Re: Billy/Tandy: the neighborhood
He was nesting. Billy got that on, like, a logical level. Not the kind of nesting that new parents did when they had a baby on the way, obviously, given a distinct lack of both desire and uterus alike. But this wasn’t living in a trailer in Hookerville with a tiny little loft area to sleep and a questionable futon where he slept with the johns (not in his bed, never in his bed, even when it was barely more than a mattress pad at the top of a ladder), or in the attic of the Carriage House. And hey, sidebar, but why hadn’t Billy ever come up with a decent attic-based pun when he lived there, above Atticus? Instead he’d just made V. C. Andrews references and left it at that. Talk about your missed opportunity.
This wasn’t living in a refurbished hippie bus out in the woods, either. Even when that trailer had felt more his own than the one in Hookerville, even when he’d started to learn so much more about his magic than ever before and felt more comfortable than he had since leaving Manhattan, it wasn’t a home. It wasn’t four walls and a floor and a ceiling that were his, and acres of empty woods weren’t a backyard with a deck and a fence and a garden with plants he had no idea how to maintain beyond occasionally spraying them with the hose’s mist setting. So it wasn’t just a home again, it was elements that he hadn’t even experienced before - if backyards existed on the Upper East Side, they were stone terraces, with maybe enough room for patio furniture in teak or something equally expensive. So, cue the nesting.
He had a mouthful of cheese and pepperoni and two kinds of beef when Tandy walked in, so he smiled with closed lips, but one cheek dimpled and the corners of his eyes crinkled with the authenticity of his happiness to see the guy. He set the slice back down in the open box off to the side of the rest of the pie, and grabbed for the glass of water with half-melted ice floating in it. He made a broad, sweeping gesture of his hand at the remaining pizza and unopened box while he worked to swallow without choking, chugging down half the glass with the ice clacking faintly against his teeth and melting unnaturally fast against the heat of his mouth.
“Please, help me eat some of this. I will finish it and that won’t be pretty for anyone involved. And welcome,” he said, looking around the open plan of the ground floor and trying to imagine what it looked like through Tandy’s eyes. “If you want to drop your stuff in your room first, it’s up the stairs and on the right.”