She lays statue-still, staring at the unfamiliar objects around her in the pale half light of dawn. She is uncomfortably close to the edge of the bed, trying not to disturb the sleeping form beside her.

She turns on her side slowly, putting her back to the man-shaped lump snoring beside her and unintentionally putting herself so close to the edge that she feels precariously balanced. She clutches at the sheet as if that could keep her from falling.

This situation is so far outside of her experience that she is overwhelmed. She is unsure of the correct protocol and so she makes no move in a hope to avoid the wrong one. She tries to distract herself by inspecting the contents of the bookcase facing the bed, but without her glasses she can make out little. There are paperback books jammed haphazardly among messy stacks of cds. One has fallen down to lean against its stack and she believes it to be a copy of Chicago's Greatest Hits. She grimaces at the volumes that single cd says about the person sleeping behind her, then tells herself not to be such a snob. It could be much worse.

Finally, she can ignore the rolled edge of mattress cutting into her leg no longer and gets up, moving as carefully and silently as possible. She finds her jacket first and wraps it around herself before collecting the rest of her clothes from the chilly room. Clutching her clothes to her chest she slips quietly out into the hall.

She knows they are the only ones in the house but she still checks left and right suspiciously, expecting to be caught creeping out with her clothes in her arms and covered only by a jacket that doesn't reach even halfway to her knees.

It's a long, narrow shotgun house, a term he had been offended by when she'd said it the previous night. He'd repeated the phrase to her as barely a question and it had taken a moment for her to realize he'd thought it an insult. "The doors line up down the length of the house," she'd pointed out, "and you could stand in the front door and shoot a shotgun down the hall and out the back door without hitting anything."

He'd grinned then, liking the term better after her explanation, "All alone in my shotgun house," he'd said.

It wasn't true, she supposed now, a shotgun blast would probably hit a lot of things. Doesn't it scatter?

She shook her head, clearing the imagery and focusing on the situation at hand. She wanted a shower but the bathroom shared a wall with his bedroom, putting the shower just inches from his bed, really. Across the hall were an office, awash in paperwork and various electronics and a sparsely furnished bedroom that seemed more storage room than guestroom. She made her way to the front of the house nearly tiptoeing. She took her clothes into the tiny bathroom by the kitchen, coming out again to search for a towel when the bathroom proved too small for a linen cabinet. After finding a towel, she found her purse but not her glasses and suffered a moment of panic that the glasses were back in the bedroom. Then she remembered when he had kissed her, standing in the kitchen. She'd carried their cups to the sink and he had followed her, taken her glasses off, and kissed her.

She felt herself blushing. It was all so unexpected. She'd never thought of herself as the kind of person that a man came up to and suddenly kissed. She'd certainly never thought that she - plain, shy, completely average Maggie Garner - would find herself in the middle of this. She felt completely foreign and suddenly sad. She was still herself, the same person she'd always been comfortable being, but now she was standing in her coat in the kitchen of a practical stranger. It wasn't what she'd ever imagined for herself and she felt immensely foolish.

Standing in the shower a few minutes later, she nearly jumped out of her skin when the curtain opened suddenly.

"Thank god, I was afraid you had left," he said. "I didn't want you to be gone."

She didn't know what to say so she didn't say anything. She grabbed the towel and wrapped it around herself, the water wetting it immediately. For several moments the only sound was the water falling on the tiny aqua floor tiles that reminded her of grade school, making puddles around his feet.

"Marry me," he said, his voice soft but insistent.

She turned off the water and for some reason what she said was "Okay."