Homecoming | Preston & Cat
General notation [I never do this, so this is obviously important]: This song is the heavy inspiration for my writing this para and I totally suggest it's yours too. Actually, it's an order. Go listen. Now.
To be completely, utterly honest, he had been lonely the past few days. It was never easy to admit he had been alone, lost without her, but he could manage it.
If she tied him down and forced it out, anyway.
They had come to this point a few times before, the all-important homecoming. Preston rarely left Chicago, but Cat was a traveller, criss-crossing the globe and leaving him behind. It would make anyone insecure, but him in particular, nudged on by Jay's abuse [he just couldn't let it go] and then Garrett's total asshattery.
There was the close [St Louis], and the far [London, for six excruciating days] but Preston and Cat always ended up in the same place when she came home, curled up on the battered loveseat he had insisted not come from IKEA. He would stroke her hair and breathe in her detergent [which never managed to infiltrate his clothes, for some reason] and just look at the girl he was so damn dependent on while she told him about the places she had been, the people she had met and where she would take him, "next time".
God. He was really whipped, wasn't he? His friends probably agreed that behind his back, he probably knew it in the back of his mind but he just couldn't care.
This time, this reunion, was different. Preston knew it, he was sure Cat probably knew it too.
There was a larger sense of urgency, desperation, even. As soon as they had crossed the threshold, laughing over the Abraham Lincoln enthusiast Cat had been sitting next to on her way back, he pushed her, tugged, really, towards their bedroom, not the kitchen, not the dumb loveseat not from IKEA.
Ignoring storytime would be what she got for surprising him at work when he couldn't really do anything like that.