As they walked, Rob lightly caught her hand with his. She didn’t stop him. And they walked to the pizza joint, fingers clasped, arms swinging, just like they used to.

xxx

Ezra’s parents rented a house on the Jersey Shore the summer after he and I started dating. We decided to spend Labor Day weekend with them out there before both our schedules got crazy again, when all the students came back to campus. We were walking along the beach at sunset and Ezra pointed toward a lifeguard stand. It was late enough that the lifeguards had gone home for the day, so the chair was empty.

“Let’s check out the view,” he said.

I looked up at the height of the chair. “I’m glad neither one of us is afraid of heights,” I answered.

He kicked off his sandals and so did I, and we climbed up the chair together, finding handholds and footholds where we could.

Ezra was quiet, which I attributed to how seriously he was focusing on not falling off the side of the chair. When we got up to the top, we sat next to each other, watching the sunset.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, as the wind pulled strands of my hair out of its bun. I tucked them behind my ears.

“Not as beautiful as you,” Ezra said.

I turned to look at him, and he was angled toward me with a ring box, open, in his hand.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

My stomach flipped. I felt, for a moment, like my consciousness had left my body, like I was watching myself. The moment felt so strong, so powerfully emotional that I couldn’t process it right then. And then I was back inside myself and smiling wider than I thought my face could even manage.

“Of course,” I said, giddy with happiness. I know Ezra isn’t perfect, I know I’m not perfect, but ever since we’ve met, we’ve just felt perfect for each other.

There was this time a few months after we started dating when I got bronchitis. I was home, cocooned in some blankets and watching television, napping in the middle of one episode of Law & Order and waking up in the middle of a different one, so nothing quite made sense. He came over. It was just after we’d exchanged keys, and I heard him fumbling with his key in my door but didn’t manage to get up off the couch before he made it inside.

“You stay there,” he said to me, after kissing my forehead.

He set up a humidifier and took VapoRub out of his backpack.

“You’re like a medical Mary Poppins,” I told him.

He laughed, but I tried not to, because I knew laughing would turn into coughing and would make it hard to breathe.

“Just wait until you see what else I have in here,” he said.