“Then all the better that we’re parting ways. Have fun with them. Hope you end up at a nightclub again. Hope you meet your third.”
“This is ridiculous! Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Maybe you guys can both take her home tonight. Maybe they’ll let you watch. That’s the ultimate dream for you, right? You don’t even want to be involved. Your dream basketball player. Your dream blonde—built just the way you really like them. Grapefruit tits and a parfait French accent. I had to hear it for years, how the girls at college were nothing compared to the girls back home, right? The California girls, wowweeee. Congrats on proving your point. You can watch to your heart’s delight and jerk off in the corner.”
“Just tell me what this is really about,” Will said. “Find a way to articulate it, please. Is it just the wine? Is it the fucking salmon toasts? Is it the fact that she, and not you, gets to go home with Jack? What is it?!”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“The worst version of you, period,” he said. “Sloppy logic. Dripping envy. You’re fucking drunk.”
“Get out of my way,” she said, and she grabbed him by the shoulders to force him aside. He held his ground and she lowered her head and butted him in the chest, hard as she could. His feet pedaled backward and he grabbed her by the arms. They locked and started stumbling down the alley. They found their collective footing and stood there straining against one another, Will stronger by enough to contain the effort, but needing to focus to do so. He felt the flash in his chin before he saw it coming. She’d lifted her head swiftly and uppercut him with her skull. He stumbled backward again, stunned. She stood there with alarm in her eyes, her head ringing loudly. They hadn’t fought like this in years. That’s when they heard it.
“Hey!” It was Jack. They were coming back down the alley. But they were far enough away still to have missed it. “What happened?” Jack shouted.
“I dropped my wallet,” Will said. He said it quickly, softly, still at the volume of their low-volume fight. He pulled it from his pocket and shook it in the yellow light. “Found it, though.”
Will wouldn’t look at Whitney, and he didn’t hear her sandals moving away, either. He didn’t notice Jack and Jenna noticing her, and so figured she must still be steps behind him, in the shadows of the alley.
“What is that, anyway?” Jenna said, as she approached. “Tom Ford?”
“Give me a break,” Will said.
“You guys still cold?” Jenna said, a tone like a Rorschach test, sweet or sarcastic depending on how one intended to hear it. “I know an outdoor bar with some heat lamps.”
“I’m actually…I think we’re gonna head home,” Will said. “Don’t know about you guys, but we got a little beat up last night. Not sure how you do it, but we’re too old now.”
“Don’t exclude me from that,” Jack said. “I actually booted this morning.”
“You’re kidding?” Will said. His chin pulsed from the blow. But he acted genuinely surprised. He acted as though nothing was wrong between him and Whitney. He’d had the month of 1-2-3 to rehearse the illusion.
“I hadn’t puked in five years,” Jack said.
“December,” Will said, raising his hand. “Office party. November, that one…” Will said, thumbing over his shoulder, then turning to look at the face he knew better than any other. She was still there, but farther away than he’d expected. There was an organs-deep impertinence blaring back at him from down the alley. The temporary disdain was real; it was always genuine when it came for him. Color and temperature and shadow, those were the variables he keyed in on at the edges of her facial features. The hang in the hair that swept across her forehead. The weight of the slashes of her eyebrows. The mouth a little fuller and redder, just then, a puffiness from the rage that was boiling an eighth of an inch beneath the surface of her skin. “Election Night. She was up sick all night Election Night. Ruined the Thai place we’d ordered from. Haven’t been back.”
“Actually, last month,” Whitney said, looking at him. She’d intended it to sting. “When I was in L.A. Out too long, up way too late…” Her face was razor blades. She was speaking loudly and moving in closer, and her eyes were suddenly fixed fiercely in Jenna’s direction. “What about you?”
“I can’t,” Jenna said, yawning. “I’ve got”—she waved a hand in front of her throat—“no gag reflex.”
“That shocks me,” Whitney said, taking several additional steps in her direction. “I would’ve taken you for a morning, noon, and night type.”
“What does that mean?” Jenna said, twisting up her face.
“You just check the boxes of someone familiar with the inside of a toilet bowl.”
Jenna laughed uncertainly, and looked to Will and Jack to see if they’d registered it as a bad joke. “Hate to disappoint you…”
“But…no gag reflex. That’s cool. Is that true?” Whitney said, looking at Jack this time.
“Hey,” Jack said, raising his hands. “Leave me out of whatever this is.”
“Yeah, Whit,” Jenna said, flexing her eyes. “What is this, exactly?”
Whitney stepped closer still to Jenna, and this time she didn’t stop short. Whitney had six inches on her and she’d thrown her shoulders back into the posture of a ballerina. She tossed her hair and threw a long languid arm around Jenna’s shoulders and pulled in even closer and squeezed. For the first time all night it was Jenna who shrank, shorter and smaller than she’d been in the short, small history of their twenty-four-hour quartet.
“I’m just joking with you,” Whitney said, smiling with cold control. “We’re all just joking around with each other, I thought? Isn’t that what this has been?” Jenna stared at the paving stones and Whitney shifted Jenna in her arm. Whitney’s dominant hand traced Jenna’s
