Page 32 of 32 Days in May

“Exactly. If you tell me I should be happy, you know what I’m gonna fucking do?”

“Be unhappy,” I jump in, twisting in my seat to face him.

Marco’s eyes shine, fixed on the road, with a look of satisfaction. “Right. I’m going to be unhappy just to piss you off.”

“And then that’ll make me actually happy,” I say wickedly.

He lets out a growl of approval.

When Marco and I get out of the car I notice the film camera hanging around his neck.

“Is that a prop?” I tease, lifting the camera away from his chest and turning it over in my hands. It’s heavy and looks loved, with visible wear marks around its leather body.

“Sure is. Gotta look tortured and artistic. Part of the brand,” he deadpans, pulling his arms through a flannel. We’re the closest we’ve been since Thursday night, and the memories are catching up to me. Especially now that I can smell his cologne—a floral musk that dusts his neckline.

He places his hands over mine, engulfing them. Suddenly, I’m back on Ernie’s dance floor, Marco’s sweat-slick chest pressed against mine, his lips flush against my ear. Wanna get out of here?

We shift toward each other, one foot crossing lazily over the other. There’s something about his body that pulls me to him—that pulled me to him the first night we met, as soon as I had enough tequila in me to shut down the never-ending rush of self-loathing running through my head. Right now, there’s no tequila, but there is our contract. We’re dating. This is okay.

Marco is the kind of guy you yearn for. The kind of guy you dream of fucking, and if our first night together was indicative of anything, it’s that we’re both horrible at pacing ourselves. We both have lead feet, and this experience is a race car aimed at a cliff.

But I don’t want to slam headfirst into intimacy again. I’ve done that before, over and over, and the ending is always the same. Luckily, this time I already have our ending. I can work backward from there.

On May 31, we’ll meet at the Pier Point Diner and split a stack of pancakes. I’ll tell him about my diagnosis; I’ll tell him about how I’m feeling sooo much better and I finally got a great job doing something cool in Philly, and I’m headed back. He’ll be completely overjoyed; he’ll tell me he got some part playing a grizzled dad, and he’s moving to Vancouver. I’ll be completely overjoyed.

Ten days before that, he’ll tell me he never wants kids.

Five days before that, he’ll tell me he thinks monogamy is a prison.

Two days before that, we’ll have sex for the first time.

Today, we’ll hold hands and see a whale.

He runs his thumb over the letter embossed on the camera’s leather case, and I feel a pang of excitement deep in my stomach.

Marco’s been monologizing about his camera this entire time. “. . . and then he told me it was actually manufactured in East Germany. It says it right here on the bottom, but I also have a certificate . . .”

I can do this.

It takes fifteen minutes for me to convince Marco he really does not want me there for his haircut. I just keep shouting, “I’m too judgmental! I’m too persuasive!” while he shouts back, “Who cares!”

We compromise, in the end. I sit in the waiting area reading the Cape May Gazette while a middle-aged man in very pointy shoes guides Marco behind a frosted-glass wall where I can distantly hear a symphony of blow-dryers whirling.

The cover stories are a recap of the Miss Teen Waves competition and an op-ed about the environmental impacts of rabid gopher extractions. It takes an entire paragraph for me to realize that one story has ended and the other has begun.

Twenty minutes later, Marco rounds the corner, smoothing a hand self-consciously over the freshly close-cropped sides of his new ’do. I let the newspaper fall to my lap.

I don’t know much about men, but I do know that there are three acceptable haircuts, two unsightly, and then there is one haircut that makes anyone attracted to men go absolutely feral. Shorter on the sides, longer on top. Long enough that it requires constant smoothing, but not so long that it could get caught on a ceiling fan or sucked into a jet engine.

This is the haircut Marco has.

Now I can really see his face, no heavy flocks of hair or a baseball hat brim in the way. Marco’s forehead is perfectly square, his eyebrows thick and placed precisely on the ridge of his brow bone, which would otherwise make him look concerned or perplexed if his eyes weren’t so warm, dark, and liquid, surrounded by faint smile lines. Without the hat and hair, I can see now the articulated angle of his jaw and the way his mouth permanently pulls to the side, like he’s chewing his cheek or getting ready to laugh.

The older gentleman and Marco shake hands mightily, then he turns to face me, holds out his arms, and says: “So?”

The newspaper falls from my lap to the floor. I clear my throat. “Well, it’s no Jonathan Taylor Thomas . . . but still . . . you look . . .”

Marco bites back a laugh. “Great?”