Happy Place(63)

I try to think about anything else. My mind is caught on him.

Earlier tonight, as Cleo and I rested our chins atop our folded arms at the pool’s edge, legs sweeping in slow, luxurious kicks through the water, she asked, Any progress on your goal for the week?

And my eyes went straight for Wyn.

Not yet, I told her.

I don’t even know what I need from this week. To make it to the end without coming apart? Or without ruining Sabrina and Parth’s wedding?

My life has been on one set of rails since I decided to go into medicine. It’s been easy to make decisions with that as the governing force. Outside of that, I’ve rarely had to.

But I don’t want to regret anything at the end of this week. I want to feel like I used this time, even in a small way, how I wanted to.

And that’s what I fall asleep thinking over and over again: What do you want, Harriet?

I dream he climbs into bed with me. Arms up, baby, he says, and peels away my Virgin Who CAN Drive T-shirt.

There’s no one else, he whispers into the curve of my belly, the underside of my arm. Perfect, he says.

When I wake before sunrise, I’m still alone.





21





HAPPY PLACE

WEST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY


WYN’S AND MY first place, just the two of us. A hissing radiator. A ghost who never does much, other than open a window when it’s cool out or knock a book off a shelf. Sitting on the floor, eating noodles straight from the takeout boxes because we don’t have a couch yet.

Side tables found on curbs and repaired to perfection by Wyn. A shelf installed above our bed, lined with the James Herriot paperbacks Hank used to read Wyn and his sisters when they were small. Plus one particular romance novel, whose origins neither of us even recall. (Wyn says it probably belongs to the ghost.) Our first place together, just the two of us, and it’s bittersweet.

Weeks ago, as the end of the lease on the Morningside Heights apartment drew closer, Cleo sat us down in a row on Parth’s squashy couch to announce she was moving.

Not just out of the apartment, or even New York.

To Belize, to work on an organic farm.

It’s called WWOOFing, she explained. You live there for free in exchange for some work.

And at first no one said anything. Until then, we’d been in a suspended reality. It had felt as if we’d stay like this, together forever, and nothing would change.

It’s only temporary, Cleo said, a six-month contract, but she was crying.

We all knew: this was the end of an era.

So we sat on the rug, our arms wrapped around her like we were a giant artichoke, her as our heart.

The night before she left, Parth organized a slideshow send-off, putting our favorite memories from the last three years up on the wall, and we cried some more, but in the morning, we put on brave faces and hugged goodbye outside JFK. See you soon, we promised.

We tried to find a new place to accommodate the remaining four of us.

We couldn’t.

Instead, Parth moved in with a friend from Fordham, Sabrina took over an Armas cousin’s vacant Chelsea loft, and Wyn and I scrounged up enough to rent the tiny apartment over the bookstore he’d been working at.

The whole first night we were there, I had to keep shutting myself in the bathroom for crying jags. I missed Cleo so much it hurt. I was afraid this was the end. That my friends would prove to be passing figures in my life, family becoming strangers.

After my last crying fit, I came out of the bathroom to a cry of “SURPRISE!”

Wyn had called Parth and Sabrina. They came, with pizza and champagne. “We had to christen the place,” Parth said.

“Plus, I want to see if this place is as haunted as it looks,” Sabrina added.

After that night, the apartment becomes home.

We’re happy here.

Parth and Sabrina come over once a week for dinner, and even though we’re alleged Real Adults, sometimes they sleep over on the couch and air mattress, and in the morning we get diner breakfast before heading to our separate programs or, in Wyn’s case, down to the bookstore.

And it doesn’t get boring, just the two of us. Every bit of Wyn he gives me is something to treasure, to examine from every angle.

The last words I hear every night are I love you so much. Sometimes he gets to say it last, but sometimes I do too. Sometimes we compete, saying it back and forth like we’re fourteen-year-olds: No, you hang up first.

Medical school ramps up. I start TAing for my favorite professor. The sex slows down, but not the touching, not the affection. His love is steady, constant. Easier than breathing, because breathing is something you can overthink, to the point that you forget how your lungs work and get yourself into a panic.

I could never forget how to love Wyn.

Sometimes, lying beside him in our bed, my ice-cold feet tucked between his warm calves, the words flit through my mind, like they’re coming from somewhere else, like my soul hears his whispering in its sleep, You belong here.

On Saturday mornings, we drink coffee on the sofa next to the window and do crossword puzzles. Or we start crossword puzzles. It becomes something of a tradition, starting and abandoning them.

Every week I try to make it through at least one more clue than the week prior, while Wyn tries to derail us earlier and earlier.

“Eight across,” I tell him, while he’s kissing his way down my neck, “is The Weakest Link.”