Hal had a bad shoulder. Danna had no patience for it. She felt Hal was selective about what the shoulder could take. They could fuck in whatever position, he could carry her bags at the airport, but if Danna wanted to book a duo Pilates session ever, Hal was in agony. He often said it like that: I’m in agony. Hal and Danna were sitting on a restaurant patio, eating cheeses. Hal had the ball game up on his phone. In the morning, they’d leave on a short vacation in celebration of Danna’s birthday; the night before a vacation, they never ate
at home.

Hal was moving his right shoulder in circles: forward, backward, forward. When he did his shoulder exercises his face always became vacant, upsettingly so.

‘Who’s winning?’ Danna asked.

‘Not us,’ said Hal. He rolled his shoulder harder. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’ He made a disgusting noise of relief and rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand.

Hal had no shame about pain. He’d grown up loved. Danna had been loved too, but by parents who were doctors. There’d been no room for pain in Danna’s house; her parents were amputating feet and resecting bowels. The only person who’d ever cared to hear about Danna’s pain was Hal. It was what made her love him right away: how seriously he took everything about her. When Danna had a headache Hal brought out his special headache hat, an ice pack in the shape of a crown. When Danna had strep, Hal shone a flashlight in her mouth to look at her tonsils twice a day and gave her creative descriptions of how they looked. The left one looks like a striped candy. The right one looks like a blobfish.

Hal held his silverware in the European style because his mother had grown up holding it that way. He could flex his butt cheeks independently of one another, on command. He’d published a chapbook straight out of grad school about an empty field and time passing and dedicated it to Danna. Danna had intrusive thoughts sometimes about Hal getting crushed by the train or stabbed by a bum on the train or stabbed by Danna herself in the middle of the night while she sleepwalked, which she’d never done, but which she always feared she might spontaneously start doing. The thoughts made her very sad most of the time. But sometimes when she had them she didn’t feel anything at all, and she wondered what she’d feel if Hal died for real. Sometimes she thought nothing. She wondered if that meant she didn’t love him. She wondered if that meant she shouldn’t marry him. She wondered if anyone should marry anyone. She wondered if she’d have these thoughts if she were marrying someone very rich. She wondered if she’d have these thoughts if she were marrying someone who wasn’t very rich but who wasn’t Hal. Eight years in, Hal felt like another her, somehow. She knew his body better than her own, she loved how silky he was, she could tell by the hitch of his voice exactly what he was thinking and exactly why he was thinking it, she could watch him struggle with a jar and know whether he would be able to get it open, she could tell by the way he headed toward the bathroom whether he was going in to shit or trim his nails, she could tell from how he looked at his phone who he was texting. She could trace his behaviors and failures and strengths to the behaviors and failures and strengths of his parents and of his brothers. She could make the worst and thickest noise when she orgasmed and feel safe in the certainty he’d love it. When he couldn’t penetrate her, which was often, because Danna had a tight pelvic floor, she knew exactly the sorts of phrases to whisper in his ear while he jerked himself off with one hand and cupped his own balls with the other, the order to say them in, which ones to repeat, which one to save for last, which one would make Hal get that sad look in his eyes that meant he was about to bust. She felt liable for him. She had the capacity to hate him. She had the need to manage him, protect him. She and Hal cared for each other. They popped each other’s pimples. They fingered one another’s assholes. They did each other’s dishes. And so, they’d recently decided, they would become engaged to be married at the end of the summer.

Danna’s great dream was to commit double suicide with Hal at sixty-five so that neither of them would ever have to endure the humiliations of old age. Danna’s mother had had a pair of patients who’d done just that about five years ago, walking into a canal together with rocks in their pockets. They were elderly communists and they’d had enough. When Danna imagined herself and Hal as old communists who’d had enough, walking together into death, it felt realer to her than the present. For this reason Danna wondered if maybe what she really wanted was just to die.

Now Danna’s mother was texting. Have fun. I am very happy for you.

Danna blinked at the text. ‘Um,’ she said out loud, ‘why does my mom think we’re getting engaged this weekend?’

Hal didn’t answer her. He had his hand over his mouth: that meant Brandon Marsh was at bat. Danna knew better than to press him. She went on the website of the jeweler who was making her ring and looked at the piece that would be ready for her in nine to twelve weeks: sometime in August. It was a gold band, channel-set with small squares of lapis lazuli. It wasn’t one of a kind. Probably several other girls had it. Danna hoped that in a year she’d still think it was chic. It was what Hal could afford. Danna had never dreamed of an engagement ring; she’d dreamed of being someone’s favorite. The ring proved that she was Hal’s.

‘Because we leave tomorrow? Or because they’re fascists,’ Hal said, after a time. ‘Fascists without a dream in their heart.’ Danna ignored it when Hal deployed these kinds of non sequiturs; they were an affectation he’d shaped for the purpose of getting attention from his father – a radical who hated children, a deadly serious writer of dense, unpopular novels. Hal had had to say things like They’re fascists, fascists without a dream in their heart from the time he was a child, probably, just to get his father’s head out of the London Review of Books. To Danna, understanding the roots of someone’s tics or pains better than they understood them themselves was the purest love could get.

‘Ah,’ said Hal. Marsh was out. Danna handed him a piece of cheese and he ate it without looking at her.

‘It’s just ball,’ they said at the same time; it was what they said when something was wrong.

Hal drove. Danna texted and listened to lo-fi beats and watched Instagram stories and checked the weather and looked at photos from May 2018 and November 2017 and searched StreetEasy for one-bedrooms under $3,500 in Fort Greene Park Slope Crown Heights Prospect Heights Gowanus Williamsburg Greenpoint Carroll Gardens Columbia Waterfront District Brooklyn Heights Clinton Hill Windsor Terrace Prospect Lefferts Gardens and checked the stock market and opened TikTok and watched a TikTok of a dog licking a baby’s head and one of a woman talking about being diagnosed with stage four cancer while pregnant and one of a woman showing off her collection of Chanel ballet flats and one of a man adding jam to yogurt to make a high-protein dessert and one of a baby allegedly seeing a ghost and one of a nonbinary relationship advice expert who was saying that the thing women are looking for in a relationship is a man who will fight for them and then Danna closed TikTok and took a picture of the highway and uploaded it to Close Friends and checked Slack and looked on Depop and read all of the notes in her notes app and googled can you buy car over 100k miles reddit and opened Maps and zoomed all the way out and scrolled to Russia and zoomed in on parts of Russia and thought about vastness and Stalingrad and goats by the roadside and coldness and fur hats and how society had been constructed and how race had been constructed and how borders had been constructed and about one of her beautiful acting-school classmates from Kyrgyzstan and about visiting Kyrgyzstan, and then she googled visit kyrgistan american legal and americans visit tibet legal and paused the music and opened TikTok once more and watched a TikTok of a Tibetan girl that popped up first thing and a video of a Kyrgyz girl that popped up second thing, which made her think about her Kyrgyz classmate’s eating disorder, which made her think about her own eating disorder, and her mother’s eating disorder, at which point she began to feel huge in her body, so she went back to looking at apartments and requested a tour of an apartment on Lincoln Place for Tuesday, when they’d be back, and then she rested her head against the window, breathed in heavily twice, thought hazily about the Lincoln Place apartment’s wide wood floorboards – so much wider than the floorboards in their current place – and fell asleep to the dream of them.

‘Danna,’ Hal said in his emergency voice, ‘Danna,’ rousing her.

Her stomach squeezed in on itself. Her arms went numb. She braced for whatever.

‘Am I getting off here,’ Hal asked, frantic, ‘or am I going straight?’

‘I’m asleep,’ Danna said. Her ears hurt. Her big headphones were still on. She lifted the right earpad and placed it behind her right ear. She looked through the windshield. They were veering right, toward the exit. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I think –’

‘Fuck,’ Hal said, whipping his neck left. ‘Fuck.’ He pulled the wheel hard. Then they were on the grassy triangle between the exit and the highway.

‘Ahh,’ Danna said. ‘Jesus fuck.’

They were stopped just in front of a murder of sturdy orange barricades, little cylinders bunched together like kindergarteners. The car lilted to the left. They were upstate-ish; there were hills.

‘Fuck,’ Hal said again, and tried to merge back on to the road.

‘Stop,’ Danna said, ‘stop, is the car okay?’ It was a rental; she had a sudden vision of being taken to court and squeezed for everything she had.

‘Nothing happened,’ Hal said. ‘We’re just on this part.’

‘Something happened,’ Danna said. ‘You’re not on the road.’

‘This is the road,’ Hal said.

‘It’s not the road,’ Danna said. ‘It’s the triangle. Stop. Stop moving. Put it in park. Put it in park.’

Hal wouldn’t put the car in park. Danna pulled up on the emergency brake.

‘You’re, like, freaking out,’ Hal said, shifting furiously into park.

‘You drove off the road,’ Danna said.

‘Because I didn’t know where to go. You were supposed to be on Maps.’

‘Stop gaslighting me,’ Danna said. ‘This is serious.’

‘This isn’t serious. I just need to know which way.’

Suddenly Danna’s head was vibrating. Her fancy German headphones were letting her know she was getting a call. ‘Mommy,’ said the lady who was the automated voice of Danna’s headphones. ‘Mommy.’ This was what the headphones said when Danna’s mother was calling. Danna declined the call.

‘Hold on,’ she said to Hal. She looked at Maps. ‘It says go straight.’ Danna looked up and ahead. ‘It’s a toll road here.’

‘I know,’ Hal said. ‘Which is why I got confused. We didn’t rent the – the thing, the whatever –’

‘What thing –’

‘The pass, the special pass that beeps. For tolls.’

‘They can bill by plate,’ Danna said. ‘There’s a whole bill-by-plate lane,’ she said, pointing to it, ‘right there.’

Hal followed her point, but he was making the face he made when he didn’t want to have things clarified or simplified, when he wanted to be confused, when he wanted to shame Danna with his confusion. ‘Where?’ he asked, squinting.

‘The – the far lane, there,’ Danna said. She pointed harder.

‘Fine,’ Hal said, pissed. He looked over his shoulder, disengaged the emergency brake and put the car in drive. He hung a hard left and floored the gas. The car rocketed across all four lanes. Lots of people honked.

‘HAL,’ said Danna, grabbing at the wheel, yanking it toward her, stopping Hal from smashing into one of the toll booths. Hal braked. A worker inside looked up like: Whoa.

‘Do you need to get out?’ Danna asked. ‘Do you need to get out and let me drive?’

‘I’m a good driver,’ Hal said.

‘So why is this happening, why are we doing this? You need to calm the fuck down. Take a fucking breath, dude.’

‘Don’t call me dude,’ Hal said. ‘I hate it when you call me dude.’ He took a breath. Hal was good at parallel parking and little else when it came to cars.

‘Let’s switch,’ Danna said, unbuckling. ‘We need to switch for a little.’

‘There’s cars,’ Hal said.

‘We need to switch,’ Danna said, and they did. Then she guided them through the toll booth and onward, toward the place they were paying money to visit.

The resort was not as nice as it had seemed online. Nothing ever was. Danna should’ve known better than to expect real comfort; she’d first seen it on TikTok. There was a small woodstove in the cabin, a laminated card on a table nearby that said i work. Danna dreamed for a second that later they’d gather some firewood together and get cozy, maybe trade lazy oral on the floor before it.

‘Fuck, my eyes,’ Hal said, taking off his glasses to paw at his lids. ‘They’re so dry.’

Danna’s phone buzzed. Giada – her oldest, simplest friend.

I SAW STORIES
ARE YOU THERE NOW
RING PIC IMMEDIATELY AS SOON AS IT HAPPENS IM DEADASS
IS THERE CHAMPS IN ROOM
OR FRUIT
?????????

There were some photogenic mandarins, stems attached, on a low table near the woodstove – Danna squeezed them, testing for realness.

Hal looked at the mandarins. ‘Aww,’ he said. ‘I love when they have the stems.’ He took a picture of Danna’s hand around the fruit, and Danna could tell by the way he moved his thumbs that he was tagging and posting.

thers fruit, she wrote Giada, but its complimentary
like he didn’t put it there
***theres

‘You didn’t order these, right?’ she asked Hal, double-checking.

Hal made a face that indicated he hadn’t. Danna’s ribs crackled; she felt rageful, out of nowhere. She never would’ve thought to want special hotel fruit. But now that there was fruit, and not because of Hal but because it was always here for everyone, she felt unspecial.

Giada texted a screenshot of Hal’s story of the mandarins, then three messages:

IS HE PROPOSING OR DID HE JUST TAKE U TO THE CATSKILLS FOR BDAY
IS HE PROPOSING OR DID HE JUST ORDER THE MOST AESTHETIC FRUIT FOR U
BLEEEEEEBS

Bleebs was what Giada said when she was feeling excited.

‘Is the ring secretly ready?’ Danna asked Hal. ‘Do you, like: secretly have the ring right now?’

Hal looked frightened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re on the emails with them too. You’d know.’

Danna had wanted a full-transparency proposal. No surprises. No pictures. She would not make the engagement face. She would not put her hands over her mouth. She and Hal would go to the store and pick up the ring, and they would walk to the waterfront, and he’d put it on her finger, and they’d walk home slowly, talking as they often did on walks about how much they loved one another, and nothing about their relationship would be different. But now Danna felt a lack.

Hal could see it in her face, apparently. ‘Is your mom bugging you about this? Is your mom making you feel like you should be engaged to me already when she doesn’t even want you to be engaged to me? Like I’m a dick for not proposing on your birthday when you told me you didn’t want me to propose on your birthday? Because your birthday was about your birthday and our relationship was about our relationship?’

‘Stop shitting on my mom,’ Danna said. ‘It’s Giada.’

‘Stop texting with Giada.’

‘You’re being really scary today.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Hal said. He put his hands in his hair. ‘We need to, like: I don’t know, dude, hit reset.’

‘You can’t call me dude if I can’t call you dude.’

‘Oh, my –’

‘You got so mad at me for calling you dude in the car. Like, so mad.’

‘I wasn’t so mad. I’m not mad. I haven’t been mad. I’m never mad at you, because you are the light of my fucking life.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Danna said, feeling crushed by love.

‘Don’t say fuck just because I said fuck,’ Hal said.

In minutes they were kissing. Sometimes they got their wires all – it was stupid. Why was it so hard for them to hear each other? Sometimes it felt like they’d never met before.

‘Do you sometimes feel like you’ve never met me before?’ she asked him, breaking the kiss. He tried not to let her. ‘Do you ever feel like we don’t know each other and we’re strangers?’

‘No,’ Hal said, so simple. ‘Do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Danna said. ‘I think it’s the driving.’

‘I made one fucking mistake. Because you weren’t navigating. Because you fell asleep. And I’d never begrudge you sleep. But I asked you to navigate.’

Danna knew Hal was right. Only babies could get away with falling asleep anywhere. ‘Two mistakes, right next to each other. Two bad mistakes.’

‘Nothing bad happened.’

But she felt like something bad had happened, even though it was, to be fair, objectively true that nothing had. In moments like this one Danna felt like something was growing out of her brain. Like she’d never know a moment of surety, or quiet. The might’ves were always branching, branching, carrying ugly blooms: the fear of missing something obvious, the fear of everyone but Danna knowing some great truth about what her life really was.

Early the next morning Danna dreamed that she was one of two finalists for a prestigious magazine job. Then the other finalist died and Danna got the job by default. She woke up feeling so boundless and powerful that she suggested a hike; there was a four-mile loop that started behind the resort, and though Danna was not an outdoorswoman, she’d inferred from the Instagrams of others that shared experiences in nature could deepen the connection between two people in an exponential way.

‘Great,’ said Hal, ‘lemme shower.’

‘But we’re going on a hike,’ Danna said.

Hal looked around as if at an audience. ‘So I can’t shower?’

‘No, it’s just: why would you? If you’re gonna get sweaty?’

‘I don’t get that sweaty walking,’ said Hal. ‘That’s you.’

While Hal showered, Danna dressed and applied SPF to her face, her vulva already sweating through her lululemon tights. ‘You’re making it so hot in here,’ she screamed through the frosted glass of the sliding door to the bathroom, but Hal didn’t respond. He emerged from the bathroom as he always did after a shower, fully dressed; Danna was dismayed to find that he was wearing chinos and a button-down. ‘We’re going on a hike,’ she said.

‘I didn’t bring hike clothes,’ said Hal.

‘We’re dressed for totally different things.’

‘So?’

‘So I want it to be an athletic walk.’

‘It’ll be an athletic walk.’

‘I want to get sweaty, though.’

Hal looked at her.

‘And when we’re dressed differently for the same thing it makes us both look retarded in completely different ways. Like: when I’m dressing for an athletic walk and you’re dressing for a casual walk, it’s like I’m alone in the pursuit of an athletic walk, and it’s like you don’t really want to be on the walk with me in the way I want to be on the walk.’

‘I want to be on the walk,’ Hal said. ‘In whatever way you want to be on a walk. I literally forgot the clothes. I wish I could be in the right clothes. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ Danna said.

‘But don’t say retarded, Danna,’ Hal said. ‘It doesn’t make you sound cool.’

The hike was simple and beautiful, but Hal seemed to have decided that he wanted to use it to make a point to Danna about her self-absorption. Each time they passed anyone on the trail, a few minutes later Hal would go, ‘Do you remember what they were wearing?’ and Danna would have to admit she didn’t and Hal would poke her shoulder and Danna would tell him to fuck off. Things grew tense and, at a certain point, when they heard someone around the next bend, Danna looked at Hal and said, ‘Don’t you fucking dare ask me what they’re wearing,’ but when the path straightened out on the far side of a deep curve there weren’t people there at all. A mother bear with three cubs was crossing the trail many yards ahead of them, one cub swiftly climbing into the brush on the trail’s western side while the other two stopped in the middle to play, like dogs, pawing and biting. The mother bear turned her head. Danna made eye contact with her, and she felt the quality and the length of their eye contact to be profound. Then the bear turned back to her cubs, urging them along. The babies walked into the yellowing brush, and their mother followed behind.

Hal smiled at Danna and squeezed her hand. He didn’t say a word, and neither did she. They walked forward: cautious, linked, studying the animals’ prints in the dirt.

After the bears, Danna started noticing the smells around her more intensely, and Hal started periodically going ‘Ah, Jesus’, and reaching up beneath his sunglasses to wipe tears from his eyes, and both of them became more vocal about pointing out flowers and leaves they liked to one another.

At the rough midpoint of the loop they stopped to sit on some large rocks and kiss and look at their phones and share some water from Hal’s water bottle, and Danna thought about what a perfect moment it would be for the moment of their engagement. Upon sitting down, Danna had pulled an expensive oversized sweater of real wool over her head to cut the chill in the air. Now, she felt thin and glamorous in the lazy way belonging to mid-errand celebrities. Once she’d seen Dakota Fanning in the old Chelsea Bed Bath & Beyond wearing an amazing plaid tunic, her hair silky and undone. Danna felt like that now, and it made her want to be seen and coveted and claimed. It was a pure, succulent moment, and she wasn’t prepared for it.

She was furious with herself for abandoning belief in life’s rarity and insisting on having everything out in the open, within her control; for having rejected such a distinct milestone of the female experience, such an ancient love ritual, in demanding no surprises. She became hateful of herself and deeply crabby, and because she’d taken a ten-milligram weed gummy right before the hike, her crabbiness pursued itself inward toward no terminus she could see.

‘Did you take a video of the bears?’ Danna asked Hal, knowing he hadn’t.

‘No,’ Hal said, like it was the dumbest question ever. ‘We were standing in front of bears. I thought I was going to have to get big.’

‘The men we passed,’ Danna said, ‘early on the hike.’

‘Yeah,’ Hal said.

‘I asked you if you thought they were a couple or a father and a son or a father and a grandson or half-brothers or whatever.’

‘Yeah,’ Hal said.

Danna beamed victory at him. ‘The old one was wearing a windbreaker and the young one was wearing a chore coat and suede boots.’

Because there was no video record of the bears’ sweetness, the memory of it quickly faded. By the time Hal and Danna reached the end of the loop, Danna’s high was gone, replaced by a dry throbbing that seemed to come from her amygdala. When she complained about the pain, Hal put an arm around her and offered to cancel their dinner reservation in town and order them room service instead so they could eat while watching Neon Genesis Evangelion in bed. Danna, who’d found comfort in anime since she was small, and who was often made anxious and queasy by the specific emotional pressure of eating in a nice restaurant anyway, agreed that that was what they should do.

The resort had a little spa, and, on their last day, Hal and Danna went for massages there. They were instructed to remove their clothes and don robes in a locker room, then head down the hall to a quiet room full of couches and armchairs to await the commencement of their appointments. On a long table at the far side of the room was a tall white pot of hot water, cups and saucers, tea bags, and a glass drink dispenser full of water, ice, and fruit. Hal got them both fruity waters and they sat together, sipping them, waiting for their masseuses. Another guy-and-girl couple was in the room too. They were talking angrily at a tall, visibly gay, managerial-looking man holding an electronic tablet.

‘He booked it like that online,’ said the girl of the couple.

The manager tapped around on his tablet. ‘I’m not seeing on my end here, ah, a request for a female masseuse – on either of your reservations.’ He looked right at the guy. ‘I’d be happy to rebook you with one later on in the week. Or I can offer you your appointment right now, with our masseur Jay, who’s great.’

‘That’s a male,’ said the guy.

‘Correct,’ said the manager.

The guy pointed to his girlfriend. ‘But she has a female.’

‘You know what,’ said the girl, ‘I’ll take the male.’

‘Babe –’ said the guy. ‘No –’

Hal and Danna squeezed their pinkies together, hard. Danna felt grateful that they were themselves, and that they hadn’t requested masseurs of any particular sex because they were good and open-minded, because they understood certain things about sexuality and gender and the universe that not everyone could understand; they had found each other because of this fact, the fact that they were so much more specially attuned than most people; they were going to spend their whole lives stumbling into shining moments like this one, moments in which their love felt like it conferred onto them a lucky kind of righteousness. Then Danna thought of Hal pulling across four interstate lanes at once. She thought of how he’d probably been the one who gave her the non-warts kind of HPV, the less embarrassing but worse kind. She thought of how Hal never wiped the table quite right. She thought of how one time he’d gotten $4,700 into credit card debt and she’d cried and sat on the toilet googling number 47 spiritual significance, wondering if there was something to learn. She remembered, even now, that 47 was the atomic number of silver and the country code for Norway, that Mars took 47 years to complete an orbital cycle. She remembered coming out of the bathroom and telling Hal what to do to fix things, which was to call his father, and how Hal had said He’s not a rich man and how she’d said back Didn’t he win a Pulitzer? and how Hal had said A Guggenheim, Danna, in fucking 1989, and how Hal, then, had cried, and how she had walked to the door and said I’m gonna go get a bagel, and when I’m home, this is going to be fixed, and Hal had said It’s going to be fixed, and how things had been fixed because she had demanded they be fixed. She had put her mouth to the hose that reached into the gas valve of Hal’s soul and sucked a fix out of him. Danna thought about Hal’s father’s second novel, whose name she could never remember though it was the one that had gotten him the Guggenheim, though she could remember that it was about two young parents who hated each other and loved each other and fought physically and made up from the fighting by fucking and who once, in a pivotal scene, fucked in front of the newborn, which healed them emotionally. He’d published it when Hal was a toddler. There was a single copy hugged up in a shiny cellophane jacket displayed on a high shelf in Hal’s parents’ living room. Danna tried hard to picture the book and its title. Nothing. When Hal had first read the novel as a teenager, he’d stopped speaking to his father, and he’d started acting out and doing drugs, and he’d had to see a child psychologist, who told Hal that his father was, though an adult, really a lot like him – a boy doing his best – and that his mother, too, was just a girl doing her best, and that marriage was a difficult pursuit, and that by showing grace and understanding to his mother and his father, who were themselves just grown children pained and warped by their own parents’ insufficiencies, Hal would be able to live his life free of the burden of their mistakes, which did, in real life, include fighting and fucking loud and hard across all of the rooms of the house Hal had grown up in. Hal’s problems, Danna told herself now, came from that terrible disgusting incestuous novel, and the shelf it sat on, and the LED lamp that hung just above it, insisting upon the book’s rare specialness, prizing it even above Hal’s.

Danna’s pinky felt numb. Hal was still squeezing it because the horrible couple was still giving the resort spa manager a tough time. Danna squeezed Hal’s pinky once, firmly, to tell him to stop squeezing so hard, and he stopped squeezing, but he kept his pinky locked with hers, and he gave it a little tug when the horrible couple said something particularly nasty to the manager, who was fixing their registration on an iPad. When the manager finally bowed his head and walked away, tucking his iPad under his arm, Danna let herself look at the couple straight on. They were smiling at each other.

After their massages, Danna and Hal met up again in the waiting room, where they made cups of tea and sat in glowing silence. There was a video playing on a loop on a television in the corner; it showed escalatingly gorgeous drone shots of lavender fields in what looked like the south of France. When they’d had enough, they took their cooling teas with them to the steam room, and as they were the only ones, it seemed, left in the spa, they unbelted their robes and sat together half-naked and sweating and talking about how good they felt and about how horrible the horrible couple from the waiting room had been and about how excited they were to go back to the room and watch more anime and order more room service.

‘You want to fight for a life with me, right?’ Danna asked Hal.

‘Baby,’ Hal said, and kissed her shoulder.

‘Because I want to fight for a life with you.’

Hal looked at Danna, seeming pre-upset. ‘You don’t have to fight for a life with me,’ he said. He said it without malice or strangeness, but Danna, for some reason, picked up both malice and strangeness in how he said it.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘All I want out of, like, my whole life is a life with you,’ Hal said. ‘So you don’t have to like – fight me for it. What do you mean?’

Danna looked up at the wet ceiling and thought of how to answer in a way that wouldn’t destroy the womby post-massage safety they’d both just been feeling. She didn’t know how to explain that her whole life felt like a fight for itself, a struggle against her own every thought and fear; that she nightly had vivid, lucid dreams of having to stab a shadowy home invader with a dull knife over and over again until he finally died and relented his claim on her and her possessions; that she felt she’d never reach a place of true openness in any arena, possibly not even in her relationship with Hal, whom she often thought of as her twin, her brother, a pearl she’d formed from the grit of her own ugliness; so instead she told him she’d meant nothing, and she asked if Hal liked the flavor of tea he’d chosen. He said that he did, and then he asked if Danna liked her flavor, and she said that she did too. Then all at once Danna felt pretty bad; she felt hungover, like there was a nauseous ache in her chest and her head and her butthole; then she was asleep.

When she woke up Hal was patting her face and saying, ‘Whoa whoa whoa.’

‘Did I just pass out?’ Danna asked Hal.

‘Yeah,’ Hal said, looking toward the door. He was holding Danna’s shoulders with both hands. She was slouching pretty badly. She realized his hands were kind of all that was holding her up. ‘Hello,’ Hal shouted, ‘excuse me, can we get a little help in here? Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said, because ceiling steam was dripping into his eyes. He blinked hard, trying to get it out, as he pulled Danna’s arms through the armholes of her robe.

‘I’ve never passed out before,’ Danna said.

‘It’s hot,’ Hal said. ‘It’s way too fucking hot in here. Hello?’

‘Have you ever passed out before?’ Danna asked.

‘No,’ Hal said. ‘I don’t think?’

‘How would you not remember?’

‘I think I blacked out for just a second that time I hit my head,’ Hal said, referring to a time a year ago when he’d hit his head, ‘but I’m not sure.’

‘How could you not be sure?’ Danna asked. She felt radiant, warm, in touch with a higher consciousness. She’d fallen out of her own existence and fallen back into it. As someone who’d now officially passed out, she felt part of a community, part of a new experience; she needed to know whether Hal could share in it, or whether he couldn’t.

‘How can I be of –’ said the tall gay iPad manager, pushing open the steam-room door, but he didn’t get to the word ‘service’. Danna watched Hal make desperate eye contact with him, and then she watched the manager prop the door open with a towel and duck out. She heard him press something outside and the steam stopped curling up at her from the floor. Soon the manager was back with a tall, sweating glass of water and a wet cloth. He handed both of them to Hal, who handed both of them to Danna, who felt no need for either of them.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like I thought it would be. I’m feeling fine. It was kind of the best I’ve ever felt?’

‘Please drink some water,’ Hal said. He took the cloth from Danna and put it on top of her head. Her pleasure deepened.

‘Can we go – can we go back to the room with the lavender video?’ she asked, and Hal nodded, and the manager nodded, and together they helped her stand and walk down the dim hallway toward the staging room, and they sat her down on the couch in front of the television, and masseurs and masseuses were bringing her cooler and cooler washcloths, and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the drone footage, and suddenly there was a squat glass bottle of apple juice before her, and she felt like a baby, and she thought of Hal kissing her shoulder and calling her baby, and she looked over at Hal and told him that she was his baby, and she hugged him, and she sipped her juice, and she thought about her ring, and then, for practice, she made the face she hoped she’d make when Hal gave it to her.

Artwork by Agnes Lloyd-Platt