And then there was the fact that Patricia looked absolutely stunning naked—like, radiant. She wore these fluffy outfits a lot of the time, but her breasts were perfect and bigger than Laurence had expected, and her arms and legs were long and slender. Her skin was pale, but it had a rosy warmth to it. As she shifted around on his bed, her long black hair spilled everywhere and her toes flexed, and he caught glimpses of her downy pubic hair and the indentations behind her knees, and the whole thing felt like a miracle. He was just beginning to appreciate a fraction of how beautiful she was. Not for the first time in the past couple months, Laurence found himself thinking, I wish I still had my grandmother’s ring so I could give it to her the right way. Except now, he was also thinking, Please god let me not blow this, let this not be a huge mistake.

For her part, Patricia was looking at Laurence and feeling a kind of ache deeper than mere sexual desire, although there was that, too. All of her life, she felt like she had been telling people, “It doesn’t have to be like this,” which is the close cousin to “It can be better than this.” Or even, “We can be better than this.” As a little girl, getting pressed into the dirt by her schoolmates or padlocked in a foul old spice crate by Roberta, she’d tried to say that with tears in her eyes, but she didn’t have the words back then and nobody would have understood anyway. As the outcast freak in junior high, with everybody wanting to burn her alive, she’d given up on even trying to find a way to say, “It can be more than this.” But she’d never let go of that feeling, and it came back now, in the form of hope. She gazed at Laurence’s face (which looked squarer and more handsome without a big shirt collar framing it), his surprisingly puffy and suckable-looking nipples, his shaved pubes, and the way the leg and stomach hair erupted in a heart-shaped ring around the depilated zone. And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

*   *   *

MAYBE TWO MONTHS after Priya’s near disaster, Laurence had gone for drinks with Patricia, because only she could even begin to understand why he had just told Serafina they ought to spend some time apart. His other friends all thought he was crazy.