“Give it two days, and she’ll have you sleep with her for info,” Hark muttered. Eli’s hand, which had been patting his pockets in search of car keys, briefly stuttered.

“Poor Eli.” Minami smiled, sly. “He’s so put off by the idea. What hardship.”

Eli flipped them all off half-heartedly and headed home, resigned. Minami always thought she knew best. Unfortunately, she tended to be right.

When he stepped into his kitchen, Maya was sitting at the counter, frowning into her tablet at something that could have been a physics article or Wattpad fan fiction. She was that eclectic.

“I made dinner,” she said distractedly. “You hungry?”

He dropped his keys on the counter and tilted his head skeptically. “You made dinner.”

She looked up. “I ordered Chinese on Grubhub—with your money—and I put it on one of the paper plates I bought—also with your money—because I’m sick of loading and unloading the dishwasher. Would you like some?”

He nodded, smiling faintly while she spooned rice and chicken out of the containers for him. His gaze wandered to the table, where she’d made a move in their ongoing chess game. He made a mental note to study it later and accepted his plate.

The home where they’d been raised had been foreclosed a decade earlier, but Eli had bought this one about six years ago, after Harkness had taken off, after he’d paid off his sizable debt, after he’d become financially stable enough to cover Maya’s undergrad tuition wherever she chose to go. At the time, he’d figured Allandale would be a nice neighborhood to settle down in, with its well-kept parks and quiet atmosphere and good food. He and McKenzie had been talking about marriage, maybe not enthusiastically, but often enough that he’d taken for granted they’d eventually get around to it. They’d live here, and . . . hire a photographer for bucolic family photos, argue over the thermostat, grill every night. Whatever the fuck it was that happy, well-adjusted people did. They’d soak in the peace of the place, since their relationship was all about calm and harmony and restraint.

But here he was, living with his sister. His sister, who used to accuse him of crimes against humanity and couldn’t get away from him soon enough at eighteen, had decided to “come back home” for her master’s, her magnetic poetry stuck on his fridge and the syrupy scent of her candles cozy in the too-hot evening. As for McKenzie . . . Before today, Eli couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about her.

That was telling enough.

“Where’s Tiny?” he asked.

“Not sure. Tiny? ” Summoned, Tiny barged in through the garden doggy door and threw all of his one hundred and eighty pounds of mutt delight at Eli, who was just as happy to see him. Maya rolled her eyes. “He was busy pining for his one true love to return from the war. I just walked him, by the way. The ingrate. How was work?”

Eli just grunted, vigorously scratching the backs of Tiny’s ears to his exact specifications. The reward was as close to a smile as a canine could physically achieve. “How was school?”

She grunted just the same, and they exchanged an amused look.

Look at us. Related, after all.

“Did you see Hark today?” Maya’s tone was the personification of casual disinterest. Eli swallowed a snort and sat on the stool next to hers. “How is he?”

“Still not age appropriate for you.”

“I think he’s into me.”

“I think it’s a felony.”

“Hasn’t been for a while, since I am almost twenty-two years old.” Tiny whimpered softly at Eli’s feet, as though in agreement. Traitor.

“Yes. Fair point. Until you remember that when Hark was twenty-two years old, you had yet to achieve full control of your bowels.”

She shot him a baffled look. “Do you think nine-year-olds use diapers?”

Yes. No? What the fuck did he know? He’d barely paid attention to her before she’d been shoved into his life. “This feels like a trick question, and I don’t plan to engage with it.”

“Seems kind of puritanical of you, someone whose entire download history is hiking trail maps, solitaire, and sex-forward dating apps.”

His eyebrow rose. “Hark doesn’t do relationships, either.”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to marry him. I just want to—”

“Do not say it.”

“—use his beautiful, former rower’s body.”

“She fucking said it,” he mumbled. “Can you please not put in my head images that a therapist will have me reenact with dolls five years down the line?”

“But it’s so fun.”

“Listen, you are legally free to engage in orgies with people four times your age, but—”

“‘But don’t expect me to facilitate any of that,’ I know, I know.” She sighed. “How was the date last night?”

“It was . . .” God, it was so messed up that the only thing he could think of saying was, “Good.”

Because it was true. Being with Rue, even just to talk, had been good. Wasn’t that incredibly fucking pitiful?

“Will you see her again?”

He thought about the following day. “Maybe.” He bent his head to focus on his food, then on Maya’s recounting of her computational physics class, then on Tiny’s soft snores rising up from his feet. And told himself that if he couldn’t avoid Rue Siebert, he should at least try to think about her a little less.

7

NOT A CONDITION FOR ANYTHING

RUE

Meals were always tricky business for me, but none more than breakfast on days in which I planned to be in the lab for several hours. I couldn’t skip eating, not if I wanted to avoid feeling like I’d pass out around midday. And yet, those days also tended to start very early in the morning, which meant a significant risk of oversleeping. Which meant no time for a sit-down meal.

Which meant a lot of fucking misery.

A normal person would have bought a snack at the vending machine or packed a sandwich. But I wasn’t normal, not when it came to food: eating quickly, eating standing up, eating on the go, it all triggered some of my most cavernous anxieties. And I would have taken the hunger over those any day.

To eat I needed time and quiet. I needed to stare at my meal and know, feel, that more food would be waiting for me after the bite I’d just swallowed was gone. My issues were deep-rooted, multilayered, and impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t grown up hiding expired Twinkies in secret spots, who hadn’t discovered fresh produce only well into her teens, who hadn’t fought with a sibling over the last stale cracker.

Not that I’d ever really tried. Tisha already knew, my therapist had pried out my history piecemeal over years, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else caring about me enough to want to listen. After all, I hadn’t been food insecure in over ten years, and I should have been over this shit.

Though clearly I was not.

That morning, I fucked up on a staggering number of levels: woke up late after a fitful night of sleep, let the hot shower boil my skin for far too long, went downstairs without my car keys, and finally met Samantha from quality assurance in the parking lot, who wanted to know if, in my opinion as “Florence’s favorite,” we were all soon going to be living in a tent below the underpass, like a big happy family. Eating was the last thing on my mind, and when I stepped into the lab I’d booked, I was twelve minutes late.

And he was there.

Parked on a stool.

Loose jointed and relaxed as he waited for me.

We regarded each other with equally masked expressions. Neither of us bothered to say hi or, god forbid, How are you? We just stared and stared and stared in the deathly early morning quiet, until his eyes began roaming over me, and his pupils got larger, and my skin began to tingle.