He smothers his face with his hand. “Your nightmare brain,” he says, “is my absolute favorite, Stephens.”

My phone gives a short, snappy vibration. A text from an unknown number. Why is my mother texting me about how hot you are? This can only be one person.

“Save yourself the trouble and use this as number two.” “I already told you. You don’t count.” “The words every man dreams of hearing.”

Tala regales us with a tale that is either the nonsense ramblings of a toddler or a faithful retelling of a Kafka novel.

She’s the Marianne to my Elinor, the Meg Ryan to my Parker Posey. She is also my absolute favorite person on the planet.

“I forgot how peaceful it is grocery shopping without a four-year-old, like, lying on the ground and licking the tile,” Libby sighs,

“And all those people who made you feel like you were,” he says huskily, “have fucking terrible taste.”

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

“You’re telling me,” Charlie says, “that from the moment you stepped off the airplane, you haven’t been itching to get back to New York? Feeling like . . . like you’re an astronaut out in space, while the world’s just turning at a normal speed, and by the time you get back, you’ll have missed your whole life? Like New York will never need you like