There are so many pieces of herself that she keeps hidden from others that sometimes he wonders if they are true or just an elaborate fantasy created in his mind.
Like for instance, when she comes home each day, she takes off her shoes as soon as she is in her apartment and the door is closed. Her parents had been slightly neurotic about stains in their carpets and she never unlearned the habit. But each time she comes home she slips her shoes off, first left then right and carries them back to her closet. Each day, she slips off her left shoe first, even though her apartment doesn't have a square inch of carpeting.
When she is at home, her red hair is almost always pulled up in either a ponytail or a bun. While at work she always wears her hair down with the exception of when she works after hours on those extremely stressful days. At home she tends to twist the end of her ponytail when she's distracted causing it to curl from repeated twirls. She swears to her friends that she doesn't wear her hair up because she's self-conscious of the way her ears stick out, but secretly she is afraid she would twirl her hair without even noticing.
She loves the crispness of the air and the distinct scent that indicates the beginning of autumn. She loves the change of seasons so much that she refuses to close the windows, especially at night. She doesn't care about the sounds of traffic below or the expected temperature overnight, she will keep the windows open to maximize the amount of time she gets with the fresh air. She keeps the windows open even when the temperature drops to fifty degrees, and in order to keep warm, she bundles up in flannel pajama bottoms and a large knit sweater, sometimes she'll even add a pair of socks.
The most comfortable pair of pajamas she owns is not actually a pair, but an old tee-shirt and a pair of pajama shorts she bought during her last week in college. The shorts are flannel and are covered in a loose pattern of large mugs of hot chocolate and marshmallows. She had bought them before a camping trip she took with her younger brother the summer after her senior year and before his first year at Columbia. They cost her fifteen dollars when she bought them and she's pleasantly surprised that they are still around years later. The tee-shirt had cost nearly thirty dollars since it said Harvard on the front, but it had been a gift for her. Nearly ten years old, the name of the school has begun to rub off and it has a hole on the bottom right side and another in the seam where the left sleeve meets the shirt. No matter how worn in the pajamas are, she won't let anyone replace them, they've become her adult version of a safety blanket.
If she's working from home there are only two places where she'll get work done, and neither of those places is her desk. Her bed is the ultimate work station because it's big enough to lay all her paperwork out along with her laptop; her desk was never able to fulfill that function. She knows that you're not supposed to combine work with the bedroom because it supposedly makes it harder to fall asleep but she's been doing it since the long days and never-ending work associated with the D.A.'s office. The newer spot she's grown accustomed to is the oversized ottoman she keeps against the wall in her living room. While it doesn't hold all the paperwork that her bed can, she can sit cross-legged and listen to the cooking channel in the background.
She's dyed her hair twice in her life and if you didn't know her then, you would never know it. She wasn't always as confidant in the unique shade of red her hair is as she is now. During her junior year of high school she semi-permanently dyed her hair a dark brunette shade. The color made her pale skin seem even paler, but her green eyes were striking and noticed by everyone. There are pictures in an album from that summer when she had gone to Italy for two weeks. To this day, she credits that change in hair color for her summer fling with Ryan, the son of the family friends who had travelled with them. The second time was during her junior year in college. She had bleached her hair, then dyed it a honey blonde. While she liked the hair color, returning back to her original hue of red was not worth it. She had initially dyed it due to a dare on her twenty-first birthday, and had ultimately learned two lessons. She learned to never make a permanent decision when she was drunk and that blondes sometimes really do have more fun.
She loves the idea of so many things. For instance, she loves the idea of being able to cook gourmet, multi-course meals. She loved the idea of being a secret gourmet chef so much that she took a cooking class, every Saturday morning, for three months a few years back. She was able to increase her cooking skills from her single specialty, a whole wheat grilled cheese, to being able to roast a chicken and create her own homemade soups. Her graduation from the intermediate cooking class resulted in a dinner party that she hosted. Her first and last dinner party, at least for now, was now infamously known as that "god-awful dinner party" and it hadn't earned its reputation from her cooking skills. The chicken had been roasted to perfection and the carrots, potatoes, and squash were great compliments for a true autumn meal. The meal had been spectacular; it was the company that had been awful.
She owns a green triceratops Pillow Pet that resides on the armchair that sits in the corner of her living room. It may seem like an odd item for an adult woman to have, but her six year old nephew had gotten it for her as a Christmas gift. It was a long story, but her brother always mocked her for her dorky love of dinosaurs, a love that had endured since her childhood. She could teach lessons on the differences between a tyrannosaurus rex, a stegosaurus, a triceratops, and a brontosaurus, and she had nicknamed the group of dinosaurs "The Big Four". Her older brother had tried to involve her nephew into the fight, but the six year old loved dinosaurs as well and would instead listen to her mini-lessons whenever she went to visit. This past Christmas, her nephew handed her a roughly wrapped blob and told her it was his special gift for her. She wouldn't admit it to anyone but her nephew, but it was her favorite Christmas gift last year.
She hates everything about perfume and gets a headache whenever a heavily perfumed woman simply walks past her. Because of her sensitivity, she never wears perfume and instead she uses scented lotion every morning. The lotions from Bath& Body Works are her favorite and she's even used their body sprays because they don't give her a headache. She easily owns ten different scents, but her go-to favorites are Midnight Pomegranate and Twilight Woods. She often combines the two scents to create her own unique scent.
When she's at work, the clothes that she wears are often structured and jewel-toned. The colors go great with the paleness of her skin and the brightness of her hair and the muted tones make sure that there is never too much attention focused on her. She spends the majority of her week working so her work clothes make up the majority of her closet. The minority of the closet, however, is made up of dark or worn in jeans and tops that tend to be bright primary colors. Her polished work uniform is often traded in for a pair of jeans rolled up with a men's dress shirt, which had been left behind, that was slightly wrinkled and rolled to the elbow. This weekend-in outfit was comfortable and was her favorite because she would never wear it out of the apartment, so it always felt like home.
She likes a certain degree of chaos in her life and a small degree of clutter in her apartment. It's not that she's a messy person; because everything has a drawer it goes in, she just doesn't really care about how organized the drawer is. She doesn't lose things because her primary characteristic at work carries over to home, she knows everything. The small things in her house are brightly colored, yellow bathroom towels, bright teal dishes in the kitchen, and orange patterned pillows on the couch. She keeps the walls a basic beige though, because while she likes a small amount of chaos, she likes the organized simplicity of the one color.
There's a faint scar on her right hand from broken bones and a surgery when she was fourteen. She had fallen down a flight of stairs when she was half asleep one morning, causing everyone in the family to wake up. Luckily, she only pulled her left shoulder and broke the two middle bones in her right hand. An hour of surgery, two permanent metal plates, and three months of physical therapy repaired the bones and left the two inch scar on her hand. She never mentions the past injury, but if someone brushes the top of her hand, they can feel the slight edge of the metal plates.
She's had her heart broken three times, one time which shattered it, causing it to be patched back together slightly different. The first time had been her first boyfriend in her junior year of high school. He had been cheating on her, but waited until after finals to break-up with her so that she could help him ace his finals. Her heart had also been broken when her last boyfriend demanded that she choose between their relationship and her career. She chose her job in the end because if he couldn't see that it was an essential part of her, then he wasn't truly worth it. The time her heart was shattered was not the result of a break-up but of the potential of one. It took everything she had to put that one night behind her because while there was a possibility of gaining everything, there was also the possibility of losing it all.
After a long day at work, she loves to come home and cook dinner. Sometimes it is pasta in fresh tomato sauce, sometimes a green salad with homemade dressing and tuna steaks that tend to cause the kitchen to smell fishy until the next day. While she's cooking, she'll put on a record, usually one that features jazz music. On the shelf next to her living room ottoman is a small collection of records she's amassed over the years, all but one of them are gifts from him.
After a long day at work, he loves to come home to the smell of homemade food and the red-haired woman cooking in the kitchen. He notices the light sparkle off the ring on her finger as she puts a piece of her famous roast chicken on both of the teal blue plates that are on the counter. A new song begins to play, one that he knows by heart because his father is featured, around two minutes into the song. He puts his suit jacket on top of the chair with the Pillow Pet and rolls his sleeves up to the elbow. He steps behind her and places a kiss on the left side of her neck, which is unobstructed since her hair is tied up in a bun, as he grabs two wine glasses out of the cabinet in front of her.
He can't imagine how he went for so long without knowing that she preferred pinot grigio wine or that her bedspread was a light green, but he knows that the intricacies of her everyday life are the ones he loves the most, because they are kept secret to everyone else but him. He knows that are still more pieces of her to discover and the thrill of still learning more about a person he's known for over a decade is enticing for maybe the first time in his life.