All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,94
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.