42
OUR first eight days together are the best days of my life. You have these plush giant robes from the Ritz-Carlton. You tell me this elaborate story about stealing them while on spring break with Lynn and Chana. I love that you love to tell stories. You couldn’t possibly know that I know that you stole them from Peach’s place and I don’t tell! We live in these robes and you like to entertain me and you do.
Day Two of us, we’re lounging around in our robes and you declare the Rule of the Robes: “When you are in my apartment, you are allowed to be naked or in a robe.”
“And what if I don’t comply with the Rule of the Robes?”
You saunter up to me and growl. “You don’t wanna know, buster.”
I promise to abide by the rule and I like you all charged up, adult. Your therapy worked because your daddy issues are gone and with me, you’re a woman, not a little girl. You’re not sending e-mails to yourself anymore, and why would you? You have me to talk to and oh, do we talk. Van Morrison doesn’t know shit about love because you and I are inventing love in our Ritz-Carlton robes, with our all night conversations, with our moments of silence that are, as you say, “the opposite of awkward.”
We’re living on each other and we don’t need sleep and by Day Five we have more private jokes than Ethan and Blythe do. We watch Pitch Perfect on Netflix—you call it your favorite movie but you don’t own the DVD; you are fascinating—and you press PAUSE. You curl up into me and tell me I’m the best and I tease you about loving this movie and you giggle and snort and we wrestle and by the time they go to their championship or whatever, we’re in bed, fucking. You love me more than anything and you tell me I’m smarter than the guys in your grad program and the guys you knew in college and we read one of Blythe’s stories together and I call it solipsistic and you agree.
The next morning, I wake up first—who can sleep with you in the world?—and I notice that you were up earlier. You’re like a child in the best way and you leave a trail of bread crumbs wherever you go and your trail leads me into the kitchen, where the dictionary is open and the word solipsistic is smeared with chocolate icing from the half-eaten chocolate cake on the counter. I love you for listening, unabashedly.
You don’t want me to leave but I have to go to work.
“But I want you to stay,” you argue and even your aggression is sweet. “Can’t Ethan cover?”
“I hate to break it to you, Beck, but you should have thought of this when you were fixing him up with Blythe.”
You groan and you block the door and you let your robe fall open. “You’re breaking the Rule of the Robe, Joe.”
“Fuck,” I say and you maul me and eventually I do leave and the day goes by so slowly and we text so much my thumbs are falling off. I want to bring you all the books in the world, but I settle on one of my favorites that you’ve never read, In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien.
You let me into your place and you take it with tender hands and you kiss me with your sweet, soft Guiniverean lips. “I knew I was waiting to read this book for a reason,” you say. “It’s like I knew someday there’d be someone who gave it to me or something.”
“Well, I’m glad you waited.”
On Day Seven we invent a game: Fake Scrabble. The rule is no real words allowed. You come up with calibrat and I spell out punklassical and you beat me and you brag and I love you all hopped up on the win. You love to win and I’m not a sore loser and we’ll be as good in forty years as we are now.
On Day Nine, I catch you using my toothbrush and you blush. At first you rinse your mouth and claim it was a mistake but I see through you and I know your eyes and you bite your lip and cover your eyes. “I’m just going to say this and I can’t look at you when I say this. I like using your toothbrush because I like having you inside of me and I’m sorry I know that’s weird and gross.” I don’t say a word. I clap a hand over your hand and pull your panties off and give it to you right here, in my bathroom.
On Day Ten you tell me that you’ve never felt less single in your life.
On Day Eleven I tell you that I found myself singing a song from Pitch Perfect in the shop and didn’t stop even when people started laughing. “You’re inside of me,” I say and like that, you’re on your knees, hungry.
On Day Fourteen I realize that I have lost track of time because I’m not sure if it’s Day Fourteen or Day Fifteen and you squeeze my hand as we walk down the street. “That’s because every day is the only day,” you say. “I’ve never been so present in my life.”
I kiss the top of your head and you’re my articulate little bunny. “I never lose track of time, Beck. I think I might be into you.”
On Day Seventeen it rains and we’re in our robes in your bed and you highlight your favorite parts of In the Lake of the Woods and read them to me. When I go to work, I barely get anything done because you can’t leave me alone for five minutes without texting. Sometimes you want to talk about nothing:
Did you ever notice that the fingers on my right hand are crooked? Yep. You can tell I’m getting a lot done over here. Anyway . . . how’s work?
And sometimes, there are no words, just pictures, intense close-ups of my favorite places on your body, of which there are so many. You never make me wonder and you write back to me while I’m writing back to you and we never run out of things to say. Nobody’s ever known me this well. Nobody has ever cared. When I tell you a story, you have questions. You are rapt.
How old were you? Oh come on, I won’t get jealous if you tell me about your first time. Joe, please. Tell me tell me tell me!
And I tell you, tell you, tell you! Ethan says the first few days of any relationship are intense but Ethan doesn’t understand that this is not a relationship. You say it’s an everythingship. And what do I do with that adorable word after you come up with it? I buy a box of cake mix and a disposable silver pan and a can of frosting and three tubes of icing. I bake a cake for you and I write on the top of it:
Everythingship (n): a meeting of the minds, bodies, and souls.
And I carry that cake down the block and down into the subway and on the subway and up the stairs and up the street and up to your door and you squeal and you take about a million pictures of the cake and then we get into bed and eat the cake and have sex and watch old home movies of your family on Nantucket and eat more cake and have more sex and this is the only everythingship I’ve ever had.
I am on the ladder at work and Ethan is passing me unpopular books to hide in the high shelves and he says I can’t expect for it to stay this good and I am quick to respond, confident, bold. “I know it’s not gonna stay this good.”
“Phew,” he says.
“It’s only gonna get better.”
He goes to help a customer and the what-ifs crawl into my ear, right out of Shell Silverstein in Poetry. I text you:
Hi
And I tremble and sweat. What if Ethan is right? What if you don’t write back? What if you don’t miss me anymore? But you text me immediately:
I love you.
I could fall off the ladder and crack open my skull and it wouldn’t matter. Like Elliot says in Hannah, “I have my answer.”
My answer is you.