Chapter 3 Seventeen Rules

Seventeen Rules

POV: Lily

He started talking the second I came back in from the hallway with the first box.

"Before you say anything—"

"I'm going to say everything," I told him, and dropped the box on the floor hard enough that Murphy jumped up from where he'd been sleeping and looked at both of us.

That was how it started.

For the next hour we went back and forth across that living room like the space between us was a line neither one of us was going to cross. He had his arms folded and I had mine folded and Murphy kept walking between our feet like he was trying to physically connect two things that were not interested in being connected.

Asher could not leave because he had given up his previous place for this one and had not kept a single backup option, which was exactly the kind of thing that happened when someone moved through life treating everything like it would just work out. He had a paramedic program starting Thursday. Mandatory hours. Mandatory early shifts. No room to be flexible, no money for a hotel, nowhere to call.

And I had already paid the deposit on an apartment I had never visited because I trusted a landlord over the phone on the worst morning of my week. My boxes were in the hallway. My mom was two towns over. The semester started in three days.

So neither of us was going anywhere and we both knew it by the forty-minute mark, but we kept arguing anyway because stopping felt like giving up something.

"You take the bedroom," he said. "I stay on the couch. We split everything else."

"That's not a plan. That's just geography."

"What do you want then?"

"I want rules. Actual rules. Not a handshake and a maybe."

He looked at me for a second. "Alright. Rules."

I grabbed my laptop.

He sat back down on the couch and watched me type like he had never seen someone approach a problem this way and wasn't sure if he should be impressed or concerned. Murphy sat next to him and watched me too, the both of them with their heads at the same angle.

I went through the bathroom first. Morning slots, evening slots, days divided between us so there was never a question about who was waiting on who. Then the kitchen. I built a schedule around his paramedic hours and my class blocks so our mornings wouldn't land on top of each other. Noise rules came next because of the music that had been going through the door when I arrived, and those got their own section with specific times because vague rules are just arguments waiting to happen. Guest policy. Cleaning rotation, weekly, with each area assigned so nothing got left to chance or goodwill. Trash days. Groceries, which we would handle separately since sharing food with someone you didn't know was a different level of trust than sharing a bathroom.

Then Murphy.

I gave him his own section. Leash by the door. Off the furniture except the couch, since that ship had clearly already sailed. No food near my boxes or my desk. Vet records to be provided within two weeks so I knew what I was living with.

By the time I stopped I had seventeen rules across two printed pages, color-coded by category. Kitchen rules in blue. Bathroom in green. Shared spaces in red. Murphy in orange.

I put the pages on the coffee table in front of him.

He picked them up. Read them like he was actually reading them, not just scanning for the parts that applied to him. Flipped to the second page. His expression didn't change much but at the very bottom of page two he stopped for a second and I saw his jaw move.

"Murphy gets his own color," he said.

"Murphy is a category."

He reached over to the side table and came back with a pen. Already had one there, which surprised me more than it should have. Clicked it once against his knee, signed the bottom of page two, and handed both pages back across the table without any commentary.

Then he looked up at me.

And there it was. That expression from earlier, the one that wasn't angry and wasn't agreeable either. Sitting right at the edge of a smile but not quite there. Like he had already decided something about this whole situation and found it privately entertaining in a way he was choosing not to share.

My back teeth pressed together.

I took the pages.

Murphy stood up from beside him, walked over to me with zero hesitation, and put his nose directly against my hand. Warm. Insistent. Just sitting there breathing against my fingers like we had already established something I hadn't agreed to.

"He likes you," Asher said.

"He just met me."

"Murphy doesn't really care about that part."

I pulled my hand back and picked up the signed rules and went to finish bringing my boxes in.

Asher helped without being asked. Picked up the two heaviest ones from the hallway and carried them to the bedroom door and set them down without making it into anything. I didn't say anything about it. We weren't there yet.

By eight my room was done. Bed made tight. Desk set up with everything in its spot. Books in order by subject and then by author within each subject. My planner open to Thursday's page with the class schedule already written in. I stood in the doorway and looked at it and the worst of the tension that had been sitting behind my eyes all day finally started to back off.

I was in bed by ten.

At midnight I was still on my back with my eyes open.

I got up.

The counter near the stove had something dried onto it, a brown ring from something that had boiled over at some point before I arrived. I had seen it when I first came in and put it away in my head as something to deal with later, and now it was midnight and this was later.

Cleaning spray from under the sink. Counter first. Then around the sink basin. Then the front of the microwave because whatever had exploded in there had been left for long enough that it was starting to commit.

The living room was dark. One stripe of yellow light from the street coming through the gap in the curtain. Asher on the couch with one arm bent behind his head, Murphy a dark shape at his feet, both of them still.

I kept going. Wiped the counter a second time because I had lost focus on the first pass.

When I looked up he was awake.

Eyes open. Looking straight at me. Not at his phone, not at the ceiling. At me. And his face was doing something completely different from the smirk he had given me over those signed rules. There was no amusement in it. No impatience. It was quieter than either of those things and it sat in a place I didn't have a quick word for, somewhere close to the way someone looks when they're trying to figure out if you're okay without asking out loud.

I turned back to the counter.

Finished the section I was on, rinsed the cloth, hung it over the edge of the sink.

He still hadn't said a word when I walked back to my room and closed the door.