“I just had to,” Padgett says, with another sip. “I was tired of thinking about you, without you around ever.”

“It’s just a little fuck on the side today,” Martin can’t help guessing aloud, now that his glass is empty, “off the Trail, or—”

“Don’t do that,” she says.

“I’m just asking. Three years, Padgett. You didn’t even—”

“I called a few times.”

“No.”

“From weird phones. I did.”

“I never—”

“I hung up when you answered.”

Martin walks to the bar with half a hard-on. It is exactly like a dream, naked at work, and what is stranger is that Martin thinks he can remember at least one of those calls, a name, or no name, unrecognizable on his screen and then just a thin slice of ambient noise when he picked up, Padgett’s attention like a lighthouse blinking through a roiling storm. “And what is it now?” he says. “Now you’re going again?”

“I just wanted to see you,” Padgett says. “I’ve been waiting to.”

“Well, I’m like this,” Martin says, waving a hand up and down his body like a quick tailor. “The same. And you, married to the Emperor of the Bay Area.”

Padgett tilts to take another sip but her glass is empty too. Martin hands her his and goes to refill the other. He brings the bottle back with him. There’s a scuttling at the door, someone pushing a little to get in and giving up immediately. Padgett looks at her expensive top on the floor, wadded. “I thought I’d feel togetherer than this,” she tells him, “at least by now.”

“It’s hard, marrying for money.”

Padgett gives him a look.

“You’re earning it.”

“Stop it, Martin. Stop it.”

“I’m just trying to figure things out,” he says, throwing out his hands, and Padgett has to admit that the naked two of them, on a dirty red carpet with a bottle between them, is something that needs figuring. “We had a plot, a planned-out plot. You were going to marry this guy.”

“I did.”

“—and then in three years there’s not a peep.”

Padgett drinks. “Peep.”

“Now you stop.”

“He sees everything, Martin. He found the album. I had to stop posting at you, I don’t know what he would have figured out.”

“So what did you do?”

“I married him,” Padgett says miserably.

“And what? Fell in love, you’re going to say.”

“No, I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Then it’s according to plan?”

“It’s a marriage, Martin. Three years.”

“And?”

“And we make it work, I guess,” she says.

“Aha,” Martin says softly.

“There’s no aha.”

“You don’t love him.”