Summer finally faded into September, and the world dusted itself off and came to life again. Cute autumn clothes hit the stores and the kids went back to school and all the good TV shows came back with new episodes. The heat loosened its grip just a little, and Hank and Autumn were suddenly free to walk to the dog park and go on long, lazy bike rides and do all the other things they couldn’t do in the sweltering summer. Autumn was torn between wanting to sink into that wonderful fall feeling and wanting to chug wine all day, because every week that passed was another week Summer would never see. She missed her so much, and it wasn’t getting any better, not unless Hank’s arm was wrapped around her, at least. So she compromised and stayed sober until nine or ten at night.
The year was falling away, and Hank was only getting better. But soon Autumn’s coworkers noticed the change in her behavior – her strange remoteness, her frequent abandonments of their plans, the way she seemed to dreamily float through the halls instead of scowling and stomping her way through the office like usual, etcetera. It wasn’t adding up, and so on a trip to Starbucks during lunch one day they confronted her and staged a friend-tervention.
“Ariana has to talk to you,” Shannon said.
“Okay?” Autumn said, pausing with a scone halfway to her mouth. “Talk, then.”
“What’s going on with you?” Ariana asked. “You ditch us all the time, you’re acting all weird, you never text anybody back…”
“And how is that different from my normal behavior?”
“Good point,” she said. “But you’re wearing way less black than usual. It’s not normal. Is your health okay?”
Autumn’s eyes narrowed. What did they know? “Yeah, I mean, as far as I know.”
“Are you depressed about your friend, then, and you’ve gone on Xanax to cope with it? Because if so, I want some. I’m all out for this month.”
“No, not at all. I’m just sort of…seeing someone.”
Ariana choked on her muffin.
“What?” Autumn asked.
“You’re seeing someone?”
“You’re eating carbs?”
Ariana looked down at the muffin, re-appraising it.
“Just kidding. Yeah, I met this guy Hank, who was friends with Summer, and we’re…together, I guess.” She smiled. Together: never had a word felt better on her lips.
“Hank?” Ariana asked. “You mean, like, one-arm Hank?”
“Yes, I mean one-arm Hank.”
Ariana laughed a little.
“What is it?”
“I mean, you’re just already enough of a spectacle on your own, and then to add that to the mix, well…”
Autumn reached over, grabbed Ariana’s muffin, and ate the rest of it. “You’re just saying that because you haven’t seen his dick.”
A few nights later Autumn and Hank were in Hank’s bed while some Netflix show played on television, totally ignored. They were too busy kissing to care. They’d napped on and off all afternoon, having downed too many mimosas at brunch to ever see their day recover. At around four he’d given her the kind of orgasm that made you contemplate life, made you sit back and wonder about things, made you understand why Moses spent forty years wandering the deserts: he must’ve been searching for this. The issue of her cancer checkups now hung delicately in the gossamer corners of her mind instead of calling out to her like a big ugly neon highway sign at night, like before. It was still there, of course, it was just pushed off into the recesses of her mind like laundry on a rainy day. Love can do that to someone, make all their problems seem that much smaller next to the colossus they’ve just rode up on. Love makes nothing else matter. That is why they call it love.
Hank’s lease happened to be a week away from ending, and he was exhausted from the stress of looking for a new place. After he’d taken out his phone and ranted about how everything was so expensive now because of all the damned Yankees moving down and jacking up the prices, Autumn interrupted.
“Why don’t you just stay at my place?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“I don’t know. I guess I could. You could also move in with me.”
She rolled over and looked at him more closely. “Really? Why?”
He shrugged again. “Because I don’t want to be without you anymore.”
“Aw,” she blushed. “You’re lying. Don’t feel the need to tell me things like that. By the way, say it again.”
After he repeated himself, Autumn smiled. But then she thought of this tiny apartment on Eighth Street, with its pathetic kitchen and tiny windows and burnt-orange carpets and the air conditioner that never really worked, and she scrunched up her face. Still, in the beginning his house had actually made her slide into infatuation with him even more, because it was the house of a man, not a boy. She admired his neat bedroom and his expensive sheets and his heavy, solid furniture and the brand-name soaps and body washes in his tidy bathroom. It was so different from the messy bachelor pads she was used to seeing, with the old pizza boxes and empty beer bottles everywhere. Quite simply, he had his shit together, and it was hot.
“Um, ew,” she said. “There is way too much brown involved for me to ever move here. But you could move in with me.”
“What?”
Her breathing grew irregular. She was nervous. “I mean, yeah. It’s just me and my grandma, and she’s barely ever there – you know she’s on Senior Single Mingle, that website where old people get STDs, and she’s always out at the piano bars trying to be slutty.”
“Slutty?”
“Yep, she’s actually been seeing this guy, Redmond, who looks older than a flip phone, but his granddaughter doesn’t like her and there’s all kinds of drama. But anyway, it really wouldn’t make a difference if you were around more often. God knows she probably wouldn’t even notice even if she was around, with her cataracts being so bad and all.”
He rested his head on his hand. “You want me to live with you. That is correct?”
She looked up at the ceiling. “I can’t believe Autumn Mahal is saying this, but…yes, that’s correct. Are you into it?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
What a good feeling, she thought then, to have someone want to stay. And there was another reason this thrilled her, too: she would be able to get his sex whenever she wanted. Because Hank sexed so good, Autumn wanted to congratulate the universe on creating him. She’d never even told anyone about their lovemaking, because for some reason those stories felt like they belonged to her. She never wanted anyone to know how he held her, how he looked at her, about how the first time they’d made love, it had felt bizarrely like when she’d come into her classroom on the first day of primary school and slipped her backpack into her cubby, its new home. Hank was home now.
“Are you sure you want to live with me, though?” she asked. “I mean, I’m messier than a Pre-K classroom, I frequently overdraw my debit card and have meltdowns in the CVS checkout line, and when I’m PMS-ing I just want to lock myself in my room in a black cloak and make a list of reasons of why I hate everything in the world.”
He laughed. “Autumn, you’re not going to scare me away from you. You do know that, right?”
“Damn. Foiled again.”
And so they settled into bed, trying not to pay attention to the clops and thumps and footsteps coming from upstairs. (Autumn had decided that Hank’s neighbors were contractually obligated to stomp the fuck around from dawn until midnight.)
Autumn’s phone pinged, and to her horror, it was a Spark message. She’d forgotten to delete the stupid app, and now it looked like she was still talking to people under the radar. Shit. She tried to hide her screen, but Hank saw too early and grabbed the phone away.
“I haven’t been using it, I just forgot it was on my phone, I swear!” she cried. “Check the timestamps – all the conversations are months old!”
“I believe you,” he said calmly, and she went silent. It felt weirdly nice, just to be trusted like that. “I just want to see what the message says.”
As he read the screen, his eyes went black. He tried to pull the phone away, but Autumn took it back again, and her stomach sank as she scanned the message, from a guy named Joshua:
you’re fucking obese
“I can handle this,” she said, fire rising in her belly as she began typing.
I thought I made it clear that obesity and I are JUST FRIENDS, she responded. If obesity keeps going around telling people that we are sexually involved, I am going to beat his ass back to the homeland, I swear!
I don’t get it, Joshua said after a minute.
And you never will, you empty-skulled, David Schwimmer-looking troglodyte, she responded, deleting the app for good and tossing her phone into the cocoon of blankets.
“That’s why,” Hank said, leering at her. “That’s why I like you. You’re awesome, but you don’t know it – and do you know how many girls do know it?”
“So that’s why you put up with me?” she asked as she slid her phone into the covers, away from prying eyes. “I’m funny? I mean, I do have a great ass, but I’m not dumb – I know I’m no picnic.”
“You are a picnic,” he said. “It’s just a picnic in the middle of a raging storm, in a muddy field, during an earthquake, with a mudslide on the way.”
“Okay, I get it. I’m a lot.”
He smiled and punched a spot into the comforter for his iPad. “Well I’m nothing, and you’re a lot. It’s a good mix.”
“You’re not nothing,” she smiled, tickling his shoulder. “Well, your arm is, but that’s a different story.”
“Seriously, though,” he said, a little more distantly. “I spent years without laughing, and now you make me laugh every day. You are a symphony to me,” he said simply, and all the breath slipped out of her.
And then it struck her, how much she had overlooked Hank because of his arm. He really was attractive. His eyes were slanted downwards in the corners, giving him this weird exotic look when he smiled, and his nose had an elegant curve to it that reminded her of the Roman men in her old history books that she had neglected to read. But even if he didn’t have any of those attributes, he was still a human being, and she had never once stopped to acknowledge his human-ness. How many people had looked past Autumn herself at the hospital, writing her off as Another Cancer Patient? How many kids had stared at her and laughed at her for being a bald-headed teenager back in high school? How could she have missed out on a lesson she thought she’d learned years ago?
Before Hank could get too tired, she cleared her throat. “Hey, speaking of all this, have I been acting weird lately?”
“Rephrase that.”
“Ugh, I don’t know. My friends think I’m different now because of…well, you.”
“Nah. You’re just plain old Autumn to me.”
“Good.”
She pulled up Facebook next and shrieked.
“What is it?!” he asked, looking around like something was on fire.
“That girl Marina, at my work – she just got engaged.”
“…And?”
“And that means someone’s about to get more attention than me. Shit.”
He tried to smile, but something about it rang false.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Could you just not be so narcissistic for a second?”
“I am not a narcissist!”
He pointed towards the sky. “You have a picture of yourself hanging above your bed.”
“My eyes were popping that day!”
“Case rested. You also have your mug shot framed in your kitchen.”
“Oh, come on, it was just road rage.”
He stared at her. “You told the cop to, and I quote, ‘fuck himself sideways with a fire hydrant.’”
“He called me ‘missy’ and said he didn’t believe women should mix with machinery!” Autumn cried. “It’s not my fault that I seem to have some condition where I physically attract douche monsters into my life.”
He shook his head.
“You know,” Autumn said, “speaking of douches, the last time I dated someone, it didn’t end so well.”
“What happened?”
Autumn’s eyes glazed over. “Well, at first it was amazing – we talked every day, we got to know everything about each other, we fell in love, he said he wanted to meet my family, the whole nine yards. Butterflies, rainbows, chocolates – the whole shebang. Those were the best eight days of my life – up until now, at least.”
His face grew skeptical. “And then?”
“And then we met in person,” Autumn said so matter-of-factly, Hank had to do a double-take. “Let me tell you, our breakup wasn’t pretty. I was already going through a rough time – I’d posted a selfie that only got two likes, and that level of heartbreak just really made me think about what was important in life. Our relationship fell apart soon after that.” She took on an acid, mocking tone. “‘Stop calling me, Autumn,’ he would say. ‘Stop getting caught staring through our windows at night,’ his roommates would say. ‘Stop showing up at our property and crying into a megaphone, the restraining order goes into effect on Monday,’ his family would say. But I got them. I got them good. I’m sure they’ll never know what happened to their prized little award-winning cat, will they?”
Autumn glanced over at her cat Charlene, who looked suspiciously to Hank like one of those exotic breeds that rich people paid obscene amounts of money for. He stared at her with terror in his eyes, but he tried to shake it off.
Autumn took out a gossip magazine. “But you’re different. We just click. We hate all the same things, and I love that about us.”
He thought about that for a moment, feeling her silence. Autumn didn’t like the pause, and she looked over to find him looking unconvinced.
“Hank! Come on. Why wouldn’t I like you? You worship me and you’re handsome in a devastated, depressed, slightly murdery way. I will be able to take complete control of you and make you my slave. You’re perfect. It’s almost weird, actually, because I hate everyone except you. You’re also a little better looking than me, which is a plus. It makes me look hotter.”
“Shut up, you’re beautiful.”
“Hank, stop. I am totally comfortable with the fact that I am a six out of ten – maybe a six-and-a-half when I’ve just gotten a stomach flu and I look thin. But I’m not depressed about it, because I know I’m definitely a ten by comparison whenever I go to Wal-Mart.”
He laughed.
“Actually, we are going to need to lay down some ground rules if we move in together,” she said.
“Ground rules?”
“Yep. First of all, you have to let me eat whatever I want, whenever I want.”
“All good,” he nodded. “I would never control you in that way, anyway. And you can only make three armless jokes about me a day.”
“Five,” she said.
“Four.”
“Fine. Deal. And you have to let me dress how I want.”
“You mean, like a deranged clown?”
She gasped. “Hey! So I like a little color. So what?”
“You dress like Bozo after a bad acid trip,” he said, and Autumn rolled her eyes as only she could.
“It’s called pizzazz, you idiot. What would you know about clothes? You cut all the sleeves off your shirts, anyway.”
“There’s your first arm joke,” he pointed out. “You only have three left.”
“Okay, but no jokes about how ditzy I am, like when I didn’t know the capital of Montana, or Manhattan, or whatever country you were talking about, that just had that big hurricane. You know I don’t have a brain for geology.”
He shook his head. “I’m not even going to answer that one.”
“Fine. Shut up and make love to me, you one-armed stud.”
“Now that’s what I like to hear.”
She smiled. “Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“…What if my cancer comes back?”
He shrugged. “Then we deal with it.”
“Wow,” she said after a minute.
“What?”
“You’re just so much better than anything I ever thought I deserved.”
His face fell into a big, loopy smile, and she looked up at the ceiling in a bid to preserve the scene in her memory forever. There were just no words for this, for the past few weeks of her suddenly interesting life. There were no words for how much he felt like hers, and how much she felt like his. There were no words for how Hank looked at her, like he was amazed. There were no words for being lost inside your own tiny world with someone in the back of a cruddy dive bar on a rainy Thursday with the whole weekend opening out in front of you, flickering lights, flickering eyes. Everyone should get to know that feeling, Autumn thought to herself, and now that she finally was, she wanted to feel it for the rest of her whole life.
“You are home to me,” he said.
“That’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Then you’ve been hanging with the wrong people.”
When Hank fell into that deep comfortable rhythm of breathing that betrayed sleep thirty minutes later, after he had loved her in his way, Autumn slipped off to the bathroom. She wanted to make sure she was still Autumn, the neurotic cynical girl who was twelve pounds too fat and who spit on the sidewalk when she thought nobody was looking and who couldn’t remember to pay her cable bill on time to save her life. Maybe she had changed. She was breaking all her old rules, all those old guidelines that had kept her safe and happy and alone, and she needed assurance that she was still Autumn. So she turned on the light and took it all in. And there they were, all those features that everyone until Hank had overlooked and mocked and glanced past. There were her flushed, chubby cheeks she’d inherited from her evil old Aunt Janaki, curse her soul. There were her beady dark eyes that always looked like they were thinking of a joke too offensive to say out loud. There were the craters from the bad case of chicken pox that had caused people to call her Moongirl in middle school. There was her mouth, that damned thing that was always getting her into so much trouble, but that Hank seemed to love unequivocally. There was her shaggy, glossy black hair that Hank loved to twirl in his fingers, despite it all. Yes, there was Autumn Mahal, a girl with a boyfriend. Sure enough, she was herself – just loved.