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Kevin tightened his arm around her shoulders and she snuggled closer to him, whispering something inaudible against the skin of his neck. The feeling sent chills racing across his skin, raising goosebumps in their wake. Two years later, and still, she had the power to move him.

The bus rumbled onward, somewhere between Cleveland and Cincinnati, swaying slightly on the ancient roadway as Almost Famous rolled. Nell was mouthing the words to every important line, sometimes slipping and actually quoting them aloud, even though she knew it drove Joe absolutely bonkers. He glanced down at her and couldn’t help but smile as he watched her lips move along with Jason Lee’s lines. He knew it was one of her favorite scenes, although he’d never understood why watching the band nearly implode brought her such joy.

“Your looks have become a problem!” she mouthed, goofy grin overtaking her ability to pantomime the lines any further.

He let his head fall back, coming to rest on the windowsill behind him, and listened to the movie, the scenes unfolding inside his head. He no longer needed to watch. Between Nell and Nick, Kevin had seen Almost Famous approximately six million times. He, too, could recite the lines. And although he feigned irritation every time she suggested they watch it, secretly he thought her love for the movie was heartwarming. It spoke volumes about her.

They had been quoted in an interview once—he and his brothers—as saying that they hoped they would someday marry their biggest fans. Deep down, Kevin knew Nell was his biggest fan. But perhaps more importantly, he knew that she understood what it meant to be a fan. What it was to love a band, love a vocal, love a lyric so much that it was palpable. So much that it was a physical experience. She understood it in a way that he could no longer connect with, in a way that held him to the ground and constantly reminded him of the value of the people who loved him like that. Perhaps more than his parents, his brothers, his old time friends, Nell grounded him.

She shifted against him, sighing, her fingers tracing lazy circles against his thigh, and he reveled in the touch. They were apart so often, her job keeping her in New York and his carrying him around the planet, that he treasured each caress as though it might be their last. Some day he wanted her to follow him, to be there always. But he understood the demands of her career and, in fact, found he loved her all the more because of it. Even when he missed her desperately. She valued herself so highly, wanted so many things out of life. She challenged him, every day, to do the same.

Still, on the longest days, at his loneliest moments, he ached for her. For the comfort and security he found in her smile, in her eyes, in the sound of his name on her breath. For the patterns she traced on his skin. He longed to be in some house, on some side road, in some town. To be curled up next to her on a couch that was not barreling down the highway at seventy miles per hour. To have a cycle, a circle he lived in daily, with her by his side. A stationary address.

On the longest days, when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore he would begin daydreaming of their future. He would picture the house they’d own, and the colors she would choose for every room. He would try to imagine what it would smell like—remembering her apartment always smelled like her woody perfume and blackcurrant candles—what the air inside would feel like when he stepped through the door. He would imagine finding her, early in their marriage, curled up with a book when he came home. And later in their marriage greeting him with a child on her hip, another scampering behind her. He would comfort himself with the idea that their future was a certainty, that a home life would be his. But only someday. Even in the moments he managed to make the images feel nearly real, he felt as though they were too far off. As though he were viewing them from the wrong end of a telescope.

Lowly, under her breath, Nell began to sing along to Tiny Dancer. He almost chuckled to himself at the irony of it all as Joe and then Nick joined in on the chorus. Life and art, intersecting.

“I have to go home,” William Miller said, turning to Penny Lane.

Silence, a beat.

“You are home,” Penny replied, waving a hand in front of his face.

Kevin felt Nell feather kisses in the curve of his neck. He clutched her ever more tightly to his body.

“I love you,” she breathed in his ear. Chills, again, slid over his skin.

“I love you too,” he mouthed, turning to face her, knowing she’d never want him to say it loudly in front of his brothers like this. Knowing it was sacred to her.

In that moment, as she gazed up at him adoringly, looking smaller and more delicate than she ever had in her life, Kevin felt the weight of Penny’s line sink into his chest, like the clenching of a fist, tightening slowly but surely.

“You are home,” it echoed in his head, reverberated in the chambers of his heart.

He was home. With Nell, he was home. Home was not an address on a piece of paper, a building of brick or steel or mortar. It was a state of mind. It was what he had when he was with her. At the realization, the fist unclenched inside his chest. Warmth flooded in as the muscles relaxed.

There was a ring, in a box, in his bunk, buried under the mattress. He’d had it for weeks, trying to imagine the perfect scenario in which to give it to her. To hit his knee and tell her how deeply his love ran, how long he wanted to hold her. Suddenly it all seemed so silly. The knee and the scenarios and the idea of perfection. Of perfection being something otherworldly.

Perfection was there, in that moment, in the back of the moving bus watching an old movie with his family. With the woman he wanted to make his family. It was not pomp and circumstance, or Pachelbel’s Cannon. Just as home was not a tangible location forever eluding his grasp.

He wouldn’t wait much longer. Perhaps he’d do it that night. Maybe he wouldn’t even hit a knee, and he certainly wouldn’t prepare a speech. Waiting suddenly seemed foolish when he had her there, nestled in the crook of his arm.

He leaned down to kiss her, imagining it was the first kiss of a new phase of their life, then he rose, heading toward his bunk. He’d carry the ring with him. And when the moment was right, he’d be ready. He’d commit to her his life and he’d be at home at last.