Two Friends in Marriage (Weddings with the Moks #3)

Prologue

Evan

A few years earlier…

“H ow are you doing?” Jane Yin asks. The video cuts out for a moment, but then her face is back on my computer screen. She’s wearing a gray T-shirt, her damp hair loose.

I rub my eyes as I debate how to answer. She’s genuinely asking, not just saying it as a greeting.

“I’m better,” I reply at last, and it’s not a lie. It also doesn’t say a hell of a lot because the past few weeks have been not good, to put it mildly. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Outside of the essentials, the province has mostly shut down.

And I’m pretty sure I had COVID-19.

I got sick at the beginning of March, before a state of emergency was declared in Ontario, and at first, I assumed it was a cold. Most of the COVID-19 cases I’d heard of? They involved people who’d recently traveled, and I hadn’t been gone anywhere. Besides, I wasn’t all that sick. Yet I stayed home out of an abundance of caution, and I’m glad I did. Although I didn’t have any acute symptoms, I still don’t feel quite right, and it’s been a month.

“I’m tired,” I say. “It’s a different sort of tiredness—hard to explain—but I’m slowly improving. Thank you for the groceries and toilet paper.”

“It was the last package. I nearly had to fight someone for it.”

The package was open by the time it arrived at my door. Jane had taken half of the rolls for herself before giving the rest to me.

“Next week, I’ll do the shopping myself,” I say. “I can’t imagine I’m contagious anymore, right?” Though it feels like the information on the disease keeps changing. It’s just so new. “I’ll fashion myself a mask out of…something.”

Jane holds up her mask, made from an old shirt and hair elastics.

“Very cool,” I tell her.

There’s a rather awkward silence.

Normally, I’d fill it, but I’m just not on . Aside from going out on my balcony, I haven’t left my apartment in four weeks. I miss seeing people, and I’m not used to socializing only on Zoom. That, combined with being sick—and the fact that my girlfriend broke up with me in February—is putting a damper on my mood.

“I’m envious of people who don’t live alone,” I say. “Some men are complaining about how they have to spend all day with their wife and kids, but that sounds better than being by myself.” I punctuate this with a smile so it doesn’t sound like I’m whining…too much.

I don’t want to bring people down; I’m very conscious of my mood around others, especially now that my depression is getting worse.

“Although, if I lived with someone, I probably would have gotten them sick,” I add. “Better this way, I guess, but it would be nice to have the company now.”

Jane takes a healthy sip from her glass.

“What are you drinking?” I ask.

“Vodka and grapefruit seltzer.” She shrugs. “It’s what I had. I thought drinking while on Zoom was better than drinking alone, although if you—”

“No, no,” I rush to say. “You’re welcome to drink while talking to me.”

I’m reminded of an article I saw the other day about a distillery that has switched to making hand sanitizer. The world has turned upside down.

She has another sip. “I wish I didn’t live alone, either.”

“Yeah?” I’ve known Jane since our first year of university, which was more than a decade ago, and she’s always liked her space.

“Well, if I had someone else in this five-hundred-square-foot apartment? God, no.” She wrinkles her nose. “But it would be nice to share a house in the suburbs. To eat dinner and watch movies with someone in the evening.”

“And bake bread? I hear that stores are running out of flour.”

“They are,” Jane confirms. “There was only whole wheat at the grocery store today.” She pauses. “I don’t want to make bread or pies or whatever people are doing, though I’d be happy to do the eating if someone else was baking. Now that you’re feeling better and shouldn’t be contagious, you could live with your parents for a bit?”

“True. Might do that.”

It’s not an option for Jane, though—and not just because her dad lives on the other side of the country.

She drums her fingers on the desk. “It’s a pity we’re not married and living in a house in the suburbs together. With both of our salaries, we might even be able to buy something.”

“Two people don’t need to get married to live together.”

“But if I’m going to buy property with another person, I’d want some kind of commitment, and since I don’t see any romance in my future…”

“No?” I say. We haven’t talked about Jane’s love life in a long time.

“Dating is such a minefield, and how am I going to meet anyone on an app? How can I swipe left or right when I have no idea who I might eventually find attractive, once I know them better? Plus, there’s the pandemic.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of rough.”

“Maybe it’s the vodka talking, but I wish I could have an arranged marriage. Even though I literally haven’t had a relationship in five years, I think I’d like to get married, and that sounds so much simpler.”

“I guess your dad wouldn’t—”

“Ha!”

“You could arrange it yourself,” I suggest.

“Who would go for that? Would you?”

It’s certainly not what I imagined for myself. But relationships haven’t worked out well for me, have they? I’m tired of getting my heart broken.

I can’t give up hope, though. Not yet.

An acquaintance once said it should be easier for me to find someone because I’m not limited by gender, but it’s not that simple.

“In three years,” I say, “if neither of us has found anyone, we can have a small wedding and buy that house in the suburbs.” I’m not sure how serious I’m being. Everything is kind of weird these days.

“What about kids?” she asks. “I’d like one or two.”

I nod. “Sounds good.”

“But I, uh, won’t want to have sex, except for procreation purposes. Or we could have kids another way. You could sleep with other people, as long as it’s fairly discreet. I don’t want friends coming up to me and telling me that my husband is having an affair.”

It’s strange—in a nice way—how matter-of-fact this is. In my last relationship, we still hadn’t had a discussion about children by the six-month mark, and the idea of bringing it up made me anxious. But ultimately, that had nothing to do with why the relationship ended.

While not having sex in a marriage might not be my ideal situation, this does sound appealing. I mean, I know we get along—and for long periods of time, too. There are some friends I enjoy in small doses but nothing more. Jane, however, has traveled to Europe with me, and we weren’t about to murder each other at the end.

“That’s fine,” I say.

“I thought you were too much of a romantic to go for this.” She taps her finger against her chin. “Let’s make it more than three years. How about if we’re both still single by my thirty-third birthday, we’ll get engaged?”

About three and a half years, then. Her birthday is in early December.

I hold out my hand, my pointer finger touching the screen, and she holds out hers. We pretend to shake on it.

“Do you think handshakes will ever come back,” she says, “after this is all over?”

“I don’t know, but surely the pandemic won’t last beyond the end of the year, right?”