Work Text:
Maddie isn’t an early riser, but she’s for sure an earlier riser than Pete. Even though she’s the contractor with no real work hours besides the ones she’s imposed on herself, and Pete’s the small business owner with, nominally, strict opening hours. And so, the mornings that they wake up facing each other, smiling and laughing softly in the morning light, and disembark from bed together, are few. Most mornings of the week, Pete wakes up and she’s already gone.
He encounters the first post-it on the bathroom mirror. This one has been there for two months. “REMEMBER TO FLOSS. (ALSO BRUSH YOUR TEETH FOR 120 SECONDS.)” in Maddie’s chickenscratch handwriting, the pencil smudged and faded against the pale pink paper. It’s a reminder for both of them. They’re working on being real adults together. It’s been on the mirror for so long that Maddie jokes that she’d notice it more if they finally ripped it off the mirror, but Pete likes looking at it in the morning and smiling and dutifully counting to a hundred and twenty. Helps him pull himself awake.
Pete passes “maddie meds midnight patches tues fri” on the closet door as he absently does up the buttons on his loudly patterned shirt, and startles at “PETE CALL ENDO” on the back of the bedroom door because fuck, he really does need to schedule his next blood draw. He stops to pull up the website for the endocrinologist in Firefox so that the next time he opens the app he’ll see it and remember. “call landlord about painting” and “animal shelter????”, both in his own script, are stacked near on top of each other above the coffee machine. Maddie has helpfully left some out for him, even though it’s gone cold. He sticks it in the microwave, tearing off yesterday’s “call sofia” that had been covering the start button because he had called Sofia yesterday.
Listen, it works. He forgets things. Maddie also forgets things. It had started as Pete sitting up straight at one in the morning on the Tuesday-Wednesday border every couple weeks and asking, “did you switch your patches?”, but eventually they’d decided that this worked a little better.
Besides, somebody’s gotta keep Staples in business.
They’d made sandwiches last night. He grabs the deep teal stack of sticky notes to add “out of ham” onto the cold cuts drawer before shoving the sandwich in his bag. Pete picks up his keys from where they always land, on the table next to the door with three arrows stuck on the wall and a fourth note reading “KEYS GO HERE”, before turning to open the door and seeing a new note left for him.
“LOVE YOU,” it says.
Pete smiles. He takes a quick picture, texts it to Maddie with a heart emoji, and heads out to work.
“Fuuuuuuck,” Pete sighs as he opens the shoebox.
“Yeah?” calls Maddie from across the room, where she’s only half-paying attention to picking up the Magic cards that had exploded onto the floor. They’ve been living here for a month and a half and still aren’t fully done unpacking–but they’re on the last couple of boxes now.
“It’s, like.” Pete’s scowl is audible even without Maddie having to see it. “Pictures. Of me. From when I was a kid and stuff.”
Maddie stills. “Oh. Oh .”
Baby pictures are weird. Maddie dated someone once who wasn’t shy at all about her boy-self. She’d showed Maddie pictures of herself in suits, her high school graduation, her preschool days. It hadn’t been Maddie’s favorite thing to look at. Pete has only seen a little of what Maddie looked like pre-E. She’d showed him on her anniversary of starting HRT. It was sort of a nice feeling. He’d been real sweet about it, and now if he ever visits Maddie’s parents he won’t be completely taken off guard by pictures of pre-E Maddie in hanbok.
Cautiously, she walks around the rest of the spilled cards and places a hand on Pete’s shoulder. She crouches down next to him, keeping her eyes up. “Wanna throw them out?” she asks. “Burn them?”
Pete shakes his head. “I kept them for a reason,” he says thickly. “They just startled me.”
Mm. Maddie gets that. “Can I look?”
His shoulders finally start to relax. “If you want.”
“Pete,” Maddie pushes. “I’m asking you .”
“Fine.”
He passes the box to Maddie. She balances it carefully on her knees while keeping her other hand on Pete’s god-awful loudly-printed button-down.
The pictures on top are baby-Pete. He’s got a chubby little face and in almost every picture he’s being passed around to some cousin or some other aunt. His eyes are bright, and they get just a little dimmer as Maddie goes through the stack, until she gets to high school Pete, with his hair in two braids, wearing a long, flowy skirt under a sweatshirt. “You were pretty,” she observes, trying to keep her voice mild.
“I know.” Pete sighs it, like he’s been told this a thousand times before. “If I’d been less weird I’d’ve been swarming in boyfriends.”
“I like you better now, though,” Maddie adds. She sets the box down and turns to meet Pete’s eyes. Dim now, but bright, usually. “I like you handsome.”
That gets a laugh out of him. Maddie takes this as her cue to give him a kiss, and then goes back to cleaning up her cards.
He comes home and the walls are all different colors, like they’ve been quilted. “Jeez, Maddie, did you rob a Home Depot?” he asks, running his fingers across the jewel-toned purples lining the doorway.
“They’re free,” Maddie corrects him. She stares intently at a patch next to the window. “What d’you think of this green?”
She taps it. Apple Sage , reads the tiny print in the bottom right corner. “No,” says Pete. “The wall’s already green. I thought we didn’t want green.”
Maddie says, “hm,” and tears the swatch off the wall. Then, “I just wanted to be sure.”
“Mid,” Pete says, using a nickname used mostly by Maddie’s online friends. “Girlfriend. Babe. This is a lot of swatches.”
She shrugs, and then her attention turns suddenly to the wall closest to the oven. “Shit! We vetoed orange.” Maddie’s hair bounces behind her, that’s how quickly she’s moving as she speedwalks over and tears off swatch after swatch.
Pete sighs. “Maddie!”
When Maddie turns she looks like a kid caught sneaking candy, a sheepish smile spreading across her face. “Sorry. Just. I know that it’s not often that complexes let residents paint the walls. I know it’s contingent on us picking something good.”
Pete bites back a smile of his own. “Babe,” he says, and walks up to her, and brushes a strand of her multicolored hair out of her face, eclipsed in this moment by the chaos of the walls. “Honestly, I’m just glad we’re getting rid of this godawful peach color. And I think you’ll look all pretty wearing old clothes covered in paint. I’m excited for that.”
Her eyes dance around to what of the original color pokes through. “It really is terrible,” she agrees. “You think I’ll be pretty?”
He kisses her on the lips. “I think you’re always pretty,” he tells her, when he pulls away.
“We did it.” Pete nearly giggles as he settles himself under the sheets next to Maddie.
They’ve slept in the same bed before. Plenty of times. Trying too hard to be quiet lest Maddie’s roommates hear and failing and staying up laughing all night; collapsing in Pete’s twin bed after dates and trying so hard to fit. But this feels… permanent. This bed, the first piece of furniture that they assembled in the apartment and the only one functional save the couch donated by Kingston, is not just Pete’s bed and not just Maddie’s bed but their bed. Their sheets their bedroom. Their apartment.
Maddie kisses his cheek. “We did do it.”
She can’t keep her eyes off him as they get ready for bed. It’s like the first night they spent together. She watches Pete with a slight smile as he brushes his teeth and she switches her patches and downs her progesterone. He plugs in his phone and takes his own meds and absently tries to shape his pillow into something satisfactory and she’s looking at him like they’ve been dating for four months again. By the time he rejoins Maddie in bed, she’s grinning. “Hey, handsome.”
He leans in to kiss her on her exposed collarbone. “Hey, beautiful.”
“Can you believe we thought we were gonna have sex the first night after moving?” she whispers to him conspiratorially.
He nods. Laughs. Drops back onto the pillow dramatically. “I know. I know . I’m so tired, Maddie.”
She ties her hair back into a ponytail. “Wanna just go to sleep?”
Pete sighs heavily. “Yeah. We can have sex tomorrow night.”
“Alright.” She smiles, and turns off her desk light. “Goodnight, handsome.”
He turns off his own light. “Goodnight, beautiful.”
As she settles down to sleep, Maddie’s still smiling, because this is the first night of the rest of their lives. Every night after will be just like this.
Listen. Pete loves Marie, the old lady next door, just as much as anyone else in the building. He just wishes her hamster wheel wasn’t directly next to his and Maddie’s bed, that’s all.
“Fucking hamster,” he mutters. It’s three in the morning. And he’s been up all night listening to the squeaking sounds of the hamster wheel.
“Ughh,” Maddie grumbles next to him. “The one morning I actually have to get up early for a client meeting. Why doesn’t she just kill me instead, Pete.”
“Marie?” he asks. “Or Fluffernutter?”
Maddie sighs. “Both.”
They lie in silence for a little while longer, grimacing. At one point, Maddie comically puts her head under her pillow, pulling the sides down to block the noise. She gives up before too long. Pete imagines it isn’t very comfortable.
Eventually, he gets out of bed and hits the wall, right where it sounds like the hamster wheel is in Marie’s apartment. The noise stops for a moment, and Pete hears himself and Maddie both breathe a little sigh of relief. He gets back into bed and gets comfortable again…
before the noise starts, with renewed vigor, almost like the hamster is exacting revenge.
“God FUCKING dammit,” Maddie exclaims, full-voiced. Pete wholeheartedly agrees.
Inside, Maddie burns.
“Come on,” Pete pleads with her. “Tell me what happened. Hey, beautiful. Maddie. Hey.”
She doesn’t want to tell him. People say this kind of shit to her all the time. It comes with being visibly trans–and, these days, visibly Asian too. Sometimes people yell at you in the public bathroom. Sometimes people yell at you on the train. It’s whatever. Pete getting righteously mad about it was comforting in the early days of their relationship, but it does nothing for her now.
So instead on days like these she comes home and tosses all her shit in the corner and heads straight to bed to glare at the plain grey sheets.
“I said don’t worry about it.”
Pete climbs into the bed next to her, both of them close enough together that they’re sharing her side of the bed. When he’s this close to her, Maddie can’t help but to lean into his touch, resting her head on his shoulder even though he’s shorter than she is. It does help, a little. That and hearing him call her beautiful the way he always does.
He sits there with her, for a minute, but she can feel his leg bouncing with pent-up energy. He’s never been good at the being quiet part. “Come on,” he says, after a little while. “Get up.” He pushes her gently.
“What the fuck are you doing,” Maddie mumbles despite herself as Pete begins yanking all the blankets off the bed.
“Helping,” he responds cryptically, and hands her an armful of pillows. Baffled, she follows Pete into the living room, where he adds the couch pillows to his precarious stack of blankets and gestures for Maddie to pick up the quilt that Iga had given them as a housewarming gift. Then, he leads her out to the balcony.
“O…kay…” Maddie says, as Pete dumps the blankets onto the balcony and begins to arrange them.
Pete raises his eyebrows at her. “We’re going to get cozy and watch the sunset. That a problem?”
“No,” she laughs. This is helping, in a weird way.
It hasn’t rained in a couple of days, and it’s not supposed to tonight either–love a New York autumn–so Maddie doesn’t worry about the blankets or themselves getting wet as Pete guides her outside and they settle into the blankets together. He puts an arm around her.
“I’ve got you, beautiful,” Pete tells her, and Maddie burns a little less.
“Umm, let me see.” Pete rifles through the drawers again. “We have pesto?” He checks the expiration date. “Never mind, nope, we don’t have pesto. God, I thought I was over this part of my life.”
“It's never over,” Maddie quips, from where she's leaning on the kitchen island behind him. It's small, not really big enough to be useful for anything besides leaning against and occasionally dropping their phones there. “We never outgrow having nothing in the fridge.”
“And I don't want to go shopping,” Pete sighs. “Actually, could we even? Have you been paid yet?”
Maddie checks her phone. “Mmm,” she hums, “looks like it hasn't hit yet. It's fine. We gotta have something .”
“Maddie I love you but I’m not eating straight pineapple for dinner.”
“We have pineapple?” Maddie leans into the fridge around him and grabs the offending container. “Mine now.”
“Yours anyway,” Pete mutters. He doesn't like it, they buy it for her. “Mid, we don't even have bread .”
“Not my problem,” Maddie calls, as she flounces into the bedroom with her plastic container. Pete sighs and starts to give the fridge another once-over.
There are two reasons why Maddie is the one who brings their laundry down the the complex laundromat, and both of those reasons are because she remembers to check the pockets.
Pete, bless him, leaves receipts and gum wrappers and jewelry and, on one memorable occasion, a dice set, in his pockets on a regular basis. It’s like he’s so enamored with the concept of men’s pants and their deep pockets (despite having been wearing men’s pants for years before Maddie knew him) that he doesn’t want to take anything out. If it weren’t for Maddie they would have started at least three fires in the dryer and lost goodness knows how many little trinkets to the wash.
Also, when she checks the pockets, it’s good chance she’ll find enough change to run the washer AND the dryer without having to open a wallet or ask someone for change.
“Come on,” she mutters, this close to simply shaking out Pete’s nice slacks upside down in pursuit of a quarter. “Come on, Peter Conlan, I know you’ve got more change in here.” Maddie eyes the stack of coins already stacked on top of the washing machine. Not quite enough to finance the washer and dryer both.
But no. These pockets are empty. Maddie sighs. Slumps against the machine for a moment. Resigns herself to running back upstairs to hunt around the apartment for some spare change (usually, she pockets what she finds lying around in preparation for this exact moment, but she always misses some). She’s just about to get up when the door to the laundry room bursts open.
“I forgot to put these in the laundry,” Pete says, brandishing a pair of jeans at her, breath heaving like he ran here. Serendipity. Without a second thought Maddie grabs them and sticks her hand in one pocket, then another. White Rabbit wrapper, two receipts, a hair tie for some reason, and–aha! Fifty cents.
She kisses him full on the mouth. She doesn’t think he knows why. She doesn’t care.
“But you’re taller,” he pleads to Maddie.
Maddie pouts back at him, equally shameless. “But you’re the man.”
And as much as, after years and years, it makes him feel good to hear Maddie call him a man, Pete’s decided that he’s not budging on this. “Maddie please ?”
“No! I’m very busy on the couch here trying to get work done and I can’t because the living room light is out.”
“And I,” Pete tries, “am very busy scrolling through twitter. Would you make me, your boyfriend, get up to change the bulb when I have to drag a chair over to the middle of the room?”
“Yes,” Maddie says, deadpan. “So I guess we’re both going to sit here in the dark, huh.”
And it's good. It's good. It's good.