[Fiction] A couple shares their secrets with each other:
“We live together in a third-floor apartment near campus and are both A.B.D. We’ve been dating for about three years, and engaged for exactly seven weeks. It’s Friday night. We’re just getting home—late—from a reception at the school followed by a few nightcaps with some of our fellow grad students. Both of us are drunk, and I’ve got this idea in my head that we should do our own version of the truth session from ‘Water Liars,’ that Barry Hannah story where the husband and the wife tell each other about their sexual pasts.
“At first Zachary doesn’t want to, but I kind of stick it to him so he says, Okay, sure. So I get another set of nightcaps going and we start. But the thing of it is, even though we’re about the same age as the people in the story that couple had been married for ten years already. What I mean is that they had plenty of—how to put this?—distance from what they were talking about. And of course the basic point of ‘Water Liars’ is how the wife’s news sends the husband for a brutal loop anyway—distance nothing. Distance be damned.”
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