“This is all that’s left if you want some,” he said, placing the glass on the side table. She’d collapsed again on the bed. Her face was slick. She was puddled up in the rumpled comforter.
The next song started. Something essential unearthed by the algorithm. It was a song from that first spring seven years ago. A song from another era; they’d spanned eras together. Something from the first concert they ever attended together, at a small club half an hour off campus, a concert for which they’d borrowed someone else’s car, stayed out all night, listened to this very record again and again on the way there and on the way back, and again while they made out in the front seat on a poorly lit wooded road.
Neither of them had reacted to the music at first, except in their faces. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, he laughed, a sick bark, and he shook his head in acknowledgment of the unwelcome ways the world was nosing in on their business. Why? Why this song just now? Her mouth was fixed in a frown, drawn down at the edges by the weight of her face. She wiped her eyes again and tried extra hard to draw Will’s gaze back toward hers. It was something they could do to each other, a power they’d had since the beginning. He sensed the request, the heat and the signal, the silver lights flashing up at him from the bed.
He sat down and looked at her. And then it happened the way it sometimes happened for them. He didn’t want it just then, but he couldn’t help himself and she couldn’t help herself. Since the beginning, it had gone that way: He’d look at her and she’d look at him, and there would be something chemical. A syncing-up. A pure meld. And now, as their eyes locked, it knitted them in place, sewed them right there into the comforter. The two minds behind the four eyes became one for an instant—it was all just chemistry—and the whole movie started to play in reverse:
A clink of two wineglasses. A bar without a menu. Will with his eyes over the rim of the butcher-red something from Penedès. Whitney’s freckled face distorted through the bleeding legs that ran down the windows of her wineglass. Alone in the world with one another. Wrapped up tight, rubber-banded together on those barstools, in an elastic closeness, as each waited to hear what the other had done, and who they’d done it with. To understand how much damage had been inflicted, and whether it was the beginning of something or very much the end.
A beach outside the city, a week ago now. Palm trees rooted in ancient stone. Brown bodies arranged like glyphs on the sand, no one at work on a warm weekday afternoon. Will’s face turned up into the sun, throat exposed, the posture of a defiant executionee. White feet, white thighs, white arms from the elbows up. Flesh spilling over the edges of his shorts, stomach muscles concealed by the dough of an uncooked piecrust. Whitney propped up like a waterslide beside him, legs crossed at the ankles, palms dug into the sand on either side of her towel. Eyes drifting to the women with the exposed breasts, the heavy breasts spread out across the sand, eyes scanning through the lenses of her shades to watch Will’s eyes, to watch him watching, wondering what he was wondering about. Whitney wondered what Will had done while she’d been in L.A. She dreaded the dinner they’d planned to have at the end of the trip, when they’d spill all their secrets. She wondered what he’d seen, what he’d taken, what he’d experienced that he hadn’t even known he’d been missing for those seven long years with her. All around Whitney, Mediterranean breasts, Mediterranean tan lines. Beauty. When the women got toasted, they turned over. When they got hot, they went swimming. Everybody watching everybody else. Will breathed shallowly beside her, drifting off to sleep. Whitney breathed sharply and unknotted her top. Her fingers fell back to the sand, clenched around the weightless fabric. The sun stung her nipples. She’d done something she’d never done before, just like that. Will stirred and turned to Whitney, Whitney turned to Will. There was a look between them. Two faces that expressed the pleasant realization that there was still room on their seven-year-old island for surprises.
A call from Los Angeles, a month ago now. Will well asleep, Whitney sleepless. She’d tried three times already, and on the fourth he picked up. Nothing but uncertainty in the story of their affairs, nothing revealed yet. He might’ve been with someone that very night, she might’ve just as likely, too—there was no way of knowing. But she sounded alone in her hotel room, and he sounded asleep in their bed. Whitney asked for the old thing they’d done in the early years. When they’d been living in separate apartments, in separate cities, to help her get to sleep. My feet on the back of your feet, he’d say. My shins on the back of your calves. Spoon on spoon. All the way up the body, until her breathing would shift and she’d be dead to the world. She relied on the routine most nights, whether he was at home or with friends. He’d step out of the bar into the cold of a snowy night and run through the evolution, whispering into his phone beneath an overhang near a dumpster—the same lines, the same order, like a prayer. It had been forever since she’d asked for it. But that night, it was like old times.
A childhood bed, last Thanksgiving. A bed Whitney’s parents
