Owen nods. He’s not like Lulu: always weighing and measuring, trying to see all of the angles and come at it from the best one. He just likes to know his own mind, to make sure he’s right with himself. He knows how to keep his balance better than almost anyone else Lulu knows.

“That makes two of us,” he says, and slips between the canvas flaps.

Lulu looks up at the darkness of the sky above her: all of that limitless black. In the context of infinity, it’s easy to think that there’s no right thing to do, at least not right now, at least not tonight.

She follows Owen in.

Once they’re settled, Owen takes out his phone to try to play music, but Ryan makes him put it away again—“No phones at The Hotel,” he says, and Cass echoes him. No phones at The Hotel.

At first the quiet that surrounds their conversation unnerves Lulu. You can hear each of them tuning in and out again. The moments in which no one has anything to say stand out, stark and unmissable.

Eventually, though, in the later, woozier hours, she starts to find it comforting. There’s a rhythm to this, she thinks. What we’re doing here together. The way conversation falls away and then finds itself again, if you let it.

Lulu wraps herself in a blanket; she tips sideways into Owen’s lap. His hands tangle in her hair. She remembers digging her fingers into his thighs, his back, the back of his head.

“Are you guys together?” she hears Ryan ask. The words sound like they’re being spoken somewhere very far away.

“Nah,” Owen says. “We were.”

“You look so pretty like this, though,” Cass says.

“Lulu and I love each other,” Owen says. “That’s all.”

Lulu hears bodies shifting, rearranging themselves.

Cass asks, “That’s all, huh?”

Lulu wishes she were awake enough to read Cass’s tone.

“That’s all,” Owen says. “That’s all there is, right?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

LULU WAKES UP because her face is too warm. She blinks and blinks. She must have fallen asleep in the tent last night. Now the sun is falling over the lip of the pool’s edge, streaming through the thin canvas. Owen is next to her. Ryan and Cass are gone.

She stumbles outside, only barely managing not to step on Owen. The day is beautiful: clear sky, clear air, exactly the kind of fresh, sweet a.m. hour that makes having a hangover feel especially depraved. Lulu wishes she had her sunglasses, at least.