I pictured her, on her stately couch in New York, painting her nails and sipping wine while I lay on the rug with some of Blithe’s meditation pillows around me.

Still, the future did not seem foreboding in L.A., as it had in New York. I knew that the old me would have scoffed, Oh, now you think everything is swell because the temperature never dips below sixty during the day, but I’d simply adjusted my expectations. I could linger in moments without waiting for a crescendo, a climax.

As Blithe emerged from his cocoon state, he became fixated on food. He would go to the fancy French bakery at least once a week and procure three different pastries and then reverse-engineer the recipes and bake them himself. He occasionally asked me to sample the two versions and try to discern the difference. My vocabulary was crude: buttery, sweet, flaky. His was like a weapon: cocoa-chalk, smegma-like, scales of crust-density. He said that he’d gone through this phase before, when he was transitioning alone in his parents’ house. Each night, he and his mom earmarked a different Julia Childs recipe to try. I wasn’t sure if his return to French cuisine was a good sign.

I kept on with my library routine. Inside the walls, I was safe from cares about the immediate present. With a spillproof coffee mug and a detective novel, I could burrow away for hours, interrupted only by glancing over at my reader-crush.

Then came the day when she was later than usual. Midmorning, she walked in, unhurried, with a leather tote over her shoulder.

“Can I sit here?” she asked in a medium-loud whisper.

“Of course.” I looked around to see if other tables were full. They were not.

“What are you reading?” she whispered.

I showed the cover of a vintage Detective Faroux volume, The Mystery of the Fallen Oak.

“And you?”

She held up a stack of files and I thought I saw a flash of magenta. “I’m Stone,” she said conspiratorially.

“I’m Pen.”

The fact that talking was discouraged made me want to keep whispering to her, but I went back to solving the mystery of a dead raven and she dived into a pile of books, musty with old resonance.

So this is daytime romance, I thought. Queer nightlife had us hooking up in the moldy corners of bathrooms, seeking touch against sensory-overloaded clubs, going for folks who were already mapped by status based on how often their outlines turned silver with hologram dust.

I had met Rachel in a queer bar.

Every known revolution comes from unsexy, incremental steps.

At lunchtime, I asked Stone if she wanted to get a juice with me. Of course, I wanted our first date to take place on some cliffside overlooking the water, replete with sea kayaking and the identification of rare birds.

She put down her field journal, rubbed her eyes, and said yes.