Like his home—a haven, technically, which he’d worked so hard to make cozy and familiar, a place to relax, to fall apart, to heal. Six months ago he stopped coming here except to sleep and eat, because it was Gynnie’s terrain to unload her misery upon him—“I can’t get the coffee filters apart, I can’t cope”—never acting like her old self, from six o’clock in the morning on. See? Contradiction.

Outside the house, it was a fun time of getting engaged, of wearing a tuxedo at a fancy engagement party thrown in their honor, of being so proud of Gynnie while everyone tripped over one another in tuxes and long dresses, trying to be charming; lazily wondering to himself about their future, enjoying the subtle closeness as the lines fuzzed between someone you have sex with and someone you need beside you, everywhere, to make it real. And after the first twenty minutes at the party he stopped talking to her, because he wanted to kick back (because she couldn’t handle herself in front of people, because she could sound like an idiot if you listened too closely), because he felt like it, and he drank and smoked cigarettes and pot, he kept moving, walking out of a room when she walked in, mocking her in front of her own boss for repeating his name. He’d done all he could to get the party to loosen up, but it didn’t work, and in the car on the way home she screamed and swung at him—scratching his cornea!—he pulled the car over, she lifted her springy, catlike appendage and came so close to kicking him that he’d already accepted it, whatever bones broke, whatever changes came from the fact that she had kicked him in the head while driving drunk while they were engaged, and then he grabbed her foot and they almost had a fistfight in the car. She was a small person and he’d hoped to bully her but that hadn’t worked out.

They were in a potentially terrible place.

Why did he do that?

He spent the rest of the summer preejaculating, scared. It seemed like a proximity issue.

It was evenings of eating under trees in the park out of Tupperware by a pond in the sunset, weekends in front of the fireplace, the house filling with smoky wood smell, of thinking to himself, This is a decent chance for the love that everyone wants in their life. A time of trying to learn to like her, to be gentle and nice, because that worked with girls. It was a time of newfound humility.

Everything was changing so fast. He tried to keep some distance between them to slow it down. Which was like trying to slow down a bullet with a chocolate-chip cookie.