Oliver had promised himself complete independence after his divorce. That included tinkering at the piano whenever he felt like it, dips for dinner and redecorating. He had decided that his apartment would be his very own space, after his own taste, with no more feminine touches or boring, faceless trinkets and capricious dying houseplants. He had made it unashamedly and boldly stylish, turned it into a place where he could be happy on his own, complete with luscious cherry parquet and decorative plaid panels, with his proud theatre memorabilia and with just the right touch of frivolous colour. It was easy to be alone, especially in a dining room where he always had an audience on the walls, and for years Oliver didn't need another person's presence for the place to feel like home.
But that was all before a certain two-braided little lady came along and turned his world upside down. Loretta made him break all of his rules for himself with a happy flair, all the while fitting perfectly into the vulnerable empty spaces of his life and his heart. And now everything seemed new to him in his apartment. Every place had a new meaning and purpose thanks to Loretta bringing her welcome little touches and new life into the bachelor's apartment – and turning it into a new, wonderful kind of a home.
The changes happened overnight, in an instant, and also sometimes gradually, unnoticeably – like the suddenly, unfamiliarly pressing urgency to get back home after stepping out, however briefly.
There was a new spotted umbrella in his oriental umbrella stand and a second set of towels in the bathroom. In his favourite nook of the lavish walk-in wardrobe his scarves were now hanging next to a wide selection of ornate shawls, a perfect picture of chaotic harmony. Loretta didn't have quite as many as he did but hers took up just about as much space. Oliver had ordered them according to colour schemes and texture to make it easier to find a match.
Some things came and some had to go, and the good-byes were easier than Oliver had ever dared to imagine.
That became evident one afternoon when upon entering his apartment and finding Loretta kneeling in the middle of the foyer, he couldn't care a wit about the porcelain shards scattered all over the floor around her.
"Oh my God! Loretta!" Oliver exclaimed, belting to the miserable rocking heap that was Loretta. "What happened?"
Panic rising in him, Oliver was ready to fight an intruder and make funny animal noises to cheer Loretta up if need be. Luckily, there was no need and no intruder, for one would have died laughing at one of Oliver's ostrich impressions. And they really didn't need another body in the building.
Shaking her head gently, with an air of hopeless remorse, Loretta said softly, "I'm so sorry, Oliver."
Tearing his gaze away from her captivating, openly regretful eyes, Oliver registered the unsettling way Loretta had squeezed her left hand into a trembling fist and was holding it up to her chest. Seeing a trickle of red appear from the side of her palm, he became achingly aware of the porcelain shards surrounding her on the floor in a familiar splatter of colour. "Oh, no," he muttered, possibly even more mortified than she was, as her words belatedly reached him.
Shrugging his way out of a sympathetic stupor and gesturing around them, Oliver let a nonchalant crescendo slip into his voice as he declared, "This ugly-ass vase? I've never liked it! It was a Christmas present to my wife from Teddy Dimas – that hog!"
At this the weary look in Loretta's eyes shifted into one of surprise. "I'll tell you about it some other time," Oliver promised distractedly, putting off the story about Will's parentage for a later and more convenient date and starting to move.
"Come on," he urged nippily, supporting Loretta, who still looked heavily burdened with shame, by the elbows as the two of them stood.
"We both hated it. That's why she left it here," Oliver elaborated generously as he guided a meekly obedient Loretta towards their little kitchen. "Good riddance, I say, and let's get you taken care of."
With committed attentiveness he took his beloved to the sink, tentatively bringing her hand away from the protective proximity of her chest, and ever so carefully pried her clenched fist open. He was forced to gulp back a reaction of horror at the raw gaping gash across her delicate palm, and turned on the tap.
"Now, this might hurt a little," Oliver warned in a fatherly tone. He was too preoccupied with marvelling at the trusting willingness with which Loretta allowed him to guide her shaking hand under the flow of water to notice the patient fondness with which she was watching him tackle his mission. The ugly red pool was washed out of her twitching palm and Loretta hissed gently from the sharp sting of pain.
"Stupid water," Oliver muttered seriously under his breath. At a rather insistent twitch, he glanced up with immediate alarm but found Loretta having a hard time holding back laughter.
Relieved that the damage was not too grave to dim Loretta's singular spark, Oliver slid over towards an overhead cupboard and instructed, "Now, you hold that there and I'm gonna get a towel, and then I'm gonna try and remember where I keep my medicine box."
"Oh, no, I've moved them," Loretta piped up quickly, halting Oliver in his tracks, his hand frozen half-way to the cupboard door. "They're on your left," she added bashfully, admitting to the first change she'd made in their now shared kitchen, which, admittedly, Oliver didn't use too extensively.
Oliver pivoted around and snatched a fresh towel from a lower, much handier place than he'd ever used. "Genius!" he commented with proud content and grinned at an immediately brightening Loretta.
The rest of the procedure was performed in tense but positive silence. Oliver wrapped the kitchen towel around Loretta's hand and had her hold pressure on the wound until he returned from the bathroom with a tin box containing all the medical equipment he had in the apartment. After meticulously cleaning up the cut, his touch incredibly tender, Oliver wrapped the only bandage he had around the pad of cotton pressed against the vase's last angry revenge and the hand that was part of his greatest treasure – and made a mental note to restock on first aid equipment. Never mind how many times Will had lectured him on home safety, it took bringing a loved one into the space to actually see reason in the boy's worry.
By the time Oliver finished bandaging up her hand, the two of them had instinctively drawn closer to one another in pensive, devoted concentration, so that Loretta's tiny, "Thank you," didn't need to be much above a whisper of a breath.
Before releasing it, Oliver raised her hand gently to his lips and placed a little kiss in her palm, his lips lightly grazing the skin next to the bandage. Some remaining facade of Loretta's melted away as she sighed blissfully, and Oliver chose the moment to deliver a piece of news he was as giddy to present her with as he could be.
"I went to the locksmith today," he confided, still cradling Loretta's hand close to his face as he reached a hand into an inside pocket of his jacket. A sentimental glisten of emotion appeared in Loretta's pale eyes, and Oliver placed a single key deftly into her fixed palm. A silky pink ribbon was tied in a bow around it, fitting for its lovely new owner.
Welcoming new bits and pieces, customs and traditions, ideas and joys into their shared home was all the more easier since Oliver considered everything about Loretta adorable – like the way she drank her tea every morning, fluttering about the place, with the label of the tea bag flipping in the air. In this Loretta was unreservedly like Oliver, who, too, would take his tea everywhere in the apartment; however, she was somehow capable of keeping track of her tea cup and returning it, along with the numerous ones that Oliver had lost while shuffling through their living space, to the kitchen. She had brought over her own exquisitely feminine china tea cup, which stood out from the rest of the kitchenware like a speck of fairy dust in the mundane world.
Through mutually enthusiastic reorganizing, bookshelves in Oliver's study were enhanced with Loretta's little library, and a shelf in the study was promoted to the task of guarding Loretta's most precious notebooks, from her Playbill collection to the scrapbook with clippings of Dickie to the new and beloved actual photo album of her and her son to her personal diary, which Oliver was determined to not even glance towards. He was bursting with pride because, even after the monstrous way he had violated her trust by stealing the scrapbook, Loretta was confident to leave her most intimate confessions in his unguarded presence.
She explained that she had started writing again after years of hiatus at the beginning of their production in order to remember the whole adventure, both of her Broadway debut and her eventual reunion with her son. And when one night she was sitting up in bed, scribbling away, and Oliver pointed out that that particular adventure was more or less over and done with now, an angelic expression of bliss shifted across her face as she replied that she now had many, many more wonderful things to keep track of and be grateful for.
One of those things, as she readily confessed, was the way they could spend every moment of the day together – provided she wasn't working and he wasn't sleuthing – from thrilling dates, with which they were constantly trying to upstage each other, to little everyday moments in the comfortable privacy of their home.
One example of such a sweet interlude happened one morning in their bedroom when Loretta was getting ready for an online audition. Sitting at the vanity, she was applying her modest make-up and humming gently, completely at peace with the sincerely admiring attention with which Oliver was watching her.
He was content with contemplating in pleasant silence until Loretta started putting on her earrings and he felt the wry need to ask, "Do you need me to see if the thing is in the thing?"
Loretta caught his twinkling gaze in the mirror and chuckled, "No."
After a little while, having finished with the earrings, Loretta looked back up into his eyes, which hadn't left her delightful reflection in the mirror for a moment. "But, if you want," she mentioned in a low sultry voice, "you can check if the lipstick is really water-proof."
She pushed herself up from her chair and pivoted around to approach the bed, the supposedly water-proof gentle pink drawn into an inviting smirk.
"Oh, don't mind if I do," Oliver replied with a matching grin, sitting up just as Loretta perched herself on the edge of the bed. Tenderly, so as not to endanger the fresh powder – or whatever it was women used to create the illusion they were twenty years younger than they really were – Oliver held his beloved's face in his hands and caught her lips in a sweet, radiant kiss.
Then he pulled back a little and adoringly studied Loretta's youthfully flushed expression. "You know what, I think it is."
A fleeting haze of confusion flickered through her eyes before Loretta smiled a sparkly smile, muttering, "Good."
Another morning saw them standing back-to-back in their walk-in closet, studying their respective racks of clothing and having a serious discussion about their wardrobe choices for the day.
"I'm thinking lavender," Loretta mused, leafing through her blouses. "What do you think?"
Oliver gave a weary, defeated grunt. "I could do plum," he offered, explaining reluctantly, "My lavender's got tzatziki on it from a few nights back. It's in the laundry basket."
"I can do plum," Loretta jumped at the new idea.
"You look adorable in plum," Oliver thought, picking out his plum-coloured shirt.
"You look adorable in everything," Loretta added casually, slipping on her light silky blouse.
"I know."
There were periods, naturally, during which it was a hectic struggle to find any time to spend together at all. Mostly it was because of Loretta's constant travelling due to Dickie's knack for digging up opportunities for her. But even in busy times they could find a special joy in each other's presence and support. Only the planning was a pain – with its few, rare perks.
"Oh, about that trip next week," Loretta mentioned drowsily, awakening from a lovely daydream as she sat, head tilted against his, next to Oliver as he played her a tender twinkling prelude. "You don't have to bother-"
"Are we going on a trip?" Oliver wondered, feigning innocent cluelessness.
Loretta's head jerked up and she studied her man's face with suspicious incomprehension. They had spent hours upon hours trying to get their schedules to match – all in vain. Loretta was fated to be away at work. "But the season special in LA…"
His eyes moving between the keys and a dreamy emptiness floating around the room but never straying to Loretta's face, Oliver explained calmly, "As I understand, you're doing that next month when you're down there anyway. Dickie managed to squeeze it in between some wardrobe tests and that pilot's shooting."
Immense gratitude and admiration blossoming suddenly in her chest, Loretta tried to bring his great gift into comprehension by softly saying, "You talked to Dickie."
The whole of Oliver's body seemed to give a calm shrug. "Well, of course I talked to him," he admitted, leaning to the right as the end of the prelude took him to the higher notes. "I promised I would."
He straightened back up, having finished the piece, with a brilliant smile, which immediately faltered when he saw that Loretta was, surprisingly, close to tears. "What?" Oliver asked gently, a myriad of unlikely but urgently concerning ways in which he could have misunderstood Loretta's feelings towards the upcoming work trip flittering through his head. "What's the matter?"
This time it was Loretta's eyes that sought the comforting, safe emptiness around the room – anything not to look at her dear thoughtful Oliver, lest she really start weeping. "Oh, nothing," she said with trembling lips. "I'm just- I'm always surprised when I can count on someone."
Oliver's heart fluttered with intense sympathy at Loretta's haunting vulnerability, but before he could start reassuring her about how she could always count on him for everything, Loretta straightened up, shaking the weight of her fragile confession off her shoulders and determinedly blinking away the tears.
"So we have my whole birthday week all to ourselves," she concluded with an increasingly pleased grin, "– and the show of course."
It was clear that Loretta was looking forward to spending the unexpectedly free days of the upcoming week in the form of quality time with Oliver and perhaps some with their mutual friends in the building – nothing extravagant, as she'd had a hard but, as far as she knew, successful time convincing Oliver. Of course, what she did not know yet was that during curtain call on the night of her birthday she would be presented with an original and choreographed well-wishing song involving the whole of the male cast as well as all the dashing young male ushers, who all came bearing so many roses that later on Loretta had to hire an extra cab just for the flowers. Oliver was, after all, a charming master of persuasion with an unquenchable thirst for the extravagant.
As for another change that Loretta's moving in brought along, there was now more food at apartment 10D than there had ever been before. Ever the doting partner, Loretta volunteered to start cooking healthy food for Oliver, explaining at his protests that she wanted him around for a long time, so he needed to take care of himself. And she promised not to make any more pork chops.
It was just another ordinary day in their shared honeymoon of a life when the doorbell rang and Oliver opened the door with a sweet, "Hello, you."
In the corridor stood Loretta who was carrying two full bags of groceries, hugging a packet of celery, onion, parsley and rhubarb, and who had probably pressed the doorbell with either an elbow or her nose. Merely for the sake of the adorable mental image Oliver hoped for the latter.
"Hi! I'm so, so sorry," explanations started pouring out of Loretta as she shuffled inside and towards the kitchen. "I know I said I'd be back an hour ago, but the grocer was being so nice to me and the butcher told me this fascinating story about his pet carrier pigeon."
Oliver, who didn't mind her tardiness at all, save for the fact that he had already started to miss her company and for the feeling of being out of place in his own home without her, followed her through the hallway. "And, well, I got a little carried away, as you can see," Loretta added, gesturing with a guilty shrug towards the two bursting grocery bags she'd set on the kitchen table.
"But it'll all be worth it," she said as she shook off her coat and unwrapped herself from a heavy flowery scarf. The next thing she discarded was her silly floppy hat that had no business looking so good and totally in place on anyone. "I promise."
"Oh, I have no doubt," Oliver said, cradling the coat he had obtained from Loretta in his arms like a precious dance partner. But with an insistent reluctance to part with her company keeping him from taking it back to the coat rack, he offered hopefully, "Can I help?"
Loretta's expression sparkled with joy as she started unpacking the goods onto the table. "Only if you want to."
As soon as Oliver returned from putting away her clothes, Loretta carried on recounting her comfortingly ordinary urban adventures on the hunt for groceries, now and then pausing in her stories to marvel at a batch of delightfully perfect eggs or the lovely scent of fresh rhubarb, which she rhythmically chopped to fill a flaky pie, or some other fresh natural wonder she had picked up this perfect morning.
"Oh! And you have to smell these," she piped up, generously shoving a packet of strawberries in Oliver's direction. "The grocer picked them out for me himself."
"Really?" Oliver hummed from a happy place behind a handful of strawberries.
"Yeah, and he recommended this great butcher right nearby," Loretta twittered elatedly as her feet took her to the oven, which they had had fixed the first week she'd been there, to check its temperature. "And he gave me a discount!"
Experiencing a surprising twinge of impatient irritation, Oliver prompted, "And?"
Loretta picked up the prepared rhubarb pie, smirked at Oliver over her shoulder and bent down to place the pie into the oven. "I told him I was already taken."
Oliver made a startled grunt of guilt, not having realized that the unreasoning animosity he had briefly harboured for the no-doubt amicable grocer he had never met had its roots in unfounded jealousy.
Blissfully unaware and more than content with her progress, Loretta imprisoned the pie in the oven and returned to the salad she was preparing. "And what did you get up to while I was out?" she inquired.
All of a sudden ridiculously self-aware, Oliver wasn't about to admit that he had been missing her for the majority of the time she had spent gathering. Although admirable, he didn't want his dependence on his partner to become one of his defining characteristics. So instead he uttered an evasive grunt and performed a shrug and set about chopping cucumber on the cutting board next to the sink.
"Oh, come on," Loretta prodded, her voice jumping giddily, while washing a cluster of tomatoes in the sink. "Or," she added, smirking mischievously, "I could tell you about how the butcher complimented my, oh, so youthful and inspiring taste."
"Oh, pooh," Oliver responded to her teasing, in a momentous split-second decision, by passing his hand under the running tap and sprinkling water in her direction.
Loretta dropped the tomatoes into the sink when she jerked away, shielding herself with her hands and then giggling, "I'm gonna get you for that."
"You've already got me," Oliver muttered sweetly as in an already familiar manner the world around them slowed down to accommodate the extraordinary connection between the two of them and Oliver's fluttering heartbeat.
The breathtaking, glorious sight that was Loretta turned to him, swiftly tipped forward and kissed him lightly. And Oliver didn't think he'd ever been happier.
Then grinning at him and without really moving away from him, Loretta filled a cup half-way, dipped her fingers in the cold water and sprinkled it at Oliver's chest, at the shirt she knew he wouldn't be going out in that day anyway.
Splashed back into playfulness, Oliver pulled a face. "Oh," he said mock-bitchily. "Oh, this is how you wanna do this, huh?"
Suffice it to say they engaged in a full-blown water fight with the war zone stretching over the kitchen and the dining room and the hallway, complete with running and squealing and "A-ha!"s and "I'm gonna get you"s and "You can't catch me"s. They came to a final stand-off in the walk-in wardrobe where the both of them had to surrender on account of them both running out of ammo and laughing so hard that they fell into an entangled, dripping heap between Oliver's dress suits.
Eventually they did get back to cooking because Loretta insisted on love being best proven through good food.