Current music:	The Taylor Hanson Band - Hey (From Underneath Acoustic)
Entry tags:	happiness is

Chapter Thirty-Seven - Michael's

Plaything

Title: Michael's (37/??)
Author: tumbling_down
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2100
Genre: Hancest



Zac

We got settled on the couch with a blanket, me lying behind him with my arms wrapped around his stomach, and got Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from OnDemand. We'd already seen it once, in the theater when it came out, and I fully intended on buying it at some point, but I was really in the mood to watch it and not so much to go to the store and get the DVD. Oddly enough, Taylor didn't argue at all even though he hadn't really liked it when we'd gone to see it. I think he knew that by letting me pick the movie, I'd spend the whole time playing with his hair, which mostly made him turn into a puddle so I liked to do it anyway.

Halfway through the movie, he twisted around on the couch until he was mostly lying on top of me, gripping my waist tightly. One of his legs was beneath mine and the other on top and he pushed his head up into my neck. It wasn't entirely comfortable and I had to strain in order to see the television, but it didn't matter. I just kept running my hand through his hair and listening to the contented noises that he made in his throat every once in a while. Honestly, nothing compared to knowing that he was happy and felt good and that I was the one that made him happy.

I thought Taylor was asleep when the movie ended, so I left him and flipped through the channels until I found something that wasn't terrible on a Friday afternoon. After a few minutes he said, "Do you mind if I knit?" Then he laughed because he'd startled me. "I have some things I want to finish."

"Do you mind if I work on that left over FUTY that we made in the studio last month?" I asked, flattening down his hair since I'd messed it up.

"I thought you weren't in the mood to work," he said, slowly untangling himself from me. "Because if you're in the mood to work, I would like to go to the studio."

"You know that little area in the basement of the house?" I asked him, watching as he stood up and stretched and nodded. "Wouldn't it be nice to turn that into a little recording area? Then we wouldn't have to always go out to Hectorville every time we wanted to record just a sample of something."

I slid off the couch, wincing a little because my neck was stiff and my back hurt. "So..?" He asked, bouncing a little on his feet.

"What are you so excited about?" I laughed, folding the blanket up and putting it onto the back of the couch.

"Can we please go shopping?" He asked me.

"...Do you want to go shopping or go to the studio?" I asked, slightly confused because there was no way we were doing both.

"I have to pick one?" he asked and I nodded even though I wondered when I agreed to doing either thing. "I guess I'd rather go shopping. I ran out of that sparkly blue yarn that I was using to make Tabitha's sweater. And we need to pick out what colors we want the quilt in our living room to be."

"We don't even know when we get to move in," I reminded him. "We've got to wait for them to see how long it'll take to rip the carpet up."

He sighed and headed into the bedroom and I followed, watching him dig through the dresser for clothes. "I know. I wish we could just. Like, we own the house already, right? I mean..."

I laughed and sat down on the bed, waiting as he changed into a pair of jeans that he'd gotten when we went shopping the other day. "Tay, our lease isn't up until September here. I told Joan that we didn't need to start moving in until August twentieth."

He groaned and pulled a shirt over his head. "I just want to be there and start the whole adoption process and-"

"I know," I said, smoothing his shirt out because he'd messed it up in his frustration. "It's not even a month away before we'll get to start packing up and deciding where to put stuff, okay? Joan said the thought that we'd be able to start carpeting by the tenth, or move in then, whatever. So don't get too panicked."

"I want to move in on the tenth," he informed me, putting his wallet and things he kept in his pockets into his pants.

"But we've got to carpet, Tay, and paint and I think I want to redo that bathroom in the entry way because it's too dark," I said, helping him pull his hair into a pony tail because he was having issues with it. When he gets frustrated about anything - the house in this case - everything he does gets messed up because he can't concentrate.

"Fine," he huffed. "But can we at least stop at Home Depot and pick out some paint swatches? I mean, we can go over to the house when we want to, right?"

"Yeah...we have a key."

"So we could theoretically start painting."

"Theoretically..."

"Maybe we should keep the wood floors," he said, finally calming down a little and slinging his bag over his shoulders. "And get area rugs. I like area rugs. Or we could look at that FLOR catalogue we got in the mail the other day. That looked cool...lots of colors and stuff. And with kids, it'd be nice to have pieces that you can pull up instead of, like, having to replace or clean the whole thing. And then we-"

"Home Depot it is," I laughed. "And we can look at the catalogs when we get back."

"Also Michael's for yarn," he reminded me. "And maybe some new picture frames. I think they have a sale on those really big wood ones that hold, like, fifty pictures on sale."

"I thought you said those were tacky?"

"The plastic ones are," he said. "But the wood ones are nice...the matting is nice and the frames look good. I'd like to make one of pictures of us."

As much as I may have picked on him for all of the craft things that he did with his time, I loved how dedicated he was to making mementos of our life together. I wasn't that dedicated to tasks like that, other than putting DVDs together, and it was nice that we could fill our home with things that he put together. It always reminded me how much he really did love me and how happy he was that we were together.

* * * * * * * * * *

We went to Home Depot first to pick out color swatches. Taylor decided that none of the rooms in our new home were allowed to be white or any color near white. "I want it to be warm and inviting," he told me, pulling swatches of dark blues and oranges and reds from the displays. "It's big enough so it's not like we need white to make the rooms look bigger."

"What about wallpaper?" I asked. "Or borders or something?"

He pouted at me and held up a very strange looking paint roller. "I want to watch you get covered in paint," he informed me.

"...Oh."

"And we can do all sorts of neat effects to the wall," he said, waving his roller at me. "Ethan and Jake did their condo last year, remember?"

"Sure," I said, nodding. We'd only been there once, not long after they had moved in, and I honestly hadn't paid much attention to the paint on the walls. I vaguely remembered liking how the living room was done all together, in dark reds and purples, but I couldn't remember what the paint had looked like.

Taylor sighed and rolled his eyes, hitting me with the paint roller lightly. "You don't remember at all."

"No, not really," I admitted. "I guess I don't pay much attention to paint?"

"Well." He put the paint roller back and returned to pulling ridiculous amounts of paint swatches from the displays. "They did the living room with a sponge or something, I think? Like, they painted it red and then sponged over it with that wine color, the same one as their couch? It looked amazing."

"Maybe they could help us," I suggested. "We're not exactly interior designers."

"I'm sure they'd like that," he said. "Ethan was complaining the other day that the four of us never do anything together."

"Well. I'm up to hanging out with them whenever. I like this," I said, handing him a yellow color. "For the kitchen."

"Really? Yellow?"

I shrugged. "Kitchens are supposed to be bright, not warm. Are we really going to paint the whole house?"

"The whole house is egg shell, Zac," he said. "That's so boring."

"Right. We're going to be buying a lot of stuff, aren't we?" I asked. "I can just tell. We're going to have to buy a whole new living room set."

"Our living room set consists of a couch and an entertainment center, Zac," he told me. "That's not exactly a set."

"I like our couch," I muttered. "It's comfortable and it was the first thing we bought for the apartment."

"Was it?" he asked, turning to look at me with his eyebrows furrowed. "I thought that the bed was the first thing we bought for the apartment."

I shook my head and laughed. "No, Mom and Dad got us the bed. The first thing we bought was the couch."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Well, we can always put it up in that extra living room upstairs, or in the den, or downstairs...I mean, it's not like we have to get rid of it, Zac. I just would like to get a new set for the living room."

"Okay."

"Something leather."

* * * * * * * * * *

"If I were going to - totally hypothetical - knit you a hat, what color yarn would you want me to use?" he asked me, shoving four bundles of yarn into my face. I had been looking at some video editing software that had just come out while Taylor went nuts over the yarn. Glancing at the cart, I saw that he already had a good twenty different colors and kinds.

"I don't need a hat," I told him.

"I said it was hypothetical," he said. "Pick one."

I sighed but felt each one, finally deciding on the black shrink knit because it was the softest and the only one that didn't sparkle. "I knew you'd pick that," he said with a sigh. "That's so boring."

"I don't like sparkles."

"You like me in sparkles," he said and I raised my eyebrows quizzically at him because I honestly couldn't remember ever telling him that I liked him in sparkles. I didn't dislike him in sparkles. It just wasn't something I put too much thought into. "Whatever. Black it is."

He stood by me for a few minutes, watching me while I scanned over the package, before he said, "Just get it."

"I don't know if I want it, though," I told him. "I think it might do the same thing that what I'm using right now does."

"I want you to come look at picture frames."

"I'm sure whatever you pick out I'll like, Tay," I laughed, turning to face him. I almost wished I hadn't because standing just four feet from him were Jodi and Nancy. He for sure recognized my face because he rolled his eyes and slouched almost immediately with a sigh. "Alright," I said, tossing the box into my cart. "Lead the way."

The girls were looking at something, trying to pretend that they weren't watching us, but it was kind of obvious that they were. I wasn't really in the mood to talk to them at all, so we totally avoided them as we left the aisle and headed towards the framing and matting section of the store. They blatantly followed us that way and I hated it because we were buying yarn and a frame and we must have looked so obviously like a couple.

"This is so annoying," Taylor muttered to me through gritted teeth.

"I know."

"I hope they weren't at the hardware store, too," he said. "Because if they heard us we were so not being inconspicuous."

"Let's just pick out a frame and head home, yeah?"

"Mmhmm."

We stopped in front of the frames that he had been talking about earlier - they were 50% off - and spent a few minutes deciding between the choices. We finally chose a wood one stained dark enough that it would probably match our bedroom set. "We'll have to go to Walgreens at some point and get pictures," he said. "Because all the ones I printed out last week I cut up for my books."

"Maybe after they leave Tulsa," I suggested. "With how they are, seems like they'd try to convince the photo person to make them extra prints or something."

"That could be exciting," he laughed. "Let's make sure they're all of us making out," he whispered.

"You're crazy," I informed him, taking over cart duty while he walked next to me towards the registers.

"Mmhmm. Is that where I'm supposed to be totally cheesy and cliche and say 'crazy for you' or something?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Mmkay. I'm only crazy for you, Zac."

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