They had it all. A studio apartment on the Upper East Side, the smell of freshly baked bagels from the shop downstairs drifting in through the window that always remained cracked even in the deepest winter, so high did the landlord crank the heating that started in an infernal basement furnace and poured uncontrollably through their fifth-floor vents. One of the infamous tenement buildings that had once housed desperate German immigrants packed in like cigarettes but that would now command thousands a month on the free market. But Marco and Conor had got it cheap, thanks to the laws that limited rent increases for continuous residents and a former tenant who had infuriated the landlord by living to the age of eighty-nine.

The spring sun streamed in on the bed that doubled as a sofa, the tangle of limbs and sheets, empty vodka bottles and sauce-crusted chow mein cartons, socks and T-shirts, books and plates, overflowing ashtrays and dented pizza boxes. Marco was the first to stir. He flicked his leg irritably, then smiled as he woke up. ‘You tickling me?’ he said.

Conor half-opened his eyes, wiped some crust from his mouth, mumbled ‘No.’

Marco frowned, and then sprang up, lunging for the spider that was now scuttling off the end of the bed. ‘Fucker ran over my leg!’ he shouted.

Conor sat up, confused. ‘What?’

‘A spider. Like, this big.’

Conor rolled his eyes at the absurd size Marco had shown him, hands spread as if holding a football. ‘Come back to bed,’ he murmured, grabbing Marco’s arm and trying to drag him down. But Marco shrugged him off and crawled to the edge of the bed, grabbing a stray shoe from the floor.

‘No,’ Conor said, more firmly now.

‘It’s OK, it’ll come off,’ Marco said.

‘I’m not talking about the shoe. Leave the poor little thing alone. All she did was run over your leg. You don’t have to kill her.’

‘She? It’s a disgusting insect.’

Conor sighed. He felt, as he often did these days, as if he couldn’t keep up with Marco, with the force and energy he unleashed. He needed breakfast. He needed coffee. He needed a quiet moment looking out over the rooftops and satellite dishes and water tanks and beyond them the East River glistening in the morning sun. ‘Look, I’ve seen her before,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s been living here for a few weeks at least. I called her Nelly. And she’s a spider, not an insect.’

Marco looked at him in disbelief before, with a gasp, he saw the spider making a dash for the cupboard. Instinctively he lunged for it before stopping himself, shoe in midair, allowing it to reach cover. He turned back to Conor. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

Conor nodded. ‘You don’t have to destroy things. You can put those muscles to better use.’ That and the accompanying smile were enough to draw Marco back to bed, and as they kissed, he felt the warmth of Conor’s compassion, the fire of his idealism, so much stronger than his own. He wished he could feel the way Conor felt, caring even about a repulsive little insect.

#

As the days warmed and lengthened, the rhythm of their lives changed. They went out as soon as Marco returned home from work, and as they stretched out in the park or sat at an outdoor bar drinking cold beer, Marco told stories of his day, exaggerating so much that a dull office temping assignment became a soap opera to which Conor eagerly listened each evening, in the process forgetting the difficulties of his never-ending PhD, the research that never seemed to lead anywhere, the thesis so large and sprawling and criticised so thoroughly from so many directions that he had lost sight of both the start and the end of it.

When they were in the apartment together, they were usually drunk and exhausted, or hungover and exhausted the next morning. Even at weekends, Marco dragged them out to meet friends for brunch, to ride the subway out to Coney Island to play the arcades, to see a new exhibition, to watch a movie, to try yet another new restaurant.

‘Can’t we just stay in?’ Conor asked one Sunday morning as yet more bright plans were mingling with the scent of baked bagels in the apartment.

‘Come on, you stay in all week working on that thesis. You need to get out more.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Conor replied, his voice even and measured as it always was when he was trying to hold something back. ‘And don’t pretend you’re doing it for me. You’re always the one who wants to go out, to do something, watch something, drink or smoke or eat or do anything but just spend time with me.’

Marco frowned, grabbing Conor’s arm. ‘But I always want to spend time with you. All those things, we do them together. That’s how I want it.’

‘What’s so bad about just staying in with me then?’

‘And doing what? Looking at the spider all day?’ He jutted his chin at the complex filigree web in the corner of the apartment, high up where the roof met the two walls, where it was warmed by the rising heat from the vent in colder weather and now, in the warmer days, was stirred gently by the gusts from the air conditioner whirring below. He still refused to call Nelly by her name or to refer to her as ‘she’ rather than ‘it’, but he had acquired a grudging respect for the creature Conor loved so much. He admired its cunning, the way it lay in wait for unsuspecting little insects, wrapped them in its sticky snare, and ate them at its leisure. Conor, on the other hand, admired Nelly’s patience, the way she was always repairing and rebuilding and perfecting, so that what Marco saw as the same web was in fact constantly evolving and renewing.

‘Why not?’ Conor said. ‘You might learn something.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Look, we’re not going anywhere. Don’t you see that? We go to new bars, but they’re always the same. We talk about the same things. We’re always too drunk or distracted to say anything serious. We don’t know each other any better than we did five years ago.’

‘Look, honey, there’s not much more of me to know,’ Marco said in his husky Hollywood diva voice, the one that usually raised a laugh or at least a smile.

‘There has to be,’ Conor said. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point? What are we doing?’ His voice faltered slightly, as if trying at the last moment to gulp the words back down.

Marco was silent for a long time. Nothing moved in the apartment except some muscles in the sides of his face, which worked constantly as if he were chewing on a tough seed. ‘You’re just feeling stuck because of the thesis,’ he said finally, with the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence. ‘You’re putting it on me.’

‘We’re both stuck,’ Conor said gently. ‘Don’t you see that? We’re moving, but we’re just getting more firmly stuck.’

For a moment, Conor thought Marco was going to hit him. But, instead, he did something worse. He launched himself up from the bed and swiped at the web in the corner of the room, tearing it to shreds and knocking the startled spider onto the side of the cupboard, where he slapped at it with the flat of his hand. Then he held his hand up to Conor, hoping to show him the mangled mess of the spider. But Nelly had been quick enough to dodge the worst of the blow. On his palm was not a dead body but two severed black legs, still feebly twitching. Conor pushed away the foreign hand, got up, pulled on some clothes, and stumbled to the door.

It was a rare argument for them. They’d been together since high school and never been through the rough patches that other couples talked about. From the beginning they’d been inseparable, stunned to find so much in common when usually the other students were mysteries to them. Marco had no Italian ancestry and Conor no Irish—their parents had just liked the names. With his sandy hair and pale skin, Marco in fact looked more Irish, and Conor looked more Italian with his dark brown eyes, dark hair and seemingly permanent tan. They’d laughed together about the assumptions people made, not just about their ethnic origins but about their personalities, their interests, their aspirations. ‘And everyone always asks about girlfriends,’ Conor had said, feeling his way cautiously like a cat walking in the first snowfall of winter. He looked at Marco, and Marco did not recoil as he had feared.

Instead, Marco said the words that would bind them to each other through those tough growing-up years: ‘As if everyone has to be interested in girls, right?’

#

The rift didn’t last long. Marco apologised, Conor forgave him, and things were back to normal. But normal is a relative term. The spider, too, returned to her corner, patiently span and repaired the web that Marco had destroyed, caught and ate her prey. But she did so with six legs instead of eight. Conor used to watch Nelly sometimes as he sat trying to concentrate on the books and papers spread out on the small kitchen table. He thought he could see, as she moved, a drift to one side, a constant effort to correct course. How did she do it? How did she go on when she had lost something so important? Did she feel the absence of those legs? Did it cause her pain? Regret? Grief?

The deal they struck after the argument was that they would cut back on the drinking and bar-hopping, only going out to meet friends. But they had so many friends, and the demands of Manhattan nightlife were so great, that there was little real difference. Conor went along and drank and laughed as always, but their friends noticed that he was drinking more and laughing less. Marco, meanwhile, laughed more and drank less. Everything was off-kilter.

Another difference in their lives was that, increasingly often, Conor was not at home when Marco returned from work. In the past, he had been a constant presence, bent over his books, looking up with a smile of love and relief when the key turned in the lock and the door opened. Now, however, Marco had to get used to the strange feeling of an empty apartment for one, two or five hours.

One night, when Conor came home late, in the dark, Marco slammed down his iPad and jumped up from the bed.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Hello to you too,’ Conor said slowly.

‘You didn’t answer your phone. I texted—‘

‘About twenty times. I know. A little creepy, Marco.’

Marco’s muscles tensed, and he glanced up at the spider’s web in the corner, but only for a moment. He took a deep breath. ‘Who were you with, Conor?’

‘I told you, I signed up for classes at the Y.’

‘You weren’t there. I checked.’

‘So now you’re following me?’

‘I was worried,’ Marco said, and something about the way he said it made Conor soften towards him. There was such an innocent, childlike hurt in his voice, and it reminded Conor of the early days, when they’d met, two shipwreck survivors clinging to each other, bewildered at the hostility of the world around them, at the cruelty of people to whom they had done nothing.

‘Look, love, I’m not a child, OK?’ he said. ‘You don’t have to worry. I’m not seeing anyone else or anything like that. I’m just trying to do new things. I went to a poetry slam, that’s all. I knew you wouldn’t be interested, so I didn’t invite you. And I turned off my phone all night.’

He reached out for Marco, and Marco relaxed into his arms, and in that moment it seemed as if things would work out. Above them, in the corner, Nelly sat in her web, watching. She shuffled across to repair a broken strand, happy to be able to use all eight legs now. Her old, damaged skin lay discarded behind the cupboard; she had emerged from it a few days earlier, struggling out of it, stretching her full complement of limbs and feeling young and new.

#

Marco never noticed the spider’s new legs, and Conor never told him. Nelly was busier now that the summer heat was cooling off and the sun was slanting lower into the apartment, blocked earlier and earlier by the bulk of nearby apartment blocks and only illuminating their lives in dim, reflected form. She had woven an egg-shaped white sac on the bookshelf, hidden behind the hardback novels they never read, as if she knew they were only there for show. They’d found it by accident, while cleaning up after Marco had smashed a full wine bottle against the wall. Conor saw the guilt in Marco’s eyes as he realised what the little white shape was and who had made it. The spider would soon be a mother, and he had first disabled her and now smashed a bottle over her eggs. Conor let him feel it, only pretending to sympathise by saying, ‘At least the glass didn’t break it.’

Conor looked at the egg sac with envy as the days stretched by. He ached to build something so perfect, something shaped with such care and love. Instead, things were falling apart. In retaliation for Conor’s late nights, Marco had started going out on his own too. Sometimes, they barely saw each other for days. The affection was still there, and sometimes the passion, stronger than ever. But the intimacy of shared experiences was fading like a beautiful painting left out in the sun.

And then, one day, the sac was broken, but not by Marco. Either Nelly had broken in or her children inside had forced their way out. They searched the apartment, and only after they were about to give up did they find the baby spiders, spread out on a shelf like tiny motes of dust. So small and fragile were they that a single sweep of the hand would have erased them from existence.

‘Should we feed them?’ Marco asked.

‘Sure, we’ve got some spaghetti in the fridge,’ Conor replied, but without the hard, sarcastic edge that had crept into his voice recently. It was just a joke, and they were just boys again, gazing with wonder at the world and, after trying and failing to understand their place in it, making a joke out of it. Their arms were around each other, and they just stood there as the sun slid down the wall, the wine stains softening into the haze of dusk.

The sudden closeness didn’t last, however. Like the dusk, it was moving inexorably towards its own end as soon as it began. When Conor said how good it would be to have a family one day, he saw the intimacy freeze and die as the muscles on Marco’s face tensed and his eyes set hard. ‘I know your family wasn’t so great, but we could be different,’ he said gently, but it was too late. Marco stood up, went out, and didn’t come back until his eyes were red and clouded and he couldn’t walk across the apartment without crashing into the furniture whose positioning he knew by heart.

The spiderlings grew larger and less fragile and innocent; soon they would be setting their own webs, killing their own prey in slow, sticky suffocation. Marco and Conor never again referred to that aborted conversation, withdrawing instead to the safe ground of daily life, talking about buying groceries and taking out the trash. If Marco had just opened the door a crack, Conor would have let him in, but he never did, and Conor was not going to try again. He’d tried too many times.

One day, the shelf was empty, the spiderlings gone. Conor found them and instantly turned to Marco. ‘What did you do to them?’

Marco looked up in bewilderment from the bed, and Conor could see that the look was genuine. But he had thought his lover capable of killing their own children, and that could never be unthought.

‘Look,’ Marco said, pointing to the window that they always left cracked. There, balanced on the ledge, was Nelly, her thin legs swaying softly in the breeze. And lined up alongside her were the little spiderlings, still small but just visible against the light grey sky beyond. ‘What are they doing up there?’ Marco asked.

Conor knew. He’d researched this, deep into the night when he was too angry and disappointed to sleep, bathed in the glow of his phone and reading about the moment when things would change. ‘Watch,’ he said.

For a few minutes, there was just the slow hum of the heating system and the distant sounds of traffic, the steady mechanical grinding of life in the city. Then, from one of them, a tiny wisp of thread, almost invisible, shooting out into the vastness of the world outside, and a second later it was gone, pulled out into the open air.

‘Oh my God!’ Marco gasped. ‘It’ll die.’ He sprang forward as if to save it. Just then, another one did the same thing, and then another and another. Their small bodies started sailing out into the city, carried away on the wind, occasionally illuminated by a shaft of sunlight but otherwise lost against the grey immensity of the apartment blocks and office buildings. ‘They’re killing themselves,’ Marco said.

’They’re starting their real lives,’ Conor replied sadly. ‘Finding somewhere new.’

#

A few weeks later, the apartment was empty. Conor and Marco had divided their things, packed them into separate boxes, and carried them to separate apartments in separate boroughs. Soon the landlord would have the place cleaned and painted, and new tenants would move in, filling the quiet, empty space with their own stories. But for now it was empty, bare. Only a few scraps of paper and bits of broken plastic and the wine stain on the wall remained of Conor and Marco’s life together.

And, in the corner, amid the dust and debris of their hurried departure, a small dry spider lay with its legs curled in on themselves, as if in her dying moments Nelly had been trying to hold onto something. Perhaps she had been dreaming of her children, many of whom had never survived that perilous launch into wide open space but some of whom had landed in sheltered spots across the city and were now living new lives, weaving new webs, watching new stories unfold. Perhaps she had died trying to hold on to things that she knew could never stay the same. Or, more likely, she had died knowing that she had lived a summer and had poured her creations out into the world, and there was nothing more to be done or said. A puff of breeze from the cracked window stirred her body, which rolled for a second like tumbleweed as voices drifted in from the hall and a key turned in the lock.