch. They watch sitcoms. She drinks her coffee. She keeps glancing up at him out of the corner of her eye, to make sure he's still there. The third or fourth time she does it, he's looking back at her.

"Thanks," he says softly. "For, you know. Fixing me up."

"It's fine," she tells him, and if she was a different kind of person she might lay her hand on his face, skate her thumb across his eyebrow. "Close your eyes."

His hand lands on her shoulder once he's fallen asleep.

*

He's watching his third Law and Order rerun in a row and he's pretty sure he knows who the killer is when hears a crash from the kitchen. "You okay?" he calls, glancing over his shoulder. For a good doctor Neela is weirdly clumsy, like she saves all her physical grace for the ER.

"Just fine!" she calls back.

Five minutes pass. It is suspiciously quiet. "Neela?"

"No problem!"

Yeah, right. He gets up and goes inside. She is standing barefoot on the narrow strip of countertop between the refrigerator and the stove. The tile below her is littered with broken glass--he recognizes a Guinness logo, a couple of cheap tumblers he got at Target. Ray thinks of the games he used to play when he was a kid, throwing the couch cushions on the floor and pretending they were islands, jumping from pillow to pillow over a rug that was an ocean lit on fire. Neela is trapped. He tries not to smile. "Contemplating your next move?"

She glares at him. "Don't laugh."

"I'm not laughing."

"I broke some glasses."

"I see that."

"I seem to be stuck up here."

"I see that, too." He's still wearing his sneakers so he kicks the largest shards out of the way, raises his arms. "Come here." He lifts her off the counter, her hands bracing against his shoulders. She's surprisingly light. He sets her down in the living room so he won't wind up picking glass out of her feet again, but once she's on the ground she doesn't let go right away, so he doesn't either. Ray holds his breath. He can feel the jut of her ribs beneath his hands.

She breaks first. "Well," she says, taking a step back, sliding into a pair of flip-flops sitting by the couch. "Thank you. Sorry."

"No problem," he says. He swallows; it feels like he's got a fucking plug in his throat. "Make sure you get all the pieces up this time, will you?"

*

A few nights later Ray comes home with a crate of fat orange clementines, the first of the season. "I love clementines," Neela says, hopping off the couch and following him into the kitchen with more enthusiasm than she's felt for anything in days. "Makes it feel like holidays."

"So you said."

She squints at him; it's misting outside, and rain is clinging to his eyelashes, the stubble on his face. "You remembered that?"

Ray shrugs. "I may have."

"All right," she says, pulling the netting off the top of the box. "Out with it. What do you want?"

"Huh?" He opens the refrigerator, pulls out a beer. "Why?"

"Are you feeding me, like you used to feed the nurses to make them love you?"

Ray pouts his lips in mock offense. "Do you not love me already?"

"Well." Neela considers, dropping her peel in the trash. "I suppose I tolerate you with increasing ease."

"Man, Rasgotra, you really know how to sweet-talk a guy."

They bring the box to the couch, assume their positions. They've been holed up in the apartment every night for a week, licking their respective wounds: Michael's leave getting delayed has put her in a terrible mood ninety-five percent of the time, and the skin around Ray's eye has turned yellow and green. They annoy each other, sure, but not as much as everyone else does.

They watch Jeopardy, which he's oddly good at. Sometimes she wonders how much he secretly knows.

"How you doin' over there?" he asks after awhile, glancing over at her. His eyes are very green.

Neela looks away. She's noticed this in herself lately--a preoccupation with the movement of his muscles under his t-shirts, a tiny kick in her stomach when she hears his key in the lock. His presence in the apartment has begun to feel physical to her, corporal in a way that, for all her medical knowledge, feels unfamiliar and strange. Something is happening, here.

She doesn't remember when exactly she stopped finding him so ridiculous. She still sort of does.

Eventually she's going to have to find a new place to live.

Ray nudges her with his knee. "Neela?"

"Yeah." She swallows. "I'm all right," she tells him, and in this moment she is. They sit on the couch and watch the television, the pith from the clementines staining their hands.