38
ONE MONTH LATER
I honestly don’t remember any details about my first New York gallery opening.
I guess I can confidently say there were a lot of people there with fancy credentials, and if I think too hard about the specifics, I get a shaky feeling in my gut that could be excitement, anxiety, or an impending stomach flu.
The whole time I kept muttering, “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” to Wyatt until he finally detached himself from my parasitic side to make me—his words—“face my admirers.”
I’ve only really resurfaced into coherence now that we’re already back in Brooklyn at Wyatt’s place, in that quiet moment before everyone else arrives, as Wyatt curls his hand around the back of my neck and pulls me in close to bury his face against my hair and whisper, “I’m so proud of you. You were amazing. You’re amazing.”
I take in a deep breath of his smell, pine-fresh men’s deodorant and crisp detergent. My hands fall to his hips: warm, steady, an anchor holding me down.
Every moment with Wyatt is one that I wish I could bottle up and keep forever. I wish I could pull those bottles out when I’m away and release the memories to relive them.
This past month has felt like a dream. The best kind of dream, of course. My portfolio is littered with photos I’ve taken on my new Leica—including several of Wyatt himself, hunched over his negatives or lying in bed with the sheets bundled around his hips and the dawn light silvery on his skin.
Even the boring moments feel effervescent—scrambled eggs in the morning, fighting off Haze as he tries to steal our food, curling up on Wyatt’s tiny couch to watch Nicolas Cage movies. Ophelia and Diego adore him, which is good because if they didn’t, I’d probably have to fight them. Diego even adopted Wyatt as an unofficial test subject for his more adventurous food creations.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
“I love you,” he says, and the words are so soft, so warm in the dim interior of his apartment, words I could curl myself into forever.
I tighten my fingers at his sides. I almost don’t want to breathe too heavy, like existing in awareness of my body might make the moment tremble and break.
Every moment we share now feels so precious and hard-won.
“I love you too.” I tilt my head to kiss his neck, right over his pulse point. “So much.”
He pulls back and looks me in the eye, traces his thumb along my cheekbone. When his lips meet mine, I forget we’re expecting company, at least until the infuriatingly loud buzzer screeches to herald Michal and Shoshana’s arrival.
“You killed it,” Michal says, clinking her glass of seltzer against mine. “I feel like I know a celebrity.”
I can’t help rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. Says the girl who just had her work featured in a Vogue editorial. Sharing an MFA program with you is gonna be intimidating as fuck next year. I’m glad I don’t have to do it.”
“It’s not too late to come back to Parker! I need someone to suffer through deadlines with me.”
“Well, I personally welcome you to the grown-up world,” Shoshana says. “Before you know it, you’ll be buying blazers and debating which washing machine to buy with the rest of us.”
“I’m a grown-up!” Michal pokes her wife in the side with her elbow. “I have very serious opinions about washing machines.”
The buzzer blares again, and I nearly trip over Haze on my way to let the next round of people in. I rescue the black cat from getting trapped underfoot by carrying him around for the next twenty minutes, at least until he decides he’s sick of me and launches out of my arms to go hide on top of his cat tree. Shannon texts me at some point to make sure I’m still sober. I finally made myself message her again after the summer program ended, resurrecting our friendship from the graveyard of all the ones I’d abandoned or trashed. I’ll never stop being proud to text back 100% well and with it.
There are enough people here that I don’t even hear the bell ring for Ophelia and Diego’s arrival. Someone else must let them in, because out of nowhere Diego barrels into me and flings both arms around my neck.
“My dear,” he says, “you were phenomenal.”
“Sorry we’re late,” adds Ophelia.
“Fashionably!” Diego says, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, it was mostly Ophelia’s fault. This is what happens when you go cheap on glitter eyeliner, dear; you have to redo your makeup about fifteen hundred times to make it look right.”
“It was not fifteen hundred—”
“But who knows? Maybe you can afford nicer stuff now that you actually got paid. Or you can, like, cover all three of our rents. I dunno, just an idea!”
“I saw your ad on the way here,” I say, and dig out my phone to flip through the photos until I find the one I snapped of the gin ad on the subway, Ophelia’s illustration so gorgeous and perfect that I honestly can’t believe I know the actual human who created it.
“A banger,” Diego says approvingly. “Ophelia Desmond, corporate artist. Now do more and hire me as a personal assistant. I hate my job anyway.”
“Didn’t you just get a new job?” asks Wyatt, who doesn’t know Diego well enough yet to know any better. “Aren’t you literally working for the mayor?”
“Like I said. I hate my job.”
“You spent all of last night going on about how fulfilling it is to be in a position to make an actual difference, and the mayor is chill and secretly socialist, there’s a flavored seltzer machine in the break room, and the girl at the desk next to you looks like a young Barbra Streisand,” I remind him. “You drank three martinis and monologued about it for like ten straight minutes.”
“And?”
The party goes on pretty late considering it’s a dry event and everyone is living it up on seltzer and nonalcoholic beer alone. Once it’s over, Wyatt and I lie on the living room rug, fingers laced together atop Wyatt’s thigh, as Haze walks across our bellies.
“I hope it’s like this forever,” I say, eyes half-lidded.
Wyatt squeezes my hand, and I exhale long and slow. A damp cat nose nudges my cheek.
“It won’t be,” says Wyatt. “Bad days always come. But we can try.” His thumb rubs the back of my hand. “We can fight for it.”
I turn my face toward him and open my eyes. He’s already looking at me, the amber lights from the street outside glowing gold on his skin. I lean over and kiss him, his stubble scratching against my jaw. I don’t know what time it is, except that it’s past three, and as exhausted as my body feels, my mind still tilts helplessly toward his.
“I love you,” I say again because it deserves to be said again. It deserves to be said a million times.
His mouth smiles against mine, and I draw my phone out of my back pocket and take a photo of us. I’ll keep tonight for a lifetime.