“What are you guys doing here?” I say, hoping they don’t hear how my voice choked up a little there at the end.

“Okay, we’re not as good at planning these things as you are,” Pen says, “but I think we did a good job. Come sit.”

I kiss them both and look at the spread. There is wine, cheese, and crackers. But I don’t even care. They’re both here. “I thought you had to work.”

Fletch rummages around the basket. “Shit I forgot the knife. Dude, how do you always remember all the stuff for surprises? It took us a long time to manage this much. Oh, and we both arranged some time off so we could surprise you.”

Pen crawls across the blanket and lays her head in my lap. “It’s been too long.”

It has. Everything seems right again. We lounge on the blanket for a long time just hanging out. This is perfect. Everything I want. I mean, I want sex, too, in a little while. But this, the three of us, feels like all the pieces of me come back together again.

I don’t know how something like this works in the forever world. It seems like we still have a lot of shit we’ll need to go through, but if we can always come back to this, this inedible cheese, bad wine, too many ants yet perfect picnic in the backyard, then life is just going to work out fine, isn’t it?

Epilogue

Penelope

Five years later

“Are you ready?”

I blow out a breath that’s been constricting my chest all night during our Christmas Eve festivities. Am I ready?

Yes? No?

I try to remember what life was like when I thought I would never understand relationships or people or sex. Now I don’t think it—I know it. People make absolutely no sense at all. We’re not a very logical species. We can’t seem to ask for what we need or say what we mean. We talk in circles. Relationships are unfathomable too. They are always changing, and if you don’t grow, if you’re too rigid, then the relationship breaks. It’s hard for me to always remember to allow growth and change. I prefer things like gravity and quadratic equations—things that have rules that don’t bend.

And sex—well I know for sure I’ll never understand that. How each time it’s different. How different moods and tones and feelings change the intensity and duration of an orgasm. How sometimes it seems to take me an hour to get there and sometimes just a mouth on my boob sends me into orbit in thirty seconds.

Shane opens the door to our bedroom and gestures us inside, “After you, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

“Thank you, Mr. Smith,” Fletch answers.