3

Every time he left the city, he was reminded how much he was beginning to loathe living there. There was a lot to be said for living in the heart of everything, of being minutes from every possible form of entertainment and business imaginable, but the stone and the brick and the dust and the exhaust fumes, after ten years, were starting to get to him.

Here, by contrast, everything was beautiful. It was mid-afternoon on a hillside in the country, looking west-ish over a a field of barley, and the sun was lowering and the air was warm, and everything was bathed in a wonderful golden light, and everything was simply beautiful. Never mind that there was a highway twenty feet behind them.

Also, he was nervous, because he thought this was pretty much the perfect time for it.

He looked over at her, her eyes closed and lying back on the grass, hands behind her head, and thought to himself that she really was very pretty. Maybe even beautiful. In the warmth, she had taken off her cardigan, and her top showed a touch of her stomach, and he wanted very much to hold her. But […]

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1

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes, absolutely. We’ve been together for two years now; it’s about time.”

The apartment was small, she thought. Ridiculously small, in fact, and their boxes were filling it to the point where it was a squeeze just to get in the front door. Was this really the best they could do?

From the bedroom she heard him cursing, and sighed. Yes, she loved him, and yes, he was an angry pain in the ass. “What is it now?” she called.

“I can’t find it,” he called back. “I remember putting it in one of my bedroom boxes, and it isn’t here!”

“What are you even looking for?”

“My toothbrush!”

This was starting to give her a headache. “Your toothbrush? We can buy a new one.”

“No! It’s a waste of money.”

This wasn’t a conversation she was going to continue, and she turned back to her own boxes. They were going to have to get rid of a whole lot of stuff, and it was probably going to be mostly her stuff. She was a little worried when he realized how many boxes were filled with her clothes. And shoes.

They […]

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If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was a setup. Considering where things ended up leading, it might as well have been. All of it, just to meet that one girl.

Marlon was crazy. He owned a huge apartment in the expensive part of the city, and no one really knew where he got the money; he worked at a divorce attorney office, the kind that don’t require a spouse’s signature. He had first met Marlon when he still worked at the big law firm, and he’d fallen in with him right away – the guy knew how to throw a party.

He never quite figured out why Marlon left; something to do with his boss, who Marlon had never really liked. In his mind, that didn’t really justify leaving a cushy job with an almost infinite upward path for a downtown crap shack that got people out of your life for $300. There was no way he was making any decent money there, even if they kept things off the books (which was pretty likely). It didn’t change a thing; he’d kept the apartment, the expensive TV and white leather couches, and he still threw mad parties. […]

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