Four months later they had moved in together because Jason needed a place and Alex’s apartment was subsidized by Caltech. Jason had just begun to get everything together to apply to graduate schools to study dance professionally, but at the time he merely taught a few times a week or moonlighted as a dancer at various clubs as he completed his on-again, off-again undergraduate degree at UCLA. Neither Jason nor Alex had ever actually lived with someone they were in a relationship with before, nor even really had a relationship of any seriousness. At first it was like they didn’t know what to do with each other in the small rooms: they listened to their respective music with headphones on, they were very careful and calculating about using the toilet only when the other was out of the apartment, and for a while Jason didn’t let on how much he actually smoked pot (which turned out to be a thrice daily habit). But soon enough everything began to blend—for instance the pot habit quickly became a shared ritual of morning, after work, and deep at night under the blue glow of two open laptops before they had sex. In a fast flowering, they began to enjoy the humorous freedom of living together. Near continuous nudity became the norm. Nude smoking a bowl, nude cooking, nude eating, nude movies, nude toast in the morning, nude watering of the plants. There was even nude painting, laying out the plastic sheets everywhere, shopping together and looking at color swatches, then giving their bedroom an undercoat of white, which culminated in both of them running after each other with paintbrush splotches on their butt cheeks, backs and legs, streaks on their faces, getting paint everywhere around the room, Jason laughing and defending himself with two paintbrushes until Alex had taken him down with a Judo throw, then squirmed on top, madly kissing with lips tribal white. Alex loved that Jason would sing hilariously dirty takes on classic Disney songs in the shower. Alex loved that Jason was flexible. They became inseparable, cryptophasiac in their language, known around WeHo for their antics. They were jointly invited to parties, they became fixtures of the gay scene, but were fiercely jealous and defensive. Although they never had The Talk to define any boundaries, neither of them ever transgressed, they were an item and came as a fungible unit and this was known. A year passed, the best year of Alex’s life. Then the acceptance letter from the Tisch School of Arts in New York City came for Jason in the mail. They wanted him for their esteemed dance program and this was the opportunity of a lifetime, and at first Alex was jubilant; they celebrated back at The Abbey, but there was a darkness to it, because Alex still had three years to go before completing his PhD. And so it was that this knowledge began to infect everything. Every party became a wake. And as Jason’s flight approached it all exploded into screaming fits and slaps and shoves. They hit and pinned each other. They woke with bruises in the morning on their wrists and arms and legs from the fights and the crying and the accusations and the recriminations, both their faces becoming grotesques, gargoyles of their former selves, their movements erratic, compulsive in their need to hurt and to be close at the same time, a dissonant dance that neither had ever experienced before, completely shocked by themselves, completely shocked by their newfound capability to be so spiteful and so uncontrollable. But the inevitability of parting settled like the clearing of sediment from muddied water, and the fights and the bruises ceased, and when the subject came up they would just sit together, together but apart, filling a room with their silence, their inability to find a solution to this problem in which they both did not lose. In such a sorrowful state they hung on for the next month before the flight, clung to each other, to their joint life. They had some nice nights out, they celebrated as they could. Eventually they hung on for just a day, then, an hour. The ending bore down upon them in Terminal 4 of LAX. Hang on for just a few more minutes. Hold me a few seconds longer. The universe is fourteen billion years old and we can hold on to each other for five more seconds before you go through security and get on that plane and we never see each other again.