“Can you keep a secret?” she said.
He smiled as he’d done with every other silly thing she’d said on the walk, and when he stepped out of the light, they crossed another street into new darkness.
“I mean, you can’t tell Jenna, or Will, or anyone at the alumni association,” she said, smiling as though there might be a joke coming. “This is just between you and me and the laundry hanging from that balcony, ’cause I think I just need to tell someone, ’cause it’s kinda rusting away inside of me. Besides, it’s the other reason we’re here, the real-er reason, the other half point—and I probably should just say it to make sense.”
“Okay…”
“So, as you know, Will and I have been together since the end of college. That’s a great thing most of the time, and not great other times.”
“Sure,” he said.
“And a couple months ago—back at school, actually—we got engaged. Or, rather, Will proposed, and…”
“Oh!” Jack said. “I hadn’t realized. That’s amazing.”
“Well, this is the between-you-and-me part, because it goes a long way to explaining…We both, or, I don’t know, that’s probably up for some debate, but we both decided to try something because it didn’t feel quite right. Something wasn’t sinking in the way we thought it would. Something was just not certain.…And if there’s one thing the married people I work with seem to agree on, it’s that if there’s something bothering you, it’s not gonna get better with marriage, it’s not gonna be fixed by marriage, right? Not that I usually care what those people have to say. But we decided to do this thing.…We decided to go on, like, a quasi-break. Not to date other people, but to sleep with other people. I was in L.A. for a month for work while he was in New York. And, so, we each gave each other three freebies. And the idea, then, was to come here at the end of it, to come clean, and then go home engaged, all the better for having, you know, gotten it out of our system.”
She’d been looking straight ahead, trying to put words to something she hadn’t had to describe before. She turned to Jack. He wore a neutral expression. She couldn’t tell if he thought it was scandalous or boring, or if it reasonably explained everything.
“And so…” she said, and he looked at her expectantly, searching for a line to guide him to the next part, “that’s what we’re doing here, and that’s what we’ve been sort of dealing with these last couple days. We thought we were getting out of here, we were ready to put everything behind us, and then these days keep on coming…”
“And so you did it?” Jack said.
“What’s that?”
“You went through with it? You had your three each? And everything’s okay?”
“Is that awful? I haven’t told even my close…I haven’t told a soul. Does it sound terrible?”
“I mean, I feel about as far away from getting married as possible. But when I’ve dated girls—which, you know…but when I have—I guess I’m the jealous type. The thought of even someone I’ve hooked up with a couple times, if I really like her, the thought of her being with someone else…That’s very mature of both of you, I guess.”
She laughed softly. “I don’t know. I mean, hearing you say it back, it gets me all tied up in knots again. And it makes me wonder why I think it’ll all be okay now. I never was the jealous type until I met Will. I didn’t die for boys the way other girls did. I didn’t usually get caught up in crushes the same way. I just tried to act above it all. And then things changed. I was so crazy after I met him. I’d finally found this person I could settle into. Then, I don’t know what happened—I mean I do know part of what happened. He hooked up with some girl his first year of law school, that’s what happened. And it short-circuited me. It seems trivial now, but when it happened…Anyway, eventually all that went away. And by the time he proposed, I just, I don’t know, I felt totally numb to it. It didn’t hit me hard one way or the other. It was terrible. And so this other idea, the three, I guess I wanted it for him, but I wanted it for me, too. I wanted to wake up a little. I wanted it to be fair, and that was the only way, even if it would be excruciating. I got tweaked when he told me about his ones the other night, when we confessed everything. But that was something that was missing even a few months ago—me feeling crazy again. That’s actually what got me excited all over. This is how you’re supposed to feel about this. Strongly. It’s like it snapped me out of my whatever. And then we tried to get out of here and put it all behind us. And, yeah, you’ve basically had a front-row seat to everything since…” She looked at him. “Does this all sound totally insane?”
“I’m just impressed that you were able to go through with it. I know people who’ve gone on breaks, or whatever, but it never works.”
“Well, I guess that’s TBD. I think we thought we’d reached the end of something, then realized a bunch of other shit was just starting up.”
“So three each?” Jack said. The premise of 1-2-3 was finally sinking in.
“Well, he actually only did…we only did two…” She flinched as she said it. “To be fair to the facts.…But all that’s behind us now.”
“Does Will know it’s behind you?” he said. Jack was tuned in in a way she hadn’t seen before, like she’d found a station with a song
