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“Wait, you’ve never been to IKEA?” They’re sitting on her living room floor, talking about everything.
“No,” he replies, unconcerned.
“Never?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, but just to be clear, when I say never, I mean...”
“I haven’t set foot inside an IKEA in the entire course of my life.”
“Oh, Ben.” She closes her eyes and puts her hand over her heart, as if physically pained. “We have to go. Right now.”
“Do you need furniture?”
She shoots him an incredulous glance. “You don’t go to IKEA for the furniture.”
He’s confused. “I thought it was a furniture store?”
“You go for the experience. And the meatballs.”
“A furniture store sells meatballs?”
“Get your car keys.”
It’s fine, as far as furniture stores go. The main appeal for him, as with most things in his life these days, lies in her enjoyment of it. It’s almost like a religious experience for her. As soon as they cross the threshold, she throws her arm out so suddenly that it would’ve clotheslined him if he were about fifty pounds lighter.
“Breathe it in,” she instructs solemnly, and he smiles. “Breathe!” she insists.
He dutifully breathes, and she’s satisfied. He sneaks his hand into the back pocket of her jeans as they set forth. She eyes it dubiously.
“I’ll allow it only if you pay attention.”
“Oh, I’m paying attention,” he says, tugging her to one side so they’re not blocking the flow of foot traffic as he pulls her into his arms and nuzzles her cheek.
“Not to me!” she squirms, giggling. “To the store!”
“Okay,” he relents, and looks around. “This seems to be a...kitchen.”
“Wow. I think you missed your calling as an architect.”
“And here we have...another kitchen. Why do they need so many?”
She darts around to the sink built into the kitchen island, lifts the handle on the faucet, and mimes washing her hands. She closes the faucet with her forearm and looks around for a towel. Fortunately there’s one hanging on the oven handle, so she doesn’t drip too much imaginary water on the floor before drying them.
“That’s why,” she says. “So you can picture your life in them.” He’s picturing a life right now, but it has nothing to do with the kitchen.
“We need to get furniture,” she decrees, as they progress into the bedroom section.
“Okay, what do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Maybe a nightstand. We need to have the experience of assembling it together. A couple’s ability to successfully build IKEA furniture together is a make or break factor in the relationship.”
“It doesn’t come assembled?”
Rey takes a deep breath, in a Lord-give-me-strength way. “First of all, no, that’s the fundamental concept of IKEA. Second of all, I’d like to you appreciate the self-restraint I practice on a daily basis in never saying ‘OK boomer’ to you. I’ve literally never said those words.”
“Really? Never? Because I seem to have an oddly fresh memory of...”
“Literally never.”
Without her, he’d be lost. He’s not entirely sure why there are maps posted if you essentially have to walk through the entire store anyway. He doesn’t notice the shortcuts until she points one out, but she doesn’t let them go through it because the full experience apparently doesn’t include taking shortcuts.
“You should only take the shortcuts if you’re in a hurry. Which is a terrible tragedy in an IKEA.”
“Because you miss out on the experience.”
She looks around furtively to make sure the coast is clear, then pulls him by the shirt into a little nook between two wardrobes and kisses him deeply. She eventually lets him go, and he asks, rather short of breath, “Is that part of the experience too?”
She smiles up at him. “It is now.”
Rey records the information for the bedside table she selects, on a little sheet of paper with a little pencil provided for that express purpose. It’s like no other furniture store Ben has ever been to. Not that he goes to furniture stores. It’s like no other furniture store the interior designer he hired to furnish his apartment has ever been to.
Then they turn the seventy-sixth corner, and suddenly there’s a cafeteria. Rey’s excitement ratchets up a couple notches more.
“Are you ready for meatballs?” she enthuses.
“I guess?”
“Okay, if you’re not going to be excited about it, you don’t get any.”
“That’s fine, I’ll get something else.”
“Ben.”
“Oh, I mean, I’m so excited. To eat meatballs. At a furniture store.”
“Why don’t you work on recalibrating your excitement level while you’re finding us a table. I’ll get our meatballs.” His wallet is already out of his pocket, but she stays his hand. “My treat.”
“But I want to feed you. Meatballs.”
“Oh, you can feed me meatballs later,” she says, waggling her eyebrows.
“Did you really just make a sex joke?” he asks incredulously. “About meatballs? In an IKEA?”
“Oh sure,” she scoffs, “Mister high and mighty. Like you’ve never made a sex joke in a retail store.”
“I have never made a sex joke in a retail store.”
“Well, everybody has their faults.” She pats his hand soothingly. “I love you anyway.”
Time passes differently inside the IKEA than in the real world. They could’ve been there for hours, or maybe a couple days. He’d be fine, he thinks, living there with her. No running water in the kitchens, but plenty of beds. When they leave with the box containing the pieces of her MALM bedside table, it’s dark outside.
“Okay, we need a game plan,” she announces, once they’re back on her living room carpet. She’s rummaged around in the box and extracted the assembly instructions. “First we need to decide who’s who, of the IKEA men in the picture. I think I’m the one on the left. He has a hammer. And the one on the right has an ear.”
“If you’re starting already with jokes about my ears, I don’t know if our relationship will survive the assembly process.”
“I guess, we’ll see, won’t we? This is the single most effective compatibility test in the world. All marriage counselors prescribe it.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Oh, you think you know more than marriage counselors than me, just because you grew up with one for a mom?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fair.”
She busies herself with emptying the box, and if this is the number of pieces and the volume of hardware needed for a two foot tall bedside table, he would hate to see what one of the wardrobes requires.
They start, and it’s long. And hard. And he would make a sex joke, except that he decides to save it for the next time they’re in a retail store.
She’s treating the various items with a fairly careless disregard for what their purposes seem to be based on a strict interpretation of the pictograph instructions. He checks and double-checks, and he sometimes suggests but never contradicts. It’s midnight, and they don’t seem to be much closer to correctly assembling anything than they were when they started two hours ago. But it’s fun, just being around her. Being allowed to be her audience of one. Once in a while she looks up and seems to search his face for something, and he doesn’t know if she finds it or not, but she smiles and leans over and kisses him.
Each time she deepens the kiss a little more before pulling away, and he doesn’t know what game she’s playing, but he’s all in. Finally, at 12:27 a.m., she sets aside the piece of particleboard she’s been holding for the last twenty minutes and crawls over to him. She plucks the instructions from one of his hands and the seemingly identical but apparently vitally different screws from the other. She drops them on the floor, and she straddles his lap.
It’s so hard to think straight, but he has to make sure. “Rey, what are you doing? Don’t you want to finish this?”
“Oh, I’d rather finish something else,” she says, then applies herself to kissing down the side of his neck. They make out for a while, until his erection strains his jeans and he gasps out, “Bed.”
“Couch,” she counters, and the suggestion has merit. Because the bed is so far away, and they’re already right next to the couch. She’s a genius. They stand long enough to hurriedly disrobe, then she gives him a little shove and he plops down, and this time when she straddles him, there’s nothing in between them. She aligns him at her entrance and sinks down oh so slowly, and he will never tire of this. He eats up her little throaty gasps as she rides him to one orgasm, and then he coaxes another from her with the pad of his thumb on her clit. When her cunt stutters and clenches a second time, he follows right after with her name on his lips.
She collapses in a spent heap on his shoulder, and he snakes his arms under her thighs and carries her to bed. She murmurs a sleepy protest when he sets her down and starts to leave, so he crawls in next to her and tries to keep his eyes open until she falls asleep.
It’s one of the more difficult things he’s done in recent memory, leaving her bed a half hour later. He rubs the tired sand from his eyes and heads back out to the living room. He puts on his discarded clothes and drapes hers neatly on the couch. Sitting down on the floor, he pulls out his phone and Googles “How to assemble MALM bedside table.” He finds a promising YouTube video and settles in to watch.
It’s 2:06 when he realizes that he oriented the very first piece wrong, and now the peg holes that he needs in step twelve are on the wrong side. He reaches for the screwdriver and starts unscrewing.
It’s 3:38 when he decides that it’s actually designed to be impossible for one person to do it, that the instructions require two people for a reason. He wants to quit and get back in her warm bed, but then he thinks about how pleased she’ll be if he finishes it.
It’s 4:57 when his eyelids start to close of their own accord, but he tells himself he just needs to screw in one more screw. And then another. And then another.
It’s 6:13 when the little bedside table sits completed in the middle of the living room, and he staggers back to the bedroom and collapses into bed. Her soft snores lull him to sleep in seconds.
He’s jolted awake by her shout of “Ben!” from the living room. He springs up and runs out. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You finished it? For me?”
He smiles proudly and sleepily. “Yeah.”
“Oh Ben, you didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to make you happy.”
Her smile rivals the sun. “I am happy. But you didn’t need to go to all this trouble. I could’ve done it later today.”
“But I have to work later.”
“I know, I could’ve done it by myself. In college, that was one of my jobs. Building people’s IKEA furniture for them.”
“Wait. You—did this professionally? For money?”
“Believe it or not, that is what a job entails.”
“But...you...have you built this exact bedside table before?”
“I didn’t do MALM as often as HEMNES or EKTORP. This model, I’ve probably only done a dozen times.”
“A dozen times? By yourself?”
“Yep.”
“So why did you need me?”
“I didn’t need you, Ben, I wanted you. And you were so patient, the whole time.” He basks in her praise for a second before she adds, “But now you’ve ruined our relationship test. We’ll never know if we’re truly compatible.”
He looks at her, at the morning sun streaming in onto her ratty old nightshirt and her hair a mess from being slept on, and he shrugs. “I don’t know, for some reason I think we’ll make it.”
She comes to him and wraps her arms around him and buries her face in his chest, so it’s a little muffled, but he hears it just fine: “Me too.”