Gabe just shook his head. He didn’t say anything, but Ruby could imagine what he was thinking: You actually pay rent to not live here?
Ruby twisted a lock of her hair around her finger. She and Gabe had talked a little about the differences between them. But their conversations had been general, not specific. She didn’t know about the neighborhood in Los Angeles where Gabe had grown up, or much about his life before he’d come east for college. She knew that his mother had lived in New York, before he was born, and that she and Gabe had lived with her parents, in her childhood bedroom, for a while when Gabe was little. She knew that Gabe hated cilantro, that he’d been raised nominally Catholic but never went to church, that he was bisexual and could understand but not speak Spanish. Beyond that, Ruby could make guesses, based on what she saw: the way Gabe had worn the same pair of black-and-white checkered Vans for the entire time she’d known him, or how he always bought used textbooks and sold them back to the university bookstore at the end of the semester, or the way that, when he’d packed, his entire wardrobe had fit into the duffel he’d set at the foot of the bed. At college, rich kids and poor kids and all the kids in between wore versions of the same clothes, ate the same meals, attended the same classes, studied from the same textbooks, and typed their papers on the same laptops. There were differences, of course: some kids’ jeans cost twenty dollars and some kids’ cost two hundred; some kids owned the newest laptops and some just leased them from the school—but you had to look for them. College didn’t erase the differences between how everyone grew up, but it disguised those differences—except, of course, for the kids who went out of their way to drop the names of the places they’d vacationed or brag about getting bottle service at some club, and those kids were easy enough to avoid. Only now that Ruby was home, she had been unflattened, her circumstances brought sharply into focus, so that Gabe could see her life in all its dimension. And what must that look like, what must she look like, now?
I know how to fix this, Ruby thought. She took Gabe’s hand and tugged him toward the bed. A few minutes later, she was on her back, with Gabe’s mouth hot against hers, his hands warm at her waist, and her bra and sweatshirt both shoved up around her neck. Ruby hummed happily as she felt his lips against her cheek, then her neck. After the first few times they’d gone to bed together, she and Gabe had learned each other’s bodies, figured out each other’s rhythms, where, and how, they liked to be touched. When they made love, it was always satisfying, even if Ruby worried sometimes that it wasn’t the kind of explosive, world-shaking sex that would strip their souls bare and forge the kind of eternal, intimate communion that the movies and books—including her safta’s—had taught her to hope for. Maybe the books and the movies had it wrong, she thought, as Gabe cupped his hands under her bottom and Ruby wrapped her legs around his waist. Maybe even the best sex was more akin to a good meal than a revelation. Maybe she’d bought into a bunch of stupid, paternalistic myths and was being dumb to worry about how, when she came, it was hardly ever during actual intercourse, and usually with the help of Gabe’s hand, or her own. Maybe…
“Stop thinking,” Gabe had murmured in her ear. The feel of his breath on her skin made her shiver. Ruby closed her eyes. The scent of her sheets, her stepmother’s fabric softener, was all around her, the feel of her down comforter beneath its crisp duvet cover. The slant of the light through the window, the hardwood floor creaking underneath them, all of it was wonderfully familiar, and as she felt Gabe slide inside her, Ruby felt content, her monkey brain ceasing its chatter, until everything was quiet and she felt herself, finally, at peace, at home. Only Gabe could ever make her feel that way. She never wanted to let him go.
That was the night that Ruby decided she wanted to marry her sweetheart… and what Ruby wanted, Ruby got. When she’d decided to learn to play the drums she’d worked on her dad until he’d agreed, and when she’d wanted to do theater she’d convinced the head of her high school’s drama club to let her join when she was just in eighth grade. She’d gotten into her first-choice college; she’d gotten both of the internships she wanted once she was there. She knew how to apply herself and work toward the goal of a future together, and it helped, of course, that Gabe wanted it, too. He loved living with her, although sometimes Ruby worried that what he loved even more was being with a family, in a big, capacious house with two adults who were accomplished cooks and two little boys who idolized him. In the end, it hadn’t been hard at all. “We should get married,” she’d said, after they’d made love on a night six months later. It had been a Friday—Shabbat dinner, a movie in the basement screening room （which was just an extra-large flat-screen TV and an extra-wide couch）。 Bowls of buttered popcorn and Sarah’s seven-layer bars, which were better than any candy. Slipping away when the movie was over, shedding their clothes in the playroom so they were naked by the time they reached the bed. A perfect night, and when Ruby had whispered her plan—we should get married—Gabe had said, “I’m in.” For months it had been their secret. As soon as they’d found their own place, and started their jobs, Ruby had called her safta, and Gabe had called his mom, and they’d gone back to Brooklyn, to give Sarah and Eli and Dexter and Miles the news.