All the Birds in the Sky

The remaining wall space, over by the door, was taken up with a small bookcase containing graphic novels, engineering texts, and a few science memoirs, like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Random action figures and toys in silly poses sat on the dresser, and one of Serafina’s robots, Jimmy, peered over Laurence’s bed frame.

Laurence was feeling pretty freaking nervous. He had been with a nontrivial number of girls — but at least half of those had been tipsy hookups where you had a certain amount of plausible deniability about sexual performance. He’d dated Ginnifer, an electrical engineer with a wicked smile, during sophomore and junior years in college, and she would devise contraptions that could stimulate Laurence’s prostate with varying levels of vibration while also enabling her to straddle his penis, and apply a similar variable-speed oscillation/vibrator function to her clitoris. Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe.

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.