i. Quinn is as enthusiastic about learning about Broadway as Spencer is. She's into musicals and Spencer's into stage plays, yet both of them are into dragging one another by the hand through the New York City Subway terminals until they've reached the theater of the night. "They say all roads lead to Rome," Quinn says breathlessly as she looks both ways while running across West 45th to the Booth Theater, "but all shitty red lines of the IRT lead to Broadway." The irony of the most decrepit Subway line in America leading to the most fabulous place in America doesn't escape Spencer. Since starting school at Yale and frequenting the city each weekend with her girlfriend, she's purchased enough pocket packs of hand sanitizer to kill 32 strains of the common cold.
ii. While Spencer's overly concerned with not getting sick, Quinn is concerned with the other sort of cold. Her Midwestern temperament is not yet accustomed to the New England chill, despite the fact that she's considered herself a Yankee for over two years. The cold clings to her like frost to a windshield. It makes her papier-mâché spine feel like an icicle, ready to give way like it did once before. Stepping outside freezes her skin, her mood. Three months after she and Spencer begin dating, Quinn buys them matching peacoats and equestrian boots.
Somewhere between hooking her fingers in Quinn's beltloops and brushing the tip of her nose against the blonde's earlobes in gratitude, Spencer finally asks the question Quinn was waiting for. "Why'd you buy these?"
"To combat the cold," she replies in earnest.
iii. You spread your legs apart for her.
iv. You spread your arms apart for her.
v. She spreads her legs apart for you.
vi. She spreads her arms apart for you.
vii. Spencer never cared much for Disney Princess movies before she met Quinn. Now she can't stop watching Sleeping Beauty on repeat while she works on Henry James essays, physics problem sets, astronomy charts. Quinn makes her feel like Cinderella at the ball, and Spencer swears that, since she'd fallen for the girl from Ohio, she's had a flock of cheerful finches following you like Snow White. She believe in true love; she hoards the Classics accordingly.
viii. They make a pact; Spencer will put up with your crushes on the dead if Quinn put up with hers on the living. One day at the supermarket, Quinn catch her girlfriend salivating over the blonde actor on the cover of Cosmopolitan. The momentary pang of jealousy she feels is uncomfortable, but also the exact opposite. It's a pinch of a reminder that she still wants Spencer. In her life, beneath her sternum, in her bed.
"Tramp," Quinn says, teasingly.
"Necrophiliac," Spencer retorts.
"Excuse me?" the cashier asks.