“Nice,” I tell Daniel in surprise. Somehow it doesn’t quite seem like his style.
“My ex-wife painted it a long time ago,” he explains in a low voice so he doesn’t wake up Sari. His eyes are friendly and sad. His cheek nestles gently into his daughter’s fall of dark hair. “Hold on to that infinity as long as you can.”
We get all of Daniel’s picnic stuff (and his kids) packed into the truck and then it putts off down the street. Penny and Stacia wave and head off in opposite directions.
And then it’s just me and Vin.
“So, what happened?” Vin prods the second we’re on the Btrain, both holding the pole and swaying.
I try to tell him about the fight, but he can’t stop touching me. He’s sliding my hair behind my ear. He’s pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose. He’s untangling my earring. Is it just me or did he get taller since the last time he physically adored me?
“Are you even listening?” I demand, which makes the kid in AirPods and a backpack (who is also holding this same pole) laugh. I turn to the kid. “He’s not even listening.”
“Lauro got yelled at! I listened,” Vin insists.
“Yeah, but it was the context that was important!” I say.
“What context?”
“Em isn’t someone who normally yells,” the AirPod kid supplies. “Plus, it sounds like they were probably dating at some point.”
I point at the kid. “He gets it.”
“Okay, okay,” Vin says, with a smile for me and for New York. “I get it. It’s big. Lauro and Em. Who’d have thought.” Now he’s straightening the straps of the tote bag against my shoulder. With a frown, he realizes I’m the one carrying the casserole dish and takes the bag over to his own shoulder. And then I guess that messed up my shirt because now he’s smoothing it down.
I roll my eyes at the kid. “I guess I’ll just try again later.”
The kid is laughing and looking back and forth between us. “Have a good night.” He waves and gets off at Bryant Park.
A crush of people board the train and Vin takes the opportunity to crowd me. A suitcase rolls over my toe and Vin lifts it like it’s a shoebox, handing it from a teenager to their father. Elbows and high heels and packs of people who just got out ofFrozen.The world is an obstacle course but I’ve got a bodyguard. Vin plants his forearm across my shoulder blades and curls us away from the pole, which has gotten too crowded. He holds the overhead bar for both of us and I hold his ribs.
It has been a very long day and my feet are tired but I wouldn’t mind if this train ride were six hours long.
But it ends, as all things do, and now we’re headed down our block, back to our apartment, where the worst year of either of our lives mostly took place, and to the two separate bedrooms that nearly tore us in two.
“Vin—” The entrance to our apartment building opens its yawning mouth. This building has been here for a hundredand fifty years, it’s seen it all. It doesn’t care about quarreling couples. It’s six stories tall and six units wide on a Saturday night. Someone is almost certainly getting banged into their headboard in there as we speak. Dropping a cake on the floor, fresh from the oven. Singing in the shower. Deciding whether or not to fuck your husband? It’s not fazed. Nothing would surprise this rent-controlled building. These are nerves, I realize, at going upstairs, just the two of us, and seeing exactly what’s worth fighting for. “Vin—”
But he’s not listening again. He’s suddenly got one arm braced across me, stepping in front, yanking me back behind him. There’s a large man lunging up from the stairs of the building, jolting toward us on feet like roller skates.
“Roz!” he chirps, and reaches for us. “And Hot Vin.”
“Lauro?” I duck under Vin’s arm and steady the unsteady mop of a man who falls into my arms. My heart, meanwhile, is a race car. Perceived danger. Vin putting himself in front of me. Blue tile and an accident that can never be undone. But it’s fine, it’s fine, of course it’s all fine. It’s just my friend Lauro, drunk. “Are you okay?”
I say this to Lauro, but I glance back at Vin. Who is definitely not okay. He doesn’t love a danger surprise any more than the next man who’s had a brush with death in the last year. I make sure Lauro is steady on his feet and then immediately return to Vin’s side. His fingers slide over my shoulders, to my elbows, to my hands. Verifying, for his touch memory, that I’m safe, I’m fine, we’re all fine. I lace my fingers with his and give him a squeeze.
“Okay?” Lauro muses, blissfully unaware of anything that he’s just triggered in us. “Well, sure. But the mushrooms were a bad idea.”
“What mushrooms?” I’m thinking about everyone’s potluck dishes and coming up mushroomless.
“These ones?” he says, and pulls a little baggie out of his pocket. In it are about an ounce of wrinkly gray-brown magic mushrooms.
“Oh.God.”
“No, no,” Raff says (materializing from nowhere) as he resurrects from a pile of what looked like clothes on the stoop. “It wasthesemushrooms.”
A second baggie of mushrooms is produced.
“Did you know he was there?” I muse to Vin.
