Her presence in his life is spoken of in rubber bands.

There is only a vague hint of her existence in any of the rooms he shares with her. She keeps her clothes in the dresser in the room she inhabited before she moved into his, and despite a frightening array of bath products she keeps on a shelf in the shower one would never even know she was there.

Except for the rubber bands.

It is perplexing only because he finds them everywhere and yet she never seemed to run out of the damned things.

She wears her hair up most of the time, and if it's down, she has one on her wrist. At night he watches the way she pulls it from her ponytail and tosses the circular black elastic band on the dresser, and he sees her in the morning grab the same one and put it around her wrist again.

How then, do they manage to appear everywhere? He finds them in his chair in the study, left on the sink in the bathroom, hidden beneath the pillows of the bed. One was wrapped around a shampoo bottle in the shower, another on his desk.

“Do you hide these away in case you might need one at any given moment of the day, regardless of what room you happen to be in?” he asks her finally, unnerved to discover yet another one in the sheets of the bed.

“What?” She looks at him, confused, lying on her back. Her eyes focus on the rubber band he is waving at her and she grins a little. “No, I just lose them a lot.” She reaches out immediately to take it from him.

He gives her an aggrieved expression and puts the offending object on the dresser, noting in consternation there is already one there. “How many of these damned things do you have?”

She makes a small noise that might be a laugh. “They come in packages,” she explains.

He gives her a cross look. “Of what? A thousand?”

A surprised giggle escapes her; the sound is girlish and not one usually heard in this room. “No. About twenty. I have like two packs.”

He snorted at that. “I think I've found thirty-nine of them, so you best keep track of that last one.”

“Okay,” she agrees, giggling some more, and he thinks fleetingly that she is very pretty when she laughs.

“You don't even wear your hair up in bed,” he informs her later, when she is sleepy and curled warm and tight against him.

“Erik,” she admonishes him in a soft voice, as if he's being childish.

He has his hand in her hair and tugs on it for using that tone with him. “Marie,” he answers her, though he's smiling in the dark as he says it.