She stood up abruptly, her vision going dark for a moment, and walked almost-steadily out the side door, around the building, and out toward the tents in the light rain. Marlon’s teepee was lit up, and she could see shadows inside, so she opened the flap. Jake and Yvette sat hunched toward each other, their foreheads nearly touching across Marlon’s sleeping body. Alamo, sprawled on his side, clocked her entrance with the minutest lift of his head, then returned to his rest.

“Um,” said Jake. “We’re actually having a kind of private conversation.”

Yvette looked up at her with red, shrunken eyes. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m just having a deeply conventional, terrible time and I don’t want to talk about it with too many people.”

“I put my Mariners hat on top of my tent so you could find it,” Jake said.

Some fortification in her, which she hadn’t quite known existed, was breached.

“You want me to go sleep by myself while you fuck Yvette back to mental clarity?”

“It’s healthy to be jealous,” Yvette said. “But ultimately fruitless. In the sense of an orchard bearing fruit, I mean.”

Marlon was sleeping silently, no sign of life. Was he dreaming? Or in that darkness that enough drugs and booze and exhaustion can bring if you combine them right? He seemed content, whichever it was.

“Listen, I don’t care what you guys do,” Leslie said. “But I’m staying here. I want to be lying down, and near people, okay? I’m going to lie down here next to Marlon and I’m going to go to sleep. You can keep talking here or lie down too, or sleep or have sex or talk more in the other tent, or go for a walk and come back and then lie down in here. That’s what I’m going to do, okay?”

She slipped her shoes off and took the towel from her shoulders. Her bathing suit was still wet, so she hurriedly pulled the straps down, peeled the suit to her waist, and stepped out through the bottom. She felt a momentary spike of excitement as she stood up, naked, in front of Jake and Yvette. Stripped bare, finally. Then she crawled under Marlon’s unzipped sleeping bag and pressed herself against his clothed body.

“Are you okay with this?” Jake said.

“She seems like a really nice person,” Yvette said.

They went back to their conversation—Yvette was having money problems, and her mentally ill parents were making things worse. Leslie listened to the murmuring over her head until, finally warmed through, she dreamed the wedding over again, better.

She woke up in the dark with someone spooning her from behind. Definitely, well, a man. Marlon. To her right, other bodies were hard at work. She pressed herself against Marlon and he threw an arm over her.

“Hey, Marlon,” she whispered.

“Huh,” he said.