“I’m mad at you,” I said, getting the eggs from the fridge. “I don’t like it here.”

“I know you don’t.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

He sighed, turned off the twinkle in his eyes. “What do you want to do?”

“I should probably go home, right? That would make the most sense.” As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted. Like anyone without a backup plan, I wanted the original plan to work out.

“It’s not even winter,” he said half-heartedly. “Maybe you’d like the winter?”

“It doesn’t even snow here. I looked it up. What kind of place doesn’t snow?”

“It snows in the mountains. We can go to the mountains and see snow.”

“I don’t want to go see snow like it’s some relic in a museum. I want it to actually snow. I want it to rain. I want the sky to do something, anything at all.” I was suddenly tired. The “house” was hot, the air thick and fragrant. There were orange trees in the yard and in the evenings they let off a sweet, sickly odor.

Alec took me into his arms. He used to smell like a thunderstorm, but they didn’t have the same laundry detergent here, and so now he smelled like nothing. He had always reminded me of thunderstorms, the mixture of rain and wind and power. We’d spent our first week together in bed, spring storms raging outside. During the days, I worked at the university’s map library, and he’d come visit, bringing peanut butter sandwiches and sodas. We’d play the map game, in which one of us would name a town on a map and the other had thirty seconds to find it. In the evenings, we’d walk back to his apartment, where we’d watch movies and eat take-out, wait for the room to flash yellow with heat lightning.

He didn’t feel the same in California. How could he be like a thunderstorm when there were no thunderstorms to compare him to? When I looked at him, it was like a layer had come off, revealing some muted version of the Alec I’d known back in Kansas. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me.

As he held me, I closed my eyes and pretended like we were back home. In the morning, we’d walk to the bakery around the corner and split an order of biscuits and gravy, share a mug of coffee. We’d go back to his apartment and make love, do a crossword, read books. I realized all of this was possible in California—there were biscuits and gravy, bakeries and crosswords. But it wouldn’t be the same. It couldn’t be.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

I nodded, my tears dampening his shirt. I miss you, I wanted to say.

“Let’s go to sleep,” he said. “Forget the soufflé.”

We shuffled to bed, where I immediately fell asleep. At some point in the night, Alec left the bed and went to sleep on the couch—he’d done this once before, saying it was cooler there than in the bed, where I radiated heat.