Joey slipped into a purple lacy lingerie set Grant liked and crept to the bedroom. It was dark, the lamps now toggled off. She slid beneath the covers and felt his warmth first on the sheets. She couldn’t go to him. Not before she told him.

“Babe—”

“You’re so far away,” he blurted.

She knew to go to Grant would weaken her resolve, but her body was its own beast. It folded like origami into its nook in his right shoulder.

“For Joey,” he’d once said, “I’ll drill a little plaque so no one takes your space.”

“Just the right shoulder,” she’d replied, savoring how cozy her head felt there. She liked the musky scent of his deodorant. “You can chop off your left shoulder and I’ll live, but the right let’s be careful about.”

“How did it go?” asked Grant.

“How did what go?” asked Joey, startled.

“You said you were gonna sketch after G’s?”

He ran his foot against hers, and she suddenly realized that she was capable of separating them, the two lives she’d begun to live today. The angel inside her head knocked against her skull to query what kind of person she wanted to be. But she was too tired, or too weak, to set the angel free.

“Oh. It was fine. I went to the beach, but I didn’t get much sketching done.”

“So you’re saying I’m about to sleep in a sandbox.”

Joey managed a laugh. “I did shower.”

“Somehow I predict my back’s still about to feel like sandpaper.”

He was right. Someday someone had to teach her how to get the sand out. Maybe a YouTube video. “I’m sorry, babe.”

“It’s worth it for your art, Jo.”

The dark made her dark. She might have been stronger in the light.

Joey ran a hand across Grant’s stomach, searching for the part in the corner near his ribs with the tattoo of ocean waves, which she’d first set eyes upon only a year and a half prior. The memory hit her like medicine: Grant in that knotty man bun, soaring down a big wave off Batu Bolong, so fixed in concentration at the tricks he was turning that he didn’t see her board careening at him.