Barcelona Days

and dripping down his shoulders and arms into his static fingers. He felt his heart beating carefully, deliberately, beating like wings. He hadn’t spoken to friends back home all week. He hadn’t spoken to family. He had spent time with Whitney and with Jack and with Jenna. That was it. Here was this woman, one of the few now in his immediate orbit, and maybe just maybe she was becoming one of his favorite people to talk to in all the world. Maybe here in this city was where they were supposed to meet some new people who might displace the old. Maybe with a few more years he and Jenna would become close, as proper adults, the age difference growing less substantial each year. She was intelligent, independent. She was good-looking and had figured out lots on her own already. She was extremely impressive in her way. Maybe this was his brand new friend beside him now at the bar. He certainly enjoyed being in her presence. She was full of life, overripe with energy, and he could use some proximity to that from time to time. Like a battery-charging station. Not an everyday sort of companion, but an after-work-beers-once-a-season kinda thing. She had interestingness in surplus. She had living to spare. She lowered the angle of her face, and her lips pressed together into an expectant node, deliciously, flirtatiously egging him on into telling her precisely what he’d meant. She had shared some of her secrets. It was only fair that he might share some of his. They were confidants now, after all.

“So the thing to know,” he started, “and this is very much between you and me, like deeply between you and me, because our closest friends and family don’t even know this.…But Whitney and I are engaged.”

“Oh?” Jenna said, shifting on her stool again and leaning back a little. “Congratulations, then. I didn’t—”

“We’re sort of engaged, kind of engaged, TBD engaged.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“I don’t really, either. But something happened between our maybe becoming engaged and this trip. And that something was—seriously, please, you can’t even mention this to Jack—but we decided to give each other a couple freebies before setting things in stone.”

“Like, freebie freebies?”

“We called it…well, it doesn’t matter what we called it, but she went to L.A. for a month and we decided to go on a break, with the intention of meeting up here after and coming clean. And then just having that be a thing we did while we still could, while we still had the chance to get it out of our systems, and not hurt each other terribly, and still be honest about it, and just sort of take care of something that felt necessary.”

Jenna was sitting up straighter now. She wore that pucker again, and her eyes and nose and mouth all seemed to be compassing toward a space a couple inches in front of her face. Her eyes were thrilling to the new information. She looked to have so many questions, so many questions that they’d logjammed the flume and nothing was coming out, and so there hung between them a silence that Will just kept filling.

“And so we did. She in L.A. Me in New York. And then on whatever night it was, Saturday, we told each other about it.”

“This past Saturday? The day before the party? ’Cause by then, you’re saying you were back to being together? Or at least that’s how it looked from the outside…”

“I guess that’s right,” he said. “It was weird. But so was a lot about that night. So I guess the only reason I’m telling you is, just, there was more going on than it maybe seemed. There’s been more reason to be jealous of her lately.”

“And—I have so many questions, but—you were both, just, okay with it? That was something you were cool with?”

“I think so. I mean, she’s still here, I’m still here, right?”

“But, like, these other men were fucking your fiancée?”

“I hate that word.”

“Fuck?”

“No. Too many syllables.”

“Fiancée?”

“The whole thing sounds not great when you say it…and it wasn’t great, don’t get me wrong. But, I don’t know, I had mine, too. It was even. It was fair. And, besides, haven’t you ever taken a break with someone?”

“No.”

“Well, things get interesting when you get super old like us. Stuff happens. Things end up different than you expect.”

“And here I thought…here I was with all my presumptions about how boring…”

“You thought you had us all figured out, huh?” Will said. “Well, that’s it for us, as far as that stuff goes. No more swinger parties in our future, I don’t think. No more flings. Those were it.”

“Those…how many, exactly?”

“The rules were three each, but we took two.”

“You had free passes for three and you left one on the table?”

“We didn’t realize it until the other night. We each did two independently.”

“How adorable,” she said. “How perfect. Was it amazing, though? After all those years—”

“It was…I had fun.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I dunno, it was sex with strangers.”

“And so never anyone else that whole time?”

“I hooked up with someone my first year of law school.”

“Hooked up?”

“We made out.”

She laughed. “So? That doesn’t count.”

“Well, it counted with Whitney. We were just starting out, we were young—well, we were your age—and so the scale of everything just…it felt different.”

“I mean, that doesn’t count. Even for a high schooler that doesn’t count.”

“Well, you weren’t on the jury at my sentencing. I wish you had been.”

“She really held that against you?”

“It was pretty dumb. But I should’ve…”

“What happened?”

“It was the first semester of 1L. Some stupid mixer with the business school. You know the nickname for MBAs, right? Married But Available?”

“No, but that’s pathetic.”

“Well, yes. Now you know. Regardless, it’s a fucking snake pit. You’re around all these people in this pressure cooker. Most MBAs are coming in from the real world and then suddenly it’s like all the rules are suspended, nobody seems to give a shit who’s from where, how old