As soon as she got out of Danger, she saw her phone was full of texts and voicemails. She called Kevin, who was worried, and she was like, “I’m fine, except I need a drink.”

Half an hour later, she leaned on Kevin’s crushed-velvet frock coat and pounded a Corona in the swampy back room of the art bar on 16th, with fresh graffiti on the wall and a DJ spinning classic hip-hop. Kevin was drinking Pimm’s with a fat cucumber slice and not asking her what that scene at dinner had been about. He looked amazing in the bar’s golden light, sideburns setting off the smooth planes of his face.

“I’m fine,” Patricia kept saying. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m fine. I sorted it out.”

But as her tongue greeted the lime wedge bobbing up to the lip of the bottle and tasted the pulp mixed with beer, she remembered how Kevin wouldn’t even look her in the eye when everybody else was accusing her of being a toxic loner.

“We should talk about what this is, right? You and me. What we’re doing,” she started to say, trying to make herself heard over the DJ without shouting. “I feel like we tried too hard not to label our relationship, and that became a label in itself.”

“I have something I have to tell you,” Kevin said, his eyes bigger and sadder than usual.

“I am ready to open up about my feelings. I feel…” Patricia searched for the right words. “I feel good, about us. I care about you, a lot, and I am open to—”

“I met someone else,” Kevin blurted. “Her name is Mara. She’s also a webcomics artist of some renown. She lives in the East Bay. We met only in the past fortnight, but this already shows signs of becoming serious. I was not even looking, but my Caddy pinged me with twenty-nine points of convergence between Mara and myself.” He gazed into his Pimm’s. “You and I never said we were exclusive, or even that we were dating.”

“Umm.” Patricia chewed her thumb, a habit she’d quit years ago. “I’m happy, happy. For you. I’m happy for you.”

“Patricia.” Kevin took both her hands. “You are utterly mad, but delightful. I feel so overjoyed to have gotten to know you. But I have been a fool too many times already. And I tried, I really did, to talk to you about our relationship, on five separate occasions. In the park when we were roller-skating, and also at that pizza bar…”

As Kevin listed these moments, she could see them with perfect clarity: all the missed cues and deflections, all the abortive moments of intimacy. All this time, she had been thinking of him as the one with commitment issues. Somewhere along the line, she had become an asshole.