The surprise in the suitcase

The car door slams outside and I'm already at the front hall, wiping my hands on a dish towel like I haven't been counting hours. Three days of takeout containers and a very quiet house, and now Tarah is coming up the walk with her suitcase rolling behind her and a smile I can only describe as conspiratorial.

"I brought you a special surprise," she says, dropping her bag just inside the door. She doesn't kiss me hello the way she usually does — she takes my face in both hands and studies me, thumbs brushing my cheekbones, like she's checking a recipe against the finished dish. There's something different about how she fills the hallway. Taller, somehow. More certain of the space she takes up. A warmth comes off her that I can feel through my shirt.

"You're staring," she teases, and I am, but not where she thinks. My body has gone strange in the last ten seconds — a low, rolling heat in my belly, a softness in my hips that has no business being there, an ache I don't have words for. Whatever her surprise is, apparently my body got the memo first.

"Go sit down, honey," she says, and the word honey lands on me like a hand on the back of my neck, gentle and utterly unarguable. "I want to show you what they gave me at the conference. And then I have some things I want to ask of you."