Parker Selina in the morning. As usual, she was right. I could have written a twelve-hundred-page book with no drive at all, and this would have been the subject: her body in the sheets, the slope of her waist into her hip, her dark hair loose across my pillowcase, the way she propped her elbow up on the pillow, half smiling, to look at me. “Good morning,” I said, my voice scratchy. “How’d you like the place?” “I don’t think you have enough books,” she said, nodding to the floor- to-ceiling shelves. “I can think of a way to fix that. Don’t you have a few books?” Selina reached out and toyed with my hair, cool-eyed. “I do. I’m open to joining forces.” It occurred to me what, exactly, we were saying, that I’d just joked about moving in together not even two months into an actual relationship. This should have felt like an absurd thing to do, but instead it felt like an obvious answer to an unspoken question, because I knew, I just knew, that this was it for me: Either I would have her for the rest of my life, or I would think about her for the rest of my life. I breathed, feeling laid bare, as we looked at each other. Then my hand strayed for my phone, and I opened it to find a mess of notifications. “Fuck,” I muttered. “What now?” “What?” Selina said as I opened social media. Wordless, I showed her the picture I’d been tagged in. Somehow I wasn’t even surprised. It was Selina and me at Scott’s party last night,
laughing with Arthur and Jacob and Cassie, my arm around her waist. @Sasu Naru113: I’M SORRY. WHAT? SO ALL THE DRAMA WITH THESE TWO WAS A PR CONSPIRACY? @mentoscokegoboom: I knew it I knew it I absolutely fucking knew it @swift_ly_falling: So do we think she got paid off to do the second negative review by his publisher? Like was the fight even real? @Doubleganger: Of course the fight wasn’t real, dumbass. The whole thing is a lie @Lola Xu: Interesting developments. Lola Xu’s post had six thousand likes and a slew of sly r eplies. Most of them were questioning Selina’s credentials. Some were calling her an embarrassment to the critical profession. I glanced over, considering how to defend her, how to respond, how to win. “Should we—” Selina plucked the phone from my hand. For a moment I wondered what blistering response she was going to type. Then she exited the page. I watched her delete the app, and the next, and the next. She tossed my phone into the hammock, where it swayed, an invisible weight. She turned back to me and said, “What were you saying?” I pulled her in, smiling, and as she kissed me, I felt something untie in me and slip away. Let the ocean of judgment ke ep recoiling and resurging outside these walls. Later, Selina and I would roll out of bed, and we’d get coffee next door. We’d drink it over one of the cramped tables in the humid back corner and I’d steal bites of her croissant while she made charmingly specific threats. We’d go to an art gallery in the afternoon and explore some exhibition that made
me feel far away from myself. We’d swing through every bookstore we saw, and I wouldn’t check whether my books were stocked in any of them. We’d return home and Selina would absentmindedly wander onto my bed to read an article or make notes for her next review, and I’d call my mother or father while sitting in the front window and watching spring slip one green finger through the white veil of winter. I was done scoring points in public, with a life like this in private. By late April, High and Dry had dropped off the bestseller charts, but ten weeks on the list was a strong enough showing to ensure my future in publishing, at least for another several years. First of all, the book had immediately earned out its fifteen-thousand- dollar advance. So, come this fall, and every six months thereafter, I’d get a royalty check—somewhere in the six-figure range this year. Second of all, with these new and improved sales figures, Lauren convinced Coronation to buy my next two books on proposal, this time for fifty thousand dollars apiece. Bill tried to negotiate higher. Lauren told him not to push his luck. In mid-May, Selina and I celebrated the new deal by taking the train up to Boston, where we overnighted in a tiny hotel and visited Elena and her girlfriend, Katy. As it turned out, Katy was a fan: not of me, but of Selina. “I read all your reviews,” she stammered, tugging at her hair. “Thank you,” Selina said, unsmiling. Katy laughed nervously and went off to use the bathroom. “How have you been, Park?” asked Elena, picking at the end of one of her braids. “With, you know...” She gestured vaguely at her head. “Not bad. Seriously. I haven’t had a really bad day since”—I glanced over at Selina with a small smile—“since February.”
“You sure?” “Yeah, I’m sure.” In the days after my last post about High and Dry, my siblings had reacted in ways I hadn’t expected. Christi and Kevin had sent shocked, sympathetic texts that had surprised me with their candor and sensitivity. Justin, normally allergic to phone calls, had rung me on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d spoken for an hour about my downward spiral in college. At one point his voice had grown narrow and buzzy, and he’d coughed a few times, muttering, “Sorry, I’m sorry.” The last time I’d seen Justin cry, I’d been six years old and he’d been ten, his knee gashed open on a concrete driveway. As for Elena, she’d told me she’d already suspected the truth. “Well, thank God,” she said, pouring me more wine, then Selina. “It’s about time you both got a break.” We returned to Brooklyn to an apartment full of boxes. Over the course of April, Selina and I had talked about moving in together in language that included fewer and fewer jokes, and finally, at the start of May, I’d asked Arthur if he’d be okay with moving out. “I knew this was coming,” he said with a sigh. “If it softens the blow,” I said, “I just heard about a lease takeover for this convenient rent-stabilized one-bedroom in Bed-Stuy.” “Oh, really?” “Yeah, the last tenant spent eight years upgrading the place.” He cracked a grin. “Sounds like her.” A few days later, Selina came over to give him the keys. “Please, be nice to the apartment.” “I’m very nice,” Arthur said indignantly. “You be nice to my roommate.” She just laughed. By then, he knew her. By then, he loved her, too. June spread over Brooklyn like butter, gold and balmy, and the last of Arthur’s boxes disappeared, and Selina finished setting up the home office in his old room. She called her parents in there once every few weeks, and I heard her padding slowly back and forth, her voice even
and restrained, and sometimes when she came outside afterward, she moved directly into my arms and leaned her face against my neck as I kissed her hair. By summer, City had settled fully into the new rhythms of remote work. Once a week, Selina took the subway down to Scott’s brownstone for the Friday staff meeting. “But otherwise,” she admitted, “it’s a lot less of getting breathed on during rush hour.” Even better: With the tens of thousands of dollars the magazine was saving every month on Manhattan office space, they were no longer hemorrhaging money, and Scott had clawed editorial oversight back from Nextward Capital Associates. The day that City’s front page finally cleared of articles like “What Was with That Crazy Cameo in the New Batman Trailer?” Selina and I spent the afternoon on a picnic blanket in the park to celebrate. I loved our life together. We read side by side on the couch with quiet music over the speakers, occasionally reading a striking line out loud to each other. We laughed over dinner tables with people we loved. Every day I felt like myself; every night, before I sl ept, I felt close to her. I annotated pass pages in the hammock while she made margin notes in bed. I watched her grapple with new favorites and disappointments. I learned exactly what went into her pieces. And still, every time I read her work, I was struck anew by her clarity and precision, as though to read her was to walk down an endless path inside her. Some mornings, after reading her latest, I would come into her office and kiss her and say, “It’s perfect.” And every so often, reading my pages, she would text me, You’re brilliant. Maybe nobody else in the world agreed. Maybe we were unreliable sources now; maybe that was what it meant to be in love. All I knew was that I’d finally found the right words. I wanted to spend the rest of my life saying them.