She's the yee to my yee

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

But this year he's not in Russia, and he slips into this warm syrupy slumber while Shane pets through his hair (incidentally making a disastrous mess of his curls) and reads his book. When Ilya eventually rouses, with a happy grumble of contentment, nuzzling closer into Shane's stomach, he can feels Shane laughing gently at him almost before he hears it.

"Did you sleep well?" Shane asks, and that sounds warm and syrupy too, and Ilya rolls over so he can smile at Shane and revel in the smile he gets in return.

And then Shane says, "Are you hungry? It's almost dinnertime," and Ilya realises he's been lying here, napping and pinning Shane to the couch and wasting both of their time, for hours, and he jackknifes upright so suddenly that Shane startles back.

"Fuck!" Ilya spits out. "I was--fuck, has been so long. Why didn't you wake me up?" already guilty because Shane had wanted to make some pasta thing that he was weirdly excited about and they'd talked about maybe playing more Chel but now the whole day's been napped away and--Ilya sneaks a look---Shane's book is lying closed on the couch, bookmark set neatly aside, so Shane had finished his book and not even been able to get up to go do something else.

And he's just smiling at Ilya, completely unconcerned that Ilya's been idle and asleep and... and... lazy, all afternoon, just glad Ilya had a good nap.

Shane's frowning in mild confusion at him. "Why?" he says, genuinely not seeing the problem. "You were napping, it was nice. I mean, if I'd needed to pee or something I'd have got up but I was fine." He reaches out and smoothes some of Ilya's hair down. "Oh, the pasta. We can do that tomorrow, we have all that salad from lunch and rolls and there's peaches if we want dessert."

Ilya must have responded somehow because Shane beams at him and says, "Cool, I'll go set the table if you want to go wash your face." He smirks and pokes at Ilya's cheek. "Got a little drool there." And then he smacks a kiss on Ilya's head, gets up, and trots over to the kitchen while Ilya just sits there reeling.