“It was like, I dunno, sliding down into a bath or something. Different than I’d had in a long time. Definitely not bad, definitely not better.”
“Whereas the other one’s what?”
Whitney thought about it. She wanted to get it exactly right. “Glass shattering?”
Will rubbed his face in an exaggerated fashion.
“I had my eyes closed and didn’t really look at him much and wondered after the fact if he’d maybe felt used. It really was, like, we couldn’t have been less connected. But it seemed to work for him. I guess I know what I’m doing, too.”
“Please tell me you used a condom. The way you’re saying it, this doesn’t sound like a condom situation.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she felt Will’s eyes boring deeper. “I don’t think we did. But it’s fine. I got tested when I got back to New York. Everything’s fine.”
“You let a fucking stranger old guy, who lived in L.A. in the nineties, come inside you?”
Will put his forehead flat on the bar.
“It all worked out okay,” she said.
“You can be fucking careless sometimes,” he said without moving.
“And you made some decisions I don’t love.…But we made it through unscathed.”
Will sat up again. “What were you thinking? Seriously?”
“I wasn’t, I guess. It didn’t even occur to me. I didn’t have much time. I had to take what was in front of me. Just like you. I know you think I had it easier, but that’s just not the case. The rest of the trip was production all day, every day. I just wasn’t thinking too hard about it. Sorry.”
“An old guy with a nice house,” Will said.
“Just like a young guy, but old,” Whitney said.
“What did the novelist have to say for himself afterward?”
“He thanked me in this deeply gracious and depressing way. The whole thing was a little surreal. Maybe it didn’t happen.”
“Adrien Green wakes up your body and you can’t wait to put it to use again. You find the first living breathing thing with a garden and a custom modern home on the Westside.”
“I’m twenty-nine years old. Every day I get older, my body gets grosser. I’m on the clock. Besides, it wasn’t right away after Adrien. I was running out of days.”
“Okay…” he said, swallowing. “So what about Number Three, then?”
Her brows flexed, extremely anxious-seeming all of a sudden. “You first,” she said.
“Well…” he said, pausing and dropping his eyes to his plate again. “I have another confession to make. And you might not like this one, either.”
“Oh, Will…” She looked like a different person than she had ten seconds ago.
“You might want to finish that wine.”
“Who?”
“Just finish it.”
“Who?!”
The bartender and the waitress turned toward them. They’d finally made them notice.
Will dragged some strange noodles around a dish of burgundy goo. He couldn’t tell if the contents came from land or sea.
“There, uh, there wasn’t a Number Three,” Will said. “Sorry. I…know what the deal was. But I was a little shook after all the crying. No Three for me, unfortunately.”
Whitney stared at him blankly and her breathing shifted.
“I know it’s not what we said,” he continued, “but I figured of all the options, you’d be better with fewer rather than—”
“I didn’t…” she said, cutting him off, and swallowing hard, seizing on something, some window of opportunity. “I didn’t find three guys, either.…Just two.”
They sat there on their stools in silence, letting the revelations linger. They looked all at once drained. Paralyzed, almost, by their symmetry. They reached beneath the bar and squeezed each other’s hands. They kneaded each other’s fingers and knuckles and palms, and it felt like something they could do for the rest of their lives.
“This is good,” Will said, smiling disbelievingly.
“This is exactly why this is meant to be,” Whitney said, snorting with an incredible relief.
They sat there in the thickness of what they’d done and what they hadn’t done. The way they’d operated in the world without one another, yet in unison nonetheless.
“Adrien counted as two, anyway,” Will said.
“And Kelly, then, too. A penalty for breaking the coworker rule.”
“Former coworker.”
“It all worked out,” Whitney said, eyes wet now, eyes red.
“And it did what you were hoping it would do?”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I guess I just…needed this so that I never had to wonder again.”
“Now we know,” Will said.
“Now we know,” Whitney said, smiling sadly, uncertainly. “Thank you.”
They drank from their glasses, but couldn’t touch another bite.
“Oh, one final confession…” It was Will. “I should tell the whole truth before we leave, and admit that I downplayed it—all of it, unfortunately. Each was, in fact, the best I’ve ever had.”
Whitney laughed, an overwhelming release of pent-up tension. “I downplayed it, too.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“‘A new record,’” she said.
“A new record,” he said. “Jesus.”
A piece of chocolate cake arrived, as though their waitress had understood where they’d wound up. And with the cake, the check. All that food, chef’s choice, for half as much as they’d expected. What a meal. What a final night. What a way to cinch up the experiment. It went as well as they could’ve hoped. A vacation. A revelation. An eradication of the gnawing questions.
And now they were ready. They would leave in the morning. They would return once again to the apartment they shared, to the places where they existed both separately and together, to the country and to the life. They would be married in ten to fourteen months, on a cliff or in a meadow or near the windows of a restaurant that didn’t cost too much to buy out. They would pick up the societal soldering iron, and carefully, consciously, fuse themselves together for good. They’d acted as they’d intended. They’d done what they needed to do. They’d played by the rules and they’d come clean. Now they would walk to the Airbnb, wake up early, catch a cab to the airport, and settle into their seats for the plane ride back to New York. The trip was finally over. It was time to
