Love Story Where Nothing Bad Happens Ever

The day after their wedding, Shady drove Luna to his place for the first time. Shady had a stained glass window that made the living room feel like a church. He had a kitchen sink filled with pale blue cereal bowls. He had bed sheets that were stripey. He had a banana tree. He had no curtains. He only had two forks. Luna liked it right away.

Three months earlier Luna was working in a book shop off the Bowery when Shady came in. He saw the way she was walking around adjusting things with tiny little movements, the way she ran her fingers along the spines of books—pushing them in, pulling them out—until everything was in a perfect line. He liked her right away.

Luna sang along to the songs she played in the shop. She gave recommendations to people who asked nicely. She wrote strange little stories when it was quiet. She mopped the floor. Shady came in twice a week, then he came three times a week. Luna got nervous because he watched her so intently. He brought her doughy pastries and they ate them together shyly. It felt good, taking bites after each other. It was like secret kisses.

He told her about himself and she nodded and touched the books. Every once in a while she made a point to look into his dusty eyes so that he knew she was really listening. Their days together went by fast.

For their wedding she wore a white slip dress that was thin and see-through. She bought a pair of underwear on her way to Los Angeles that said BRIDE across the width of the ass. She had the kind of body that was made to hold babies on hips and the dress showed this off. From the airport to the chapel Shady kept his hand firmly on her thigh.

When the California sun first hit her blue skin after a long winter on the East Coast she laughed. For days after the wedding, Luna laid around in her BRIDE underwear finding pockets of sun that leaked through the bay windows and bathing in it lizard-like. It was nice to be a piece of furniture in Shady’s life. She felt like a beautiful rock in his driveway.

When Luna was with Shady she did not need to put herself in proximity to alltheterriblethingsintheworld in order to be perceived as important and smart. Shady just wanted her to be happy. He wanted to make her life easier. He liked watching her laugh. Her mouth so big and true.

They laid lazy in bed like one body. Luna found a pack of stickers, an assortment of cartoon mice. They were plastic and puffy. She put one on Shady’s palm that said “I love you so much.” She put one on his forehead that said “Happiest here!” She put one below her belly button that said “Kiss me.” And the rest was history.

Like any delicious infant love, it was enough for the two of them to be near each other in sticky bliss for a good couple weeks. And Then they started to get a little itchy. It was not a crisis, but it was enough to get them out of bed.

Shady asked what she wanted to do and stuck his tongue in her ear.

“Paint the walls of your house,” she said.

“Our house” he said and sniffed the slope of her pretty armpit.

Luna chose yellow for the big sunken living room. She chose a milky green for the kitchen. She chose orange for the bedroom. Pink for the bathroom. A grapey purple for the inside of a closet.

Together they painted each room. They listened to old romantic music loudly on the record player. Luna’s underwear rode up the side of her ass cheek like an invitation. Shady wondered when he would learn the bad things about her.

When all the rooms were painted they got undressed and smiled at each other’s nakedness. They squeezed into the bathtub and the water turned yellow and milky green and orange and pink and grapey purple before turning into every color and no color at all. After the bath they ate leftovers and fell asleep on the couch. The California sun washed the flat city in something warm. It was one more perfect day in a sea of perfect days.

The bedroom was orange now and Luna started waking up earlier. She opened her eyes and Shady’s body rose and fell with soft shallow baby breaths next to her. She outlined his tattoos with the tip of her finger hovering just a little bit above his skin, so as not to wake him.

On the Fourth of July, a Saturday, the moon was in Pisces, and Luna slipped out of bed and went for a walk. She missed moving her New York legs and while the paths around the house were slightly barren, she did not need a particularly exciting landscape, she only needed to move.

Luna felt most American when she thought about her past. She had no relationship to it. She felt no shared cultural language with any particular community. She had no traditions, only habits. She was a little bit of everything which was the same as being nothing. She felt brand new, ahistorical and nonetheless, important.

She walked down one road that turned into every road and knew that any of them would bring her home safely because Los Angeles was one big sparkling movie set. She thought about how she used to touch the spines of all those books and walk down streets she’d known all her life and how now she didn’t know anything. She thought about Shady’s big fingers inside her. She broke a sweat. She thought about how theirs was a love story where nothing bad happened, ever.

Nothing bad ever happened - and the thought was like falling down a hole. She fell slow and fast and through the present and the past and the future. There was a girl at the bottom of the hole whose face looked like her own if it had been badly arranged. She put her hands on either side of the girl’s face. She brought her lips to the girl’s lips, and she saw all the good and all the bad that there was in the world.

The road brought her home. She opened the door with the key Shady gave her because he loved her. She looked at the stained glass window that made the living room feel like a church and the kitchen sink filled with pale blue cereal bowls and the banana tree. She looked at their two forks. Shady was sleeping on his back with one leg hanging off the bed. The ceiling fan above him hummed. Creamy sunset leaked through the windows and baked the clothing strewn around the room, a warm skin smell in the air. Shady smiled with his eyes closed. Luna slid beneath the sheets and fell back asleep.

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Nico Lou Monheim Carrasquillo lives in New York.