Laurence had sat in the darkest corner of PoisonRx, drinking a Snakebite, and poured out the whole story to Patricia, how he’d never felt worthy of Serafina in the first place and how their love had always felt like a shared delusion propped up by pure bloody-mindedness. Patricia had not scoffed: She’d had relationships like that too, and refusing to accept reality had made her the person she was today.

“One thing we’ve both seen,” Patricia had said, “is things come back around. People come back around. You and Serafina could have another chance, sometime.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Laurence’s drink had gone from sour fruit to dark bread, all in one swig. “Sometimes you just have to accept defeat, though.”

Patricia had kept saying she was sorry about the ring until Laurence was like, “No. I have to man up and take responsibility. For the Priya thing, for the consequences, and for my own decision afterward. Right?” Saying that stuff made Laurence feel better, both because it was true and because it made him feel like an active participant in his life.

Laurence and Patricia hadn’t started dating after that or anything—they’d just hung out. All the time. Way more time than Laurence had ever spent with Serafina, because every date with Serafina had to be perfect, and he’d always worried about being clingy. He and Patricia were just always grabbing dinner and coffee and late-night drinks, whenever Laurence could slip Milton’s leash. They were always cheating at foozeball, dancing at The EndUp with insomniac queers until five in the morning, bowling for cake, inventing elaborate drinking games for Terrence Malick movies, quoting Rutherford B. Hayes from memory, and building the weirdest kites they could coax into the sky over Kite Hill. They were always hand in hand.

They knew almost all of each other’s secrets, and that gave them license to talk in crappy puns and quotes from old hip-hop songs and fake Prohibition bootlegger slang, to the point where nobody else could even stand to be around them.

Patricia couldn’t remember a time when she’d taken herself less seriously. Like maybe Laurence was inadvertently keeping his semipromise to Kawashima and Ernesto, to keep her from getting too full of herself, but she did not even remotely mind. For the first time in living memory, she was just a girl who laughed too loud in movie theaters.

At some point, when you’re spending every free waking moment with a person, and you’ve developed your own private language, and you’re always chilling until way past your bedtime, you inevitably start to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t be easier just to share a bed as well. Not to mention, you know, fun.

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