Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

But this was someone he’d known half his life, with whom he had this whole labyrinthine history. He could not screw this up. Plus Patricia might be used to crazy magic sex. She and the other witches probably turned themselves into bats and had bat sex one hundred feet up, or had sex on the spirit plane, or with fire elementals or whatever. Even if none of that was true, she was way more experienced than him.

And then there was the fact that Patricia looked absolutely stunning naked — like, radiant. She wore these fluffy outfits a lot of the time, but her breasts were perfect and bigger than Laurence had expected, and her arms and legs were long and slender. Her skin was pale, but it had a rosy warmth to it. As she shifted around on his bed, her long black hair spilled everywhere and her toes flexed, and he caught glimpses of her downy pubic hair and the indentations behind her knees, and the whole thing felt like a miracle. He was just beginning to appreciate a fraction of how beautiful she was. Not for the first time in the past couple months, Laurence found himself thinking, I wish I still had my grandmother’s ring so I could give it to her the right way. Except now, he was also thinking, Please god let me not blow this, let this not be a huge mistake.

For her part, Patricia was looking at Laurence and feeling a kind of ache deeper than mere sexual desire, although there was that, too. All of her life, she felt like she had been telling people, “It doesn’t have to be like this,” which is the close cousin to “It can be better than this.” Or even, “ We can be better than this.” As a little girl, getting pressed into the dirt by her schoolmates or padlocked in a foul old spice crate by Roberta, she’d tried to say that with tears in her eyes, but she didn’t have the words back then and nobody would have understood anyway. As the outcast freak in junior high, with everybody wanting to burn her alive, she’d given up on even trying to find a way to say, “It can be more than this.” But she’d never let go of that feeling, and it came back now, in the form of hope. She gazed at Laurence’s face (which looked squarer and more handsome without a big shirt collar framing it), his surprisingly puffy and suckable-looking nipples, his shaved pubes, and the way the leg and stomach hair erupted in a heart-shaped ring around the depilated zone. And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.

MAYBE TWO MONTHS after Priya’s near disaster, Laurence had gone for drinks with Patricia, because only she could even begin to understand why he had just told Serafina they ought to spend some time apart. His other friends all thought he was crazy.

Laurence had sat in the darkest corner of PoisonRx, drinking a Snakebite, and poured out the whole story to Patricia, how he’d never felt worthy of Serafina in the first place and how their love had always felt like a shared delusion propped up by pure bloody-mindedness. Patricia had not scoffed: She’d had relationships like that too, and refusing to accept reality had made her the person she was today.

“One thing we’ve both seen,” Patricia had said, “is things come back around. People come back around. You and Serafina could have another chance, sometime.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Laurence’s drink had gone from sour fruit to dark bread, all in one swig. “Sometimes you just have to accept defeat, though.”

Patricia had kept saying she was sorry about the ring until Laurence was like, “No. I have to man up and take responsibility. For the Priya thing, for the consequences, and for my own decision afterward. Right?” Saying that stuff made Laurence feel better, both because it was true and because it made him feel like an active participant in his life.

Laurence and Patricia hadn’t started dating after that or anything — they’d just hung out. All the time. Way more time than Laurence had ever spent with Serafina, because every date with Serafina had to be perfect, and he’d always worried about being clingy. He and Patricia were just always grabbing dinner and coffee and late-night drinks, whenever Laurence could slip Milton’s leash. They were always cheating at foozeball, dancing at The EndUp with insomniac queers until five in the morning, bowling for cake, inventing elaborate drinking games for Terrence Malick movies, quoting Rutherford B. Hayes from memory, and building the weirdest kites they could coax into the sky over Kite Hill. They were always hand in hand.

They knew almost all of each other’s secrets, and that gave them license to talk in crappy puns and quotes from old hip-hop songs and fake Prohibition bootlegger slang, to the point where nobody else could even stand to be around them.

Patricia couldn’t remember a time when she’d taken herself less seriously. Like maybe Laurence was inadvertently keeping his semipromise to Kawashima and Ernesto, to keep her from getting too full of herself, but she did not even remotely mind. For the first time in living memory, she was just a girl who laughed too loud in movie theaters.

At some point, when you’re spending every free waking moment with a person, and you’ve developed your own private language, and you’re always chilling until way past your bedtime, you inevitably start to wonder if maybe it wouldn’t be easier just to share a bed as well. Not to mention, you know, fun.

PATRICIA REACHED WITH her left hand and stroked the incline of Laurence’s face, from his jaw to right under his eye. His eyes were bluer than she’d realized, along with the gray she was used to noticing. His pupils dilated a little. Her right hand reached out and touched from his thigh to his stomach, and he trembled a little. His penis rose out of the smooth zone, past the firebreak of hair, to graze the light fur of his stomach.

Patricia thought it was kind of funny that he shaved his junk and she didn’t shave hers, but she knew better than to laugh at this moment.

If either of them had turned their heads and looked at the racks of electronic detritus along the other wall, they might have noticed the Caddies were acting weird. That is, in a way that nobody had ever seen a Caddy behave before. The Caddies lit an LED on the peak of their guitar-pick-shaped cases as a pinhole camera activated. Even the two that were theoretically wiped and reformatted with Artichoke BSD. The Caddy in Patricia’s purse also came to life and flooded its screen with data. This wasn’t the way a Caddy flashes its screen to remind you of an appointment, or the little bubble that appears in the corner of the screen to let you know one of your friends is having drinks nearby. This wasn’t a user-interface thing at all. The Caddies were just interested in this one event. Caddies had been physically present for a billion human sex acts by now, but this was the first time they’d ever bothered to watch.

Patricia’s phone shut itself off, even though its battery was full. So did Laurence’s phone. Across town, Laurence’s housemate Isobel missed her bus by seconds and then the next bus broke down, so she wouldn’t be getting home any time soon. Laurence had left his instant messenger client active on his laptop, but the program crashed. Not even Superstorm Allegra making landfall in Delaware, erasing half the Eastern Seaboard with its twelve hundred miles of Category 3 fury, could disturb these two right now.

Patricia hadn’t seen Laurence naked since they were both thirteen or fourteen, and she had been trying not to look too much back then. This time, she made a point of taking in every detail. Meticulous. Greedy.

Laurence’s body was a lot more solid than Patricia had realized, because he was so tall that you expected him to be a beanpole. Sitting on the bed, all of him collected in one place, he turned out to have a pleasing swell to his biceps and his pecs and some impressive thigh action. He still looked like he could do track and field but mostly field. She’d always found his thick, inquisitive hands kind of thrilling, but they were sexier in the context of the rest of his skin: The sandy hair ran from his knuckles all the way up his arms, and slowly got darker and thicker as it traveled down his chest to the heart-shaped zone of smoothness. Patricia had never seen anything so beautiful. She wanted to be all over him forever.