“Yeah, so, uh… my mom left him,” Andrew starts, wincing. “I guess she actually didn’t know about the apartment for his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend, and my dad blamed me for telling her, so I’m out.”

“Wow. Fuck ’em for real. I’m so sorry.”

He somehow manages to lean casually while sitting cross-legged on a bed. “Nah, it’s fine. I went to Stanford. I have this face—” He gestures to the face in question with the flourish of his wrist. Unsurprisingly, it’s still a magnificent face. “I got, like, ten job offers within a week, and I just accepted a new position with a hedge fund here in Portland.”

“A hedge fund? Does this mean you and Dylan aren’t together? Because there is no way they’d let you work for a hedge fund.”

Andrew drops his head, and for the first time since I’ve known him, I watch a blush spread across his cheeks. “What can I say? Ours is a star-crossed love.”

I kick him again. “Andrew!”

“Ouch.”

“You’re still together?” I realize I’ve raised the volume of my voice beyond the appropriate level for a closet, but it feels warranted. “You’re really together together?”

He nods, and the blush deepens. “I don’t know,” he says bashfully. “I guess we’re, like, trying to do this thing for real, or whatever. I—I don’t have a lot of experience with, you know…”

“Real feelings?”

Andrew raises his hands halfway to his chest, then lets them drop again. “I don’t have a lot of experience dating someone I care about, so I’m petrified about ninety percent of the time,” he confesses. “But it’s also good. It’s really good. And after I finally told them that I do want a committed relationship with them… you know, monogamy, marriage, mortgage—”

“All that embarrassing crap.”

“It was like this giant weight had been lifted.” Andrew sighs. “I should’ve just done that from the beginning, but Dylan and I can’t change the past. So here we are.”

Andrew shrugs again, and there’s an unexpected sweetness to it. I think about the Burberry coat, the snapback, all the versions of Andrew Kim-Prescott I tried to pin down. But Andrew is just this—just a messy person with feelings he doesn’t always understand, just a person who is mostly trying to do his best.

I can feel him studying me from across the bed as I pick pilly bits off my sweatpants. “They miss you, you know?”

“Dylan does not miss me, unless it’s because they need a human target for their glowering.”