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I pulled the bins out of the crawl space and opened each to make sure they were the right ones. I didn’t want to drag my mom’s Christmas decorations by mistake. Everything was there, just as I’d left it when I packed it all up months ago. And on the top of the third and final bin…

“Hey, Mom?” I asked on the way up the stairs. She appeared at the top in her regular outfit of jeans and a sweatshirt, an oven mitt on her hand. “Did you put this in my bin?”

“Georgette? Yes. I found her behind the love seat when I was doing some cleaning down there. I figured you’d want her.”

I held up the stuffed koala bear that fit just right in the palm of my hand. Her fur had worn off in places, and one eye had been carefully glued back on after being lost for an entire day. My grandpa had bought her for me while I was in the hospital after falling off the jungle gym. I could still remember waking up to find her tucked against my side, a new and unfamiliar toy I’d quickly grown to love more than anything else.

“I can’t believe I forgot her.” I pressed her to my heart.

“Now you can take her along,” Mom said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to.”

I took her home sitting on the seat beside me. When I got out of the car, I put her in the pocket of my coat, an old one I’d picked up from my parents’ house since I still hadn’t found my other one. Then I took one bin from my trunk and heaved it up the sidewalk to my front door.

Someone had left me a package. Well, a brown paper grocery bag. I set down the bin and fumbled for my keys while I nudged the bag with my toe. I’d forgotten to replace the bulb in the light fixture over my door, so the bag’s contents were shadowy and mysterious. I shoved open my door, set the bin inside on the rug so it wouldn’t get snow on my clean(ish) floor. Then I brought in the grocery bag.

It was my coat.

More than that, it was my clothing, folded neatly. Bra, panties, socks, T-shirt. My favorite jeans. Only my boots were missing. I searched the bag for a note and found nothing.

“Shit,” I breathed. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Someone had taken pity on me, but who? Where had I gone wandering, naked and dark, and what had I done? I found myself feeling my body all over, as though I’d be able to tell what misadventures I’d gotten up to now. I had a friend in college who would always put a tampon in before she went out, even if she didn’t have her period. She said that way, if it went missing, she’d know she’d been up to something even if she couldn’t remember. I’d never tried that trick, but my womb twinged, anyway, as I remembered what my mind had told me I was doing during that time.

The clothes smelled of cedar as I shook them out. A small piece of paper fell from inside the folds of my shirt. It fluttered to the floor, sawing and drifting on the current of air coming in through my still-open front door, which I closed before bending to pick up the paper. It was a receipt for dry cleaning, pretty tattered and yellowed, looking old.

There was a name on the receipt.

“Shit, shit, shit.” This I said aloud and closed my eyes tight, hoping to open them and discover I was imagining this. I opened them. “Shit!”

The name on the receipt was, fuck my life, Johnny’s. I groaned and crumpled it, then thought better of it and smoothed it into my palm. I put it in my pocket.

My cell phone rang. Jen. “Hey, girl.”

“Hey,” she said. “Listen, would you mind if I bagged on our date night? I feel like a major douche about it, but, well…I have a real date. Not that a date night with you isn’t real,” she added hastily.

I laughed. “Of course I don’t mind. Who’s the date with?”

“His name’s Jared,” she said. “Get this, he’s a funeral director.”

“Whoa. Well, at least he has a job, which is more than I can say for my last lame-ass boyfriend.”

She giggled. “Yeah. Anyway, we were supposed to go out on Friday night, but he’s on call at weird times and asked if I minded going out on Thursday instead.”

“How’d you meet this guy?” I shoved my clothes back in the grocery bag, glad to have them back but not ready to face what they meant. “I never heard you talk about him before.”

“I’m almost embarrassed to say it.”

“Girl, when are you almost embarrassed to say anything?” I laughed.

“I met him at a funeral. My grandma’s sister Hettie died a couple months ago. Jared took care of her.”

“He asked you out at your great-aunt’s funeral? Whoa.” I couldn’t carry the bin and talk on the phone at the same time, so I went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, Georgette in my other hand. I set her on the table.

“No. Not then. I made a connection with him on Connex. The funeral home has a fan page.”

“What?” This stopped me dead, no pun intended. “You’re kidding me.”

“Girl, I am not even. It’s actually not as bad as you’d think. It’s more like an information page, though it is sort of weird to become a fan of a funeral home. But we started talking that way, and then he asked me out.”

“Maybe I need to hang out more often on Connex.” I didn’t mean it. Connex was such a time suck, even for someone with my currently slow social calendar.

“He’s so cute, Emm. And really funny, too.”

“Good for you! Have fun on Thursday, and don’t worry. Really. I told you, the movie’s not that good.”

“Awww, any movie with Johnny in it’s got to be good,” she said, but without the conviction she used to have.

Jared must be really, really cute, I thought, but didn’t begrudge her.

“You sure you don’t mind? Sistahs before mistahs and all that?”

“Hell, no,” I told her. “At least one of us should be getting some action.”

“It’s just a date,” Jen said, but I heard excitement in her voice.

“Have fun,” I told her again. “I’ll expect a full report on Friday.”

“You got it.”

We hung up just as my kettle started whistling. I poured the hot water over some loose tea in a tea ball, then went out to bring in the rest of my bins while it steeped. On the street, a car passed me and pulled up in front of Johnny’s house. I busied myself with rearranging my trunk while I peeked to see who got out.

Johnny did, of course. So did the woman I’d seen him with at the coffee shop. He waited to help her over the ice, a solicitous hand on her elbow. Jealousy, irrational and useless, reared up inside me, and I slammed the trunk lid so hard the sound of metal-on-metal rang out clearly all the way down the street. They both turned. I pretended to be busy with my bin.

I didn’t own him. My pieced-together fantasies didn’t give me a single right to any feelings whatsoever about what Johnny did with his life or his time. We weren’t really lovers. Hell, we weren’t even friends.

Even so, I muttered a string of curses as I unpacked the stuff I’d brought from home and spread it around my house. A few Little Golden Books on a bookshelf and a framed drawing I’d done as a kid on the wall in the living room. I paused to look at it. It wasn’t half-bad, which was probably why my mom had framed it. I was more artistic than I thought.

I’d signed my initials in the lower right corner—E.M.M. for Emmaline Marie Moser—and I smiled the way I always did when I saw my name that way. I had clever parents.

I’d drawn a house, along with a man and a woman in front. The woman was a princess or a bride, or maybe both. It was hard to tell by the fluffy pink dress and veil, and the flowers in her hand might’ve suited either. She and the man next to her were holding hands, their smiles single-line curves stretching from ear to ear. He looked more like a prince than a bridegroom, since he wasn’t wearing a tux but a long black coat with a long, striped scarf.

I looked again, closer. Long black coat. Long striped scarf. My stomach flip-flopped. I reached for the picture, the glass dusty and spotted, the wooden frame loose at the corners.

That was my house. This one. Tall and narrow, three windows on one side of the front door, one on the other. Okay, so it could’ve been any house, but it looked like mine.

And then, I saw the TARDIS. I’d missed it the first time, the blue shape partially obscured by the out-of-perspective trees. Oh.

“Hello, Doctor.” I touched the figure again. Mystery revealed. I’d been a huge Doctor Who freak as a kid. No disrespect to any who came after him, but Tom Baker would always be my doctor.

The Doctor, not Johnny.

“Freak,” I said fondly to my eight-year-old self, and hung the picture up again.

There was still the matter of my clothes to figure out, and it ate away at me all day at work until I could do nothing but conjure up all the worse scenarios. At least whatever I’d done hadn’t been illegal. Or I hadn’t been caught. I hadn’t ended up on the evening news or, so far as I could tell, YouTube. Or YouPorn, thank God.

Though if any of that had happened, at least I’d
know
what I’d done.

There was no way around it. I had to talk to Johnny about it. He’d returned the clothes; it wasn’t like he was pretending it hadn’t happened. Whatever it was.

Fuck my life.

I didn’t go to his house with a plate of cookies this time. I had no idea if a peace offering would be appropriate, and I didn’t want to intrude any more than I’d apparently already done. I went to his gallery instead.

The Tin Angel on Front Street took up most of one of the grand old mansions that had been split up into offices. It wasn’t empty when I went in, which was something of a surprise for a Thursday night. I shouldn’t have assumed that just because I had no appreciation of art that nobody else would, either. Couples carrying glasses of wine and plates of cheese and grapes wandered the rooms and murmured over the prints hung on the walls and sculptures displayed on pedestals. Soft music played.

Great. I was crashing his party. What I at first thought was some sort of special reception turned out to be a regular Thursday night event, though, as I overheard one couple talking about how they’d been there the week before to pick up a housewarming gift for friends. This week, apparently, they were looking for a birthday present.

I took my time, wandering the unevenly sized rooms. The floors of stripped and stained wood gleamed, and even though none of the walls seemed quite plumb, the soft off-white paint and windows hung with gauzy netting made up for it. Fairy lights hung on potted trees and crisscrossed the rooms with higher ceilings.

“This place is gorgeous,” I mentioned to an older couple who looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. I was glad I’d come straight from work. At least I was wearing a skirt and heels instead of jeans and boots.

“Oh, it’s amazing what Johnny’s done with this place, isn’t it?” the woman said. “Just look at some of these pieces. Hard to believe you could find anything like this in Harrisburg, of all places. Who knew there was so much local talent?”

“Is that what he focuses on mostly?” I thought Jen had said something like that.

“Yes. And his own work, obviously. You’re familiar with Johnny’s work, of course.” The man with her had wandered off, maybe to refill his cheese plate. The woman waved her glass of wine in my direction.

“Of course.”

Truthfully, of all my internet stalking, the one part of Johnny’s life I’d paid little attention to had been his artwork. I knew a little of his history, but not much else.

“We’re so fortunate to have an artist of his caliber, and his support of the local arts community has been so amazing.” She was a little drunk. She leaned in to me. “And what a looker, huh?”

I drew back in distaste. “Yeah. Is he here, do you know?”

“Johnny’s always here on Thursdays. This is
his
place,” she said, like I was a fucking moron.

A foron I might very well be, but I wasn’t going to be a coward, too. I thanked her and kept moving, room by room, until I saw him. He was standing in the very back of the very last room, talking to a group of people I assumed were artists, based on their eclectic appearances.

He was smiling, even laughing, and, oh, how beautiful he was. The wanting was a burning in my gut, sudden and fierce, but I welcomed the pain of it as what I deserved. I hung back in the doorway for a moment, watching him interact with the group surrounding him, and more jealousy speared me. Not sexual, this time. If Johnny was flirting it was subtle enough to keep me from seeing it. But he looked as if he genuinely liked the people he was with, and I wanted to be one of them.

He looked up. Saw me. His smile didn’t fade, his laughter didn’t break. He didn’t wave me in, but he didn’t look as though he wanted me to leave, either. If anything, he looked like he’d been expecting me all along.

I passed the time looking over the art in this room while his admirers all paid their respects and left one by one, until eventually we were the only two in the room. I felt him behind me before I turned, and I stayed staring at the piece in front of me for some long, silent moments while I tried to get up the courage to speak.

Johnny didn’t wait. “You like that one?”

I glanced from the corner of my eye but didn’t have the guts to face him. “It’s nice.”

“Nice? To hell with nice. Art isn’t nice. Art’s supposed to move you.”

I looked at him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know a lot about art.”

Johnny laughed, not unkindly. “What’s to know? You think you need a fancy degree or, what, a beret, to get art? Nah, you don’t need any of that. You just have to feel it.”