Rae took off her sneakers without untying them and hung her blazer on the peg—officially and unequivocallyher pegnow.
She’d moved into the Lorimer Loft after the penthouse lease expired last month. Since she’d effectively been living here anyway, it didn’t change much and was definitively the right economic decision and probably the right emotional decision as well.
Rae still didn’t feel old enough to be living with a boyfriend, but she felt wise enough for it, so the factors netted out in her mind. Her mom was bearish on the decision (“He’ll have no incentive to marry you!”) and her grandpa had been kept out of the loop to minimize the chance of a heart attack. In the Scramblette group chat, Mina had unsurprisingly been the most supportive (OMG so exciting!!! BIG STEP).
Ellen had kept silent over text, and Sarah had asked, multiple times,But where will you go if you have a fight?
This risk wasn’t relevant for Rae and Dustin. They often went to bed sad, but they never went to bed mad.
Tonight Dustin was slouched on the couch, still dressed in his work shirt, bottoms shed to boxers. A computer was propped open on the coffee table as a TV. He hadn’t been in the mood to read lately, or even be read to. Netflix was the only thing he didn’t nix.
“Inevitable,” Dustin answered, as if it were highly uninformed of her to have to ask.
Explosions ricocheted out from the computer speakers. For the past week, Dustin had been watching and rewatching a documentary calledInevitableabout how all of humanity and seven-eighths of earth’s living organisms were going to be destroyed from nuclear warfare within six years.
He went long periods showing no interest in anything and then would latch on to something that Rae found pointless and peripheral—a lost sock, a rude work email, this documentary—as if it were central to his whole identity.
“Come watch it,” Dustin said, without rearranging the sprawl of his legs to make room for her on the couch.
“I already watched it,” Rae said as she walked into the living room, tights slippery on the hardwood floor. “What good is going to come from watching it again?”
“That’s a very defeatist mentality.”
Rae bit back a caustic rebuttal. “Can we just talk on the roof? Or watch a movie?”
“This is a movie.”
“Another movie?”
“No,” Dustin said. “This is important.”
Rae joined him on the couch, twining her fingers through his with anI love yousqueeze. Dustin didn’t squeeze back. The colorful abstract art piece she’d bought was still hanging on the opposite wall—watching or mocking, Rae couldn’t decide.
Against a canned bombing soundtrack, the man on the screen was explaining how many times more powerful today’s nuclear weapons could be—down to the hundredths decimal place—than the ones used in World War II.
Rae felt a crunching feeling, worse than from punching highly specific, highly inaccurate numbers into spreadsheets. She looked down at Dustin’s hand, limply joined to hers, and flipped it over to draw reassuring circles across volatile palm lines.
The cuff of his sleeve was unbuttoned, the bottom half of his forearm free from binding. On his wrist lay a thin, fresh scar, the length of an indent on a page and the width of a tea bag string. Beside it was a shorter, fainter replica. Together they formed an inverted V, the faded scar sloped sharply up, the bright one sharply down.
Rae’s breath froze as everything else burned. She held Dustin’s wrist like she might grip a water bottle, resting her thumb next to, but not on top of, the red marks.
In uneven increments, her mind skipped ahead, past the decision on whether he’d cut himself on purpose, past the punch of her own guilt for pressing away the warning signs, past the analysis of whether he’d used a razor blade or a knife, past the timeline of when it had happened—last night, when she was working late, or if the fainter scar had been there weeks already—past the consideration of whether he had other cuts on his body right at this moment.
Her mind rattled past, but not through, those considerations and lurched to a stop straight in front of the question of how likely it was that this would happen again and that the scars would grow indimension—the probability that next time she wouldn’t find Dustin alert on the couch but passed out in a puddle of his own blood.
She finally spoke, with faux composure. “What’re these?”
“What’re what?” Dustin asked, keeping his eyes on the screen.
“These,” Rae said, avoiding calling the scars by name. “On your wrist.”
“Oh,” Dustin said, still transfixed on the documentary. “One of the guys at work brought his dog in, and it went crazy on the trading floor. Bit my arm. But I have a tetanus shot, I’m fine.”
He said it so smoothly, as if he’d explained it several times before, or at least practiced explaining it.
Rae reached over to the coffee table and closed the computer, silencing the bald man’s warning midsentence.
“What’re you doing?” Dustin asked.
