I sidle up to her in the doorway of my bedroom, leaning against the frame and leaving only a few inches between us. “I hear you talking, but I don't see your point.” I look down at her loose black tank top and black leggings, running a finger down her shoulder and into her cleavage. She giggles, embarrassed, and smacks my hand away.
“I am busy unpacking!” she protests. She can't help but grin as she says it though. “Look, I'll make you a deal. We will unpack a whole room and then after we’re done with that, we will take a break together. Does that sound okay?"
I pull a face. “You're no fun. Didn’t I offer to have people sent here from the royal palace to unpack your things for you?”
She shoots me a look. “This is what normal couples do. They move in together and they are messy and they don't have servants to attend to their every need. People all over the world do this exact same thing. Whether they're in a real relationship or not.”
I groan and roll my eyes. “Ja, whatever. Just promise me that when we finally get naked, you will let me do that thing I brought up last night.”
She glances at me, wide-eyed. “Are you talking about… anal?”
I wink at her. “I may be. Have I ever done anything to you that you didn't like?”
She gives her head a tiny shake. “No.”
“Then start unpacking somewhere. Pick a room.” I frown. “A small room. Let's get this show on the road.”
She looks around with a sigh. Pursing her lips, she heads toward the second bedroom. “I might as well start in the closet. I can't think of the last time that I even looked in your spare bedroom…”
She pads down my hallway and disappears inside the second bedroom. I follow her with a frown. It's not that I don't trust her, per se. It's just that there are several boxes tucked away in the walk in closet that are full of my personal things.
Childhood mementos, long distance use sportswear items, and some heavy jackets that have been long forgotten about. Blowing out a breath, I turn and head out of my second bedroom and start grabbing the heavier boxes. Pippa may be mostly disorganized, but she is on top of her packing and moving game. Every box has a tag with specific components that can be found within the boxes contents. Dress shirts, summer. Or books, not for rereading.
I sort through the boxes, starting with the heaviest ones, and figure that I should bring her the clothes into the closet she’ll be using first. It turns out that Pippa has a million different boxes of clothes, at least forty percent of what she owns.
So for a little while, it's just a lot of moving boxes into the spare bedroom. I stack them all neatly by the wall and figure that she will just find the ones that she needs. After I move things for a while though, I get curious about what Pippa is up to.
I stick my head into the walk in closet, finding Pippa up on her knees, sifting through a box of my stuff. A knot forms in my stomach. She wasn't supposed to be looking at any of my old stuff. She's just supposed to be making room for hers.
But when she turns her head and looks at me with the biggest, brightest grin, the knot loosens a little.
She raises a picture of all of the Løve siblings, taken when I was probably four years old. We are wearing matching naval uniforms and all looking bored. “I didn't mean to find this,” she swears. “But look at how serious you were as a child. Look at your face!”
I sigh. “Ja, I like the fact that we are all wearing matching outfits. Somebody thought that was a good idea, apparently.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I think it's kind of cute actually.” She takes the picture back from me, sticking it back in the box full of mementos. Just underneath it is a plastic binder that I vaguely recognize. I step in the closet and reach down, pulling the binder loose.
My lips curl up. “Ah. So, I remember this well. My English tutor as a kid was a failed poet. So we all had to learn about poetry.” I laugh a little, flipping through the pages. “Here's the very cutesy poem that I did about a ladybug.”