Hang

Dennis texts, Do you want to hang?

Dasha doesn’t answer. Dennis has an eye-contact fetish, and sex with him is a production. Sometimes they go to a restaurant, and when they run out of things to say, they make out. He’s vegan. He plays bass in a moderately successful band. He kisses too hard but goes down on her too soft, like he’s licking an envelope.

When she doesn’t respond by that evening, Dennis follows up with a ?, dangling like a clothes hanger. But Dasha likes not having plans. She might want to get dinner with Alix. She might get an electrician to come to her apartment. When she flips the switch in the hallway, sometimes the light turns on, and sometimes it does not. Dasha asks the light switch questions like it’s a Magic 8 Ball. Should I hang out with Dennis? The light stays dark.

Dennis tries once more. Got a house on Fire Island until Monday. You should come.

Dasha does not want to take a ferry, and the electrician says he’s free on Monday.

I’ve got O, Dennis makes a final attempt.

Dasha sucks on the inside of her cheek, tempted. Alix says she did O with that Paraguayan poet and claims that falling in love for a few days inspired the project she’s working on now, paintings of extinct megafauna roaming burnt-out cityscapes.

Should I go to Fire Island with Dennis? He has O, Dasha texts Alix.

Which one is Dennis?

The guy from yoga.

Dasha gets a message from the electrician. He actually can’t come until next Monday. A lot of people in the building are having the same problem, he says. The wires are old.

Grandpa Shoulders??

Despite being able to stack all six feet of his well-built physique into a forearm stand at the yoga studio, Dennis has the shitty posture of all tall men entering their fifties. Still. She needs to stop telling these stories about the men she dates to Alix, reducing them to nicknames, playing them for laughs.

Should I go, Dasha returns, but she’s already looking up the ferry schedule.

Have fun. Flaming heart emoji.

Dasha texts, Love you too, then realizes she texted it by mistake to the electrician. The light in the hallway blinks on and off, a warning from her building’s crumbling wires.

Dennis is waiting for her when the ferry docks in Fair Harbor.

“I saw a fox on my walk over here.” He’s breathless, like he had to run to get here. “Maybe we’ll see her on the way back.”

He takes Dasha’s bag, which contains her vibrator and the vibrator’s highly specific charger, as well as a swimsuit, her toothbrush, and a wrinkled sundress. Dennis is barefoot. No one wears shoes here, he tells her. Even when they go into the grocery store, no one has shoes on.

“Is this hygienic?”

“It’s awesome, right? I come here every summer.”

Dennis asks what she wants to snack on, but she’s not sure what vegans eat. He pays for everything, still holding her bag, while she shivers in the air conditioning.

The house he rented is in Lonelyville, a quiet part of the island that makes her think of the summer right after her parents’ divorce, when she was twelve and ran feral and unbathed and forgotten from the end of June through Labor Day.

A deer ruffles the tall grass.

“It’s this one,” he says, pointing at a tiny cabin wedged between the ocean side of the island and the bay. He sets the groceries down between his feet to unlock the door. It sticks. The floors are sandy and warped.

Inside, Dennis wraps his long arms around her and kisses her hard, but she pulls back; already her lips are swollen.

“What’s the story with the O?” she asks.

“A guy in the band brought it back for me from Bolivia.” He takes a bottle from a drawer and shakes out four capsules, two sand-colored and two white. He puts the white ones back in the bottle, and hands her one of the sand-colored ones. “It’s legal there for, like, religious ceremonies.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Yeah. I mean…” She thinks he will say something like, But never with someone like you, but he doesn’t. One of the things she likes about Dennis is that he never compliments her, so she never feels pressured to pretend to like him more than she actually does. “It’s not an everyday thing, obviously.”

“Yeah. No kidding. How long does it take to wear off?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s different for everybody. The white pills are the antagonist. We just take that when we’re ready to come down.”

“And I’ll feel like I’m love with you?”

“Yeah. I guess so. It just stimulates oxytocin and dopamine. Your brain kind of goes bananas for a while.”

“Until I take the other pill.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.”

Dasha has never been in love with anyone. She is thirty-three, the atomic number of arsenic, the same age as Jesus. She’s had four boyfriends and one girlfriend, and the most she has been able to muster for anyone so far is a muffled sense of obligation. In college, she did molly with everyone else, but had to pretend to feel what they felt. She and Alix found a girl with a satin dress in the bar and chased her, stroking the pink fabric until a bouncer made them leave.

“You ready?” Tiny wrinkles around his eyes, like a phone with a cracked screen. Handsome though. When they fuck, she runs her chapped fingers along the muscles of his back, his skin so smooth it feels like that woman’s satin dress. Though he once referred to her pussy as her snatch, putting him out of the running for a potential boyfriend. Plus he’s too old for her. Plus she’s already faked orgasms with him and lied when he asked how long ago her last STD test was.

Dasha wonders if feeling like she loves him will make her tell him the truth about these things, and she wonders whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, it feels too late or at least too inconvenient to back out now.

“On three,” Dasha says, and counts down. On one, they open their mouths and reach for their wine glasses, but she doesn’t swallow. “Let me see inside your mouth,” she says, around the capsule.

“Mistrust!” Dennis laughs, but he obliges and even lifts his tongue for her inspection. The underside of the tongue is an unlovely thing.

Dasha gives a satisfied nod and swallows.

“Just wait until you love me,” he says with a wink.

Nothing happens.

“I think your friend brought you back some duds,” she says. She’s not mad though. The windows are open, and the blades of beachgrass clash when the wind picks up, and she can smell something their neighbors are grilling, and the sense of impending correction she always carries around is gone.

“I think it kicked in faster last time,” he admits. “I don’t know.” He laughs when he sees her look. “I swear, I didn’t just sell you a story to get you out here.” Dennis reels her in by her shorts, kisses her, sucks on her lower lip before releasing her. Her breath catches and her fingers slip under his shirt in the back, chasing the seal-like smoothness of his skin.

“Kiss me again.”

He’s gotten better at kissing, or she’s gotten used to the way he kisses. He kisses her, and then they look at each other for a while. It’s satisfying, although she remembers not liking the eye-contact thing. Especially during sex, a time when she wants to curl up behind her eyelids and fantasize about other people.

“If we keep this up, we’re not going to go paddleboarding,” Dennis says. “Do you still want to go paddleboarding?”

She is surprised to find that she does. She wants to go outside with him, pass by other people. You feel most like a couple when there are other people to see you.

“Oh my god.” She grips his arms. “I think something is happening.” When he asks her what, she doesn’t want to tell him that she had a thought and it involved the word couple. She hides her face in his chest, embarrassed, but also wanting him close.

“Yeah. I feel it too,” he says into her hair.

“Oh shit,” she says, and she laughs the way she laughed that time she stole something by accident—a handbag she didn’t realize was still slung over one of her shoulders until she made it to the subway. “Should we—I guess we should have done this before, but maybe we should make some rules?”

“Like what?”

“Like no saying I love you.” Dasha has said I love you to two people: to her last boyfriend, in the hopes it would kickstart something, the words like yeast, and to her girlfriend, an easily bruised woman with rainbow hair who said it to her on their third date.

Dennis smiles at her, and she’s trying to look stern, but she can’t help smiling too.

“Oh my god, is this what it’s going to feel like all weekend?” She’s winding her arms around him so their foreheads will touch, and his arms are around her waist and she understands in a rush why the word forever is in so many love songs. This feels permanent.

“The antagonist is the bottle in that drawer if you don’t like it,” he says, and she can see that he’s afraid. They can hurt each other now.

“I like it. Let’s go paddleboarding.”

Dasha and Dennis talk.

Tell me about where you grew up.

They eat grilled vegetables and drink white wine, watching waves that roll in like fingers, scooping up smooth handfuls of beach. Dasha had wanted to order a lobster, but was ashamed to crack an animal open in front of her handsome vegan. She might never eat meat again, she thinks.

Where would you want to live, if you could go anywhere?

They are kissing at the front door of the house, unable to make it further inside. His mouth is over hers like an oxygen mask, and she makes small, desperate noises. For today, they live together; it was him saying let’s go home that set off this firestorm.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Dasha can’t sleep. The miracle of him in the bed beside her is too preposterous. How could she sleep and miss it? He opens his eyes and says he can’t sleep either, and they take blankets and a bottle of wine down to the dark beach and are drinking and kissing and about to go further when they are suddenly bathed in headlights. Some municipal vehicle is barreling down the beach, and they scream. Dasha laughs until her eyes stream and her nose runs.

What are you most afraid of?

They take the paddleboards out on the bay early while the water is still unwrinkled. She’s getting the trick of it now—you use the paddle to help you balance. She transitions from knees to standing, and preens when he says she is a natural. I love you, she mouths at his smooth back as he paddles. I love you. I love you. There is a paddleboard yoga class, and she feels him watching her in upward-facing dog. It’s like opening a new organ, this Dennis-sense. She can locate him with her eyes closed. She knows, before she opens them, that he will be floating towards her on his board in a headstand, and she is correct. He is perfect.

Who are your best friends? Who was the first person you knew who died?

She had always thought Dennis a bad name, but now she draws it in the sand. It’s Sunday afternoon and she is happy and aching between her legs and warm and there is sand in her hair. They had planned to take the antagonist early, and then board the morning ferry, to go their separate ways and get ready for work tomorrow, but now that the time has come, they keep saying one more hour, one more swim, one more orgasm. They are running out of time.

He writes her name under his in the sand, and then she draws an ampersand between the two names and then he draws a heart around the whole thing.

“I didn’t realize that our names alliterate,” she says.

“What’s that mean?” he asks.

“It doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t.

Dennis takes her hand and kisses each finger, and she brushes the sand off his lips.

“Okay.” He traces the bones of her clavicle. “You ready?”

“Yes. Wait. Can you take one more picture of us?”

They had decided that these were not selfies, they were us-ies. In some of the photos, they are looking at the camera, and in others, they are kissing, and in this one, this last one, she is looking at his phone’s screen, and he is looking at her. And chemically induced or not, he is looking at her in the way that you look at someone that you have known and penetrated and loved unconditionally. No one has ever looked at her this way before.

“Send those to me,” Dasha says.

“I will. You might be embarrassed about them, after.”

“I keep forgetting you’ve done this before,” she says, and there is jealousy, unwelcome as an elbow in her side.

“It wasn’t like this before.”

She looks at him. He lets her look. Even with the ferry coming, he does not rush her looking. “Should we say it?” she asks. “Just one time?”

Dennis strokes her hair, and sand trickles down her back. “No. We said we wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be true.”

Something is happening in her stomach, an argument. They are all running out of time here. On the beach, everyone parks their chairs as close to the water as they can, hugging the retreating tide. No one wants summer to end.

“You’re right. OK. Let’s close this out.”

She wants to ask for one last kiss, but they can still kiss afterwards, can’t they? It’s not like they will be strangers. They’ll just go back to being what they were before. Friends with benefits. One another’s side projects. He’ll be that guy she knows from yoga. Maybe it will be a relief. No one could live like this and still make it to work.

The capsules they took on Friday were sand-colored. These are white, like the space between stanzas, the color of a scrubbed out mistake. He takes one, and she sees his throat move as he swallows it dry, and he holds out the other one for her. That’s when a rogue wave overreaches the waterline, past DENNIS & DASHA, heading to claim his phone. All those pictures of them– they both go for it, and he plucks it up in time but drops the other pill. She sees the capsule for a moment before it is lost in the churn of the wave that soaks them both, and then retreats, taking her antidote with it.

“Oh fuck,” Dennis says.

“What? Are you… are you kidding me?” Dasha says. And she knows she should be angry, should be furious (Why didn’t he give you yours first? she can hear Alix asking), but she is, in this moment, although she already knows she must conceal it from Dennis and also from herself, unmistakably relieved to have her love left intact.

“Can you send me that picture?” she asks.

The ferry, crowded with sunburnt children and people looking at their phones, chugs them towards Bay Shore. Dennis also looks at his phone. There is frost rolling over his eyes. Her phone is dead; she hasn’t bothered to charge it since Friday. She stares at the water. A cupcake wrapper is keeping pace with them on the brown waves.

He frowns at something on the screen. “Which?”

His band is going on tour in a couple of weeks, and he’s tour-managing, reading reviews for hotel rooms, on the lookout for mentions of bedbugs or meth heads.

Any of them. All of them. “The last one.”

At the word last her stomach crimps, and she feels like she did in second grade when she shit her pants on stage at the girl’s choir performance, a story she told Dennis this weekend and now wishes she could take back. It is the feeling of being about to cry.

“Yeah. Of course.” He looks at her, guilty. “I’m really sorry. You know it was an accident, right?”

Dasha nods. She watches the cupcake wrapper. She does not cry.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. It will just wear off, right?”

“Yeah.” Dennis says.

It is hard to breathe, watching him. This is the longest they have ever been next to each other without kissing, except during yoga class. No one at the studio knows they are fucking, something they agreed on from the beginning. I’m not there for that, he said.

She looks at her phone out of habit. If her phone was working, she could text Alix or check the weather. She likes to know the weather. If her phone was working, she could google how long it will be until the O wears off, or she could price flights to Bolivia. You look at your phone when you want to run.

“Can you get more?” she asks.

“More antagonist?” He pats her back. “I’ll text my friend, but I doubt it.”

More antagonist wasn’t what she meant, but she doesn’t correct him.

Alix lets herself into Dasha’s room. She has the spare key. “Dude. What the fuck.”

“I’m dying,” Dasha says from the floor.

“You’re not dying. It just feels that way. Why are you lying on the floor?”

Dasha is too sad for furniture.

“Come on.” Alix hauls her up. “You’re staying with me until this wears off.”

On the train back from Long Island, Dasha cried silently until a woman with a small dog in her lap asked if she was okay. Breakup, Dasha managed. The woman said she had gotten the dog after her last relationship. The dog was wearing a bowtie.

“Do you remember what you said when I told you that I was in love with Simon?” Alix asks. Her frank eyes are framed by four different colors of eyeliner.

“Something supportive?” She looks hopelessly at her phone, which offers texts from her mother and the electrician and an environmental organization looking for donations. Her stomach sinks into her pelvis.

“You said that it wasn’t a relationship. You said it was a stack of fantasies in a trenchcoat.”

“You didn’t talk to me for a week.”

“Because you were right, and it sucked. Come on, you can stay at my place tonight. Right now you need natural light and ice cream.”

“No ice cream. I’m vegan now.”

“Oh my god, you are so bad at drugs.”

Dasha checks her phone again. She has texted Dennis just once, asking him to send the pictures of the two of them.

I’m at work, he wrote, but later I will.

That was two days ago, and she is still waiting for her brain to reboot.

On the G train, rocking against Alix, none of the men are Dennis. It’s just neurochemicals, she tells herself, but inside her skeleton is collapsing. “How long will it be like this?” she asks Alix, but she knows: it will be like this forever.

“Give me your phone.” Alix types in Dasha’s password and changes Dennis’s name to NOT A RELATIONSHIP.

Dasha frowns at it. “Did I tell you he called my pussy my snatch?”

“Gross.” When they emerge from the station, she offers a cigarette to Dasha, who lights it and sighs smoke the whole way to Alix’s apartment, where there’s a painting drying on the easel: a megalodon cruising past the rusted cars of the Wonder Wheel, a Coney Island submerged. Time is passing and everything is rushing towards extinction and still Dennis feels like the one immutable truth.

All Dasha wants is to go home, but she knows as soon as she is home, all she will want is to go out. She will buy a vegan cookie even though she is not hungry, sit on the sidewalk outside the bakery and howl like a dog tied to a pole.

“This will pass, and it will be like it never happened,” Alix says. “Give me your phone again. I want to see your Spotify. Yeah, none of this sad shit. Jesus, how many covers of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ does one person need?”

“Why couldn’t he just stay with me until it was out of my system?”

“Um, because that would be torture?”

“How much longer?” Dasha asks again and again and again.

When she opens Instagram, the flier Dennis posted for his West Coast tour is at the top of her feed, and underneath it he has written in all caps, BOOM CHICA BOWOW, and there is a pulse of shame under the chemical insistence of her brain that she loves him. He is lame and old, and yet still she wants him.

“It might be another week,” Alix says reluctantly.

Dasha has read the horror stories online—a whole subreddit devoted to people who went on O trips and swore they never got custody of their brains back, that they still loved the stupid assholes that were in front of them when the neurochemicals surged. Some of the stories were pretty bleak: a woman who fell for her beta fish, a man who watched the sky for a beloved cumulus cloud to condense once more over his head. There were grim tales of stalkings and breakups forestalled by a spiked drink. Suicides.

Alix makes a playlist for her called Bad Bitches Get It Done. Dasha doesn’t like hip-hop, but Alix says she’s got to listen to Tasha the Amazon until this is over.

Stop, Dasha tells herself. She wants to look at Dennis’s Instagram feed again, although that has never, ever made anyone feel better. Stop, please. She looks for his truck outside of the studio and fantasizes about ramming into it with her bicycle, Tasha the Amazon egging her on. Stop. She has a photo of him jumping off a cliff in Spain, his body light and curved as a feather, and it makes her want to hurl herself off something high after him. It feels like love. Coming off of O, she reads, the vagus nerve is suppressed, and in a low-grade panic, she drapes a five-pound bag of rice across her chest for comfort. Are you okay? she whispers to herself, and then answers, I’m okay, I’m okay. She checks the time and the weather app. An incoming text. Just Alix. Just her mother again.

Lovesick, Dasha’s arteries narrow. She wants someone to come and put a blood pressure cuff on her and tell her how high the number is, some proof she could write down.

“You could do what everybody else does and just date somebody else,” Alix says, coming over with a pizza. Dasha picks the cheese off her slice. What’s left looks skinned. “Weren’t there some other people you were seeing before you went to Fire Island?”

“I don’t want to go out with anybody else. I want to go to yoga.”

“Wait a few more days. You need to stay away from him.”

Dasha feels like something has been taken from her by force. On the streets of Astoria, she looks for Dennis the way you would look for someone who owes you money.

“Why hasn’t he texted me?”

“Because you are on drugs, and he is not.”

It seems impossible that she can want somebody this bad, and they not be drawn towards her as well. Her want feels like a moon, moving ravenous waves around. Dasha dreams and sees white capsules falling from the sky and when she raises her face and sticks out her tongue to catch one, his mouth clamps prophylactically over hers.

On the twelfth day of withdrawal, Dasha calls her tattooist, but there are no appointments until early October. Instead, she gets her septum pierced on Steinway Street. Alix holds her hand, and a man named Rad tilts her head back to push the needle through. Her eyes flood.

She palms the wet away impatiently. “I’m not crying,” she says. “That just hurt more than I thought it would.”

“You’re angry,” Alix says. “That’s a good sign.”

“Please don’t start talking about the fucking stages of grief. I can’t handle it right now.”

Alix folds her arms. “Okay, that’s it. We’re done talking about Dennis for the night. That’s all we’ve talked about since Fire Island, and it’s getting old.”

Dasha nods and touches her septum ring, and the pain there combined with Alix’s irritation are new things for her brain to settle on. “Sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Fucking get your shit together, Dasha.”

They don’t talk about Dennis for the rest of the night. Instead, they go see a movie about a haunted country road and then walk to Long Island City, pointing out other things that could be haunted: mailboxes and bodegas and parking spaces. For a moment Dasha thinks she’s cleared the O from her system, and she hopes Dennis will drive by and see her, laughing and healthy and whole.

The electrician comes, and Dasha talks to him while he unfolds his stepladder. He’s not bad looking, and she likes men who know how things work.

How long has he been an electrician? she asks him. Forever, he says. He tells her about getting shocked, how he was blown backward off the ladder, how you couldn’t see a mark on him even though he was badly burned.

After he finishes patching in fresh wires, he asks for a broom to sweep up the crumbs of plaster and corroded insulation that fell. “I’ll take care of it,” she says. They linger in her front hallway, and Dasha ripples with unexpected arousal.

“I have to go,” he says. “I have another job.”

“Sorry. Of course.” She hands him a tip and holds the door open, releasing him.

Should I go to the yoga studio? Dasha asks the light switch, and when she flips it, she is bathed in yes.

Maybe tomorrow, she thinks, and marvels that the urgency has gone. She examines her phone like an electrical burn—not a mark on it.

There’s a deadline for a project at work, and a mole she needs to have looked at by a dermatologist who lectures her about sunscreen and the dangers of beach weekends, and then it’s her mother’s birthday. She takes her mother to dinner, and they ask each other, Are you seeing anyone? and they both say no and split a piece of cheesecake, laughing when their forks clash, competing noisily for the last creamy bite.

Dasha doesn’t make it to yoga until the following Tuesday, and Dennis’s truck, tidily parked outside the studio, has gone back to just being an ordinary truck. Inside the studio, she kicks her sandals into a cubby, inhaling the regular lavender reek of the place, and pads barefoot to check in. No one wears shoes here. It is always summer in the studio.

“Dasha!” Chandler, the woman behind the counter, hands her towels. “Where you been? Vacation?”

“Not really. Well, sort of. I went to Fire Island.”

“I love Fire Island.”

“Yeah. It’s okay.”

The blowers are on in the hot room. At the front, the mirrors run from floor to ceiling and Dasha watches herself approach. Near the front corner she favors, Dennis is stretched out long on his mat, his narrow feet flopped open, eyes closed.

In her brain, there’s a sort of dried watermark where the craving used to be.

Dennis opens his eyes. The tiny lines around them used to spell something out for her, but now he just looks tired. “Dasha.” He rolls up fast like he got caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. “How are you?”

“Good.” The boringness of this conversation thrills her. She rotates through the series of stretches she likes best, delighted by her own pliability.

“Are you still… Is it…”

She lets him search a bit longer for the right words and shakes her head. “Out of my system.”

“Oh. Wow.” He rotates his palms on the mat to stretch out his wrists. “Was it bad?”

“Nah. Not that bad.”

He nods and his shoulders slump. “Did you see we’ve got a sub tonight? Paris is sick.”

“I just need a class. I don’t care who it is.”

The new yoga teacher enters, and it takes Dasha a moment to recognize the electrician. He’s cute with his shirt off, a garden of tattoos across his torso.

When he catches her looking, he lifts his chin in recognition, and she lifts hers back.

“Check in with how you’re feeling,” he invites, taking them through the opening sequence, and she tries, but her feelings are so much quieter and more distant now. There’s an absence, like when she was small and woke up missing a tooth that had been loose and had to conclude that she had swallowed it in the night. She never got to inspect the bloody roots. “Breathe and feel.”

Inhale. Exhale. The room heats up. A puddle grows around Dennis’s mat.

The electrician calls for handstand hops, and she nails a moment of L-shaped weightlessness.

“Nice,” Dennis whispers.

After class, he will say, Do you want to hang? and she will say no. She likes not having plans. Besides, he should have checked on her, even if they are not two people in love.

Class ends, as all yoga classes end, in corpse pose, and Dasha pretends she is dead. She wonders if Dennis will try to touch her, a hand bursting from a grave at the end of the movie, an opening for a sequel. He doesn’t. It’s a deflated feeling, her longing stripped away.

Lights dimmed, the electrician changes the music for Savasana, and when the opening piano bars of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” plunk down, Dasha has to press her lips together and staple them shut with her teeth. She can feel Dennis looking at her, shaking with stifled laughter. Maybe he thinks she’s crying. It doesn’t matter. All she can picture is him floating towards her, upside down on that ridiculous paddleboard, and her, doe-eyed with counterfeit affection. Her eyelids are shut now, and she stays shuttered through the final namaste. The floor shifts, Dennis rolling up his mat to leave. He hesitates, but no one is allowed to bother you in here if your eyes are closed. She hangs out behind her eyelids until the electrician turns on the lights and cuts the music, but still she doesn’t sit up, not until Chandler wheels in the mop bucket to delete the wet outlines of their bodies. A haunted yoga studio, Dasha will suggest to Alix later. That’s why you lose your balance sometimes: all the ghosts. Dasha moves so the work can be finished, so the gray mop can erase the last rapidly evaporating proof that their bodies had been briefly adjacent.