A shared couch they’d purchased together for their shared “living room,” their first month off Tompkins Square Park. A grown-up couch with a grown-up chicken roasting in a grown-up pot, the scent slipping from the kitchen and wrapping them up in a blanket of maturity. A new home. A new chapter. They lived together now. Sometimes they worried about growing too old too fast. Here, though: two faces of contentment wed in that instant to the scent of responsibility, of roasting chicken, a scent that they could welcome for the rest of their lives.
An argument, too much to drink, too much talk of long-term plans. About cities they might live in. About parents who might need them around someday. About where life could take them, and about where they’d never let it. They used to drink more and they used to fight harder. When everything was still possible, even the theoretical felt consequential. Will would yell. Whitney would punch and bite. Will would shove. Whitney would weep.
An unexceptional window of an unexceptional restaurant on an exceptionally cold morning during the first days of a new year. Will in D.C., Whitney down for the weekend, off the Washington Deluxe bus, twenty bucks each way. Drinking before noon, fighting off the crush of playoff football fans crowding in around them. Eating croques madames and monsieurs, and ordering rounds of Belgian beer until their brains unsealed from the walls of their skulls and relieved them of their hangovers. Pinned in by Redskins jerseys on all sides, shoved into the center of the table toward one another, in no hurry to return to the single digits outside, or the tiny room he rented from strangers on the sunnier side of U Street. It was one of the times they’d looked at each other in the midst of the chaos of a crowd, and cinched off their own fate from the fates of everyone else, speaking aloud across the table the sentiment, if not the exact words: I think we’re destined to win this thing together, I think we’re meant to make it. It happened often in those middle years, but this one stuck with both of them, maybe because of the cold outside. It was eight or nine degrees, and it made a mark like frostbite.
The raw, filthy fucking. Fistfuls of hair. Choking and gagging. Bruises and burns that wouldn’t vanish for days. Broken bed frames. Snapped straps and torn fabric. Tequila and whiskey and mushrooms and molly. Gratuitous volume through temporary walls. Retroactive apologies to roommates. Video functions on outdated digital cameras. Blackmailable photos. There were months and then years when they were mostly apart. He bought her a lavender vibrator before he moved to D.C. She bought a blue silicone dildo that roughly resembled the shape of his cock. They traveled hours on Friday evenings and Monday mornings in order to break each other’s bodies, and then answer emails side by side beneath the sheets. They knew other couples in long-distance arrangements who’d lose entire weekends in bed. That wasn’t them; they did other things together, too. But when they fucked each other, they were obscene. And as the years went on, as they grew more anxious spending all their time with single friends whose twenties were playing out the way they were meant to, the more seriously they took the imperative to prove something to one another. To treat each time like a first time, with effort to make it memorable. They auditioned for one another—physical arguments that said there was nothing else out there worth ending what they had.
The toast for graduating from law school. The toast for convincing a strange adult in a job interview that she was exactly what the streaming service was looking for. The toast for setting their lives on a course. It all happened in the same week. And so: six beers each in a grimy bar with tall windows on the hottest night of the year. The two of them at the corner table where the windows touched, projecting their lives forward into grand, sweeping plotlines. They disappeared the pint glasses and decided that it was worth the little money they had between them to keep new glasses coming forever. It was one of those nights in a bar in New York, one for no one else but them. They couldn’t tell you the faces of the people in the place, but they remembered for years the particulars of those who passed by the windows. There was a late sun. There were bare legs. There was chest hair. There was every last sweating skinny beautiful body that night in a hurry to somewhere sexy.
The sleepovers in the law-school dorm. A Friday evening that first winter when both his roommates had gone home for the weekend. They’d bought groceries and tried to cook themselves dinner for the first time in their lives. They boiled pasta and made grilled cheeses. They smoked one roommate’s weed from the other roommate’s pipe. Whitney scavenged the fridge for snacks. She found a tube of Toll House and spread the dough around a ceramic plate. She burned her forearm on the oven door but didn’t notice the infection until the morning. They fell asleep on the couch, watching the ocean episodes of Planet Earth and testing out names for their future children.
A one-star hotel room with blood and wine. A young American couple in Europe, their first big trip together. And so they skirted the hostels they’d stayed at
