Acclimation
Olivia wasn't used to the Bishop apartment yet. She'd had a week and some days, but it was slow going.
Her apartment had been clean lines and high ceilings and Crate & Barrel furniture. This...was different. Her headboard here was carved. The wood floors were old and scarred, and the rugs were collected from thrift stores. There were more blankets than she could imagine uses for, hanging over chairs and couches, colorful as plumage. Everything was buttery warm. It was cozy, which was not the first word that would have come to mind to describe the possible living arrangements of these men.
It gave her a strange feeling to think of them as men, and not as Peter or Walter or the caricatures she kept of them in her mind. They were not the nutty professor nor his sarcastic son. They were histories and actions and needs and hurt, inhabiting a whole separate world between them. Like she was living in a den of animals, a piglet adopted by tigers. Or, alternately, a tiger adopted by aliens. They were possessive and protective, though it got on her nerves that they kept her behind them whenever one of them answered the front door (even for the pizza guy-"seriously, Peter?" she'd huffed, and when he'd given her a look she'd made ninja hands and said "I can take him"). After a while she accepted it as their way of being her family.
The house smelled like them; them and coffee and a licorice tea she had brought, of which Walter had become quite fond. Theirs was a smell she found foreign when she arrived, but began to recognize, began to crave. She piled blankets up to her chin watching television, letting that scent cuddle her cheeks.
And sure as she had been that she wouldn't, she found she liked the feeling of people in the rooms around her. Hearing Walter cook was a surprising joy, the scuff of his slippered feet and the little whisks of his spatula on the pans. His record collection, too, was full of homey, round sounds that he played at a comforting volume. His movements around the house were rhythmic, even and dancerly. He had become an expert at his own comfort out of obvious necessity.
Small interactions took her aback, and brought her unexpected delight. She considered herself a deeply private person, yet when Walter's beaming face interrupted her file study - asking her benignly if she would like a pancake in the shape of her initials - she felt contentment.
On a Saturday she lay stretched out on the couch, almost sleeping, and Peter draped her with an ancient quilt. On a Sunday it happened nearly the same, except that he lifted her legs to sit beside her and when she moved to give him space he stopped her, pulled her legs back to rest on his knees and made it clear that this was how it would be: so, relax already. Olivia covered her face with her quilt, ostensibly to block the sound of Peter beginning to read the Swimsuit Edition out loud to her, while he kept his hand on her ankle, giving her tiny intermittent rubs as he remembered did it like it was nothing, like it was ordinary and every day, and eventually it was ordinary and every day, and Olivia learned (albeit slowly) that these things were all right to want.
There was a period of drought that followed, in which she had grown accustomed to touch, grown to like it but not learned how to ask for it. It was before their experiments had begun in earnest, during a time Walter wanted her in the house anyway for reasons he avoided elucidating. Difficult days would pass with difficult cases and she would wander downstairs to find Peter, situate herself near him and hope that he would make contact in some way, any way. She would fail almost invariably because he would avoid her, thinking he knew her, the private Olivia needing her space.
So he would give her space. And she would trail him. It confused the hell out of him for weeks. It might have ended poorly, might have turned her from him for an indefinite future had he turned (even once) and asked in frustration why she was following him. But it didn't; he didn't.
Eventually, he figured it out, and when he did, he didn't let it happen again. All he needed after that was the smallest look, the tiniest hopeful lean of her head and he would steer her to the couch, the place where they touched and it was ordinary and every day, and he would get her closer every time until finally it was ordinary and every day that they would be tucked together, her head on his shoulder, his chin at her temple, his arm around her and his voice low and friendly.