Maria: how should I put this

Maria: personal hygiene? yes, personal hygiene

Maria: when it comes to his lovers

Maria: I’m pretty sure anyone who smells like the Catch of the Day is disqualified, sadly

Carah: oooooooooooh

Carah: the rare and elusive piscine BURN!

Carah: FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Ian: That’s right, Maria

Ian: I suppose you WOULD know all about Peter’s requirements for sex

Summer: Stop right there, Ian

Maria: No, go on, I’d like to hear this

Alex: Ian, Peter might not have an IV tuna drip and muscles upon muscles, like some sort of steroid-induced pecs Inception, but he will fuck you up, my dude

Alex: and so will I, to be clear

Peter: Thank you for the kind offer, Alex, but there would be nothing left of him by the time I was through

Peter: and that’s only if Maria doesn’t get to him first, because she would transform him singlehandedly into a fine pink mist

Peter: So please, Ian, finish what you were saying

Carah: IT’S MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY UP IN THIS BITCH

Carah: NO TUNA IS SAFE TONIGHT

Peter: Ian?

Alex: Yo, Ian

Carah: IAN, COME BACK

Maria: He swam away, like his beloved fish

Maria: which are vertebrates, unlike him

Summer: Oh, wow. ::high-fives::

Carah: ICHTHYOLOGY SHADE, I LOVE MY GODDAMN LIFE

If Marcus could have smiled, he would have.

Instead, he drained the rest of his water, set the glass in his deep, wide sink, and prepared to remove his suitcases from the car and literally unpack his relationship with April.

After several trips outside, he set the luggage on his California king bed and unzipped everything, determined to empty every compartment, every pocket, every dark hiding place.

Dirty clothing goes in the hamper. Clean clothing goes in drawers or on hangers. Toiletries go in the bathroom. Tech goes in either my nightstand table or my office.

If he kept repeating the next steps to himself, he couldn’t think beyond the moment. Couldn’t remember.

It was all so easy. Mindless. Mindless was good.

One armful at a time, minute by minute, everything settled back into place. Clothing, toiletries, tech, emotions. His life, restored to its state pre-April. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he’d never left at all.

Then he saw it, carefully tucked inside a pocket, cushioned from damage with newspaper.

“I changed my mind,” she’d told him one Saturday, as they’d stood on the cliffs above the Sutro Baths and watched the tide roll in. “I thought you were a diamond, and then I thought you were gold. But none of that was quite right. Not once I knew you better.”

After squeezing his hand, she’d let go of him and gone digging in her oversize purse.

“I’ll be glad to hand it over.” The setting sun sparked in her hair as she shook her head ruefully. “It’s heavy as fuck. You’d think it would be easy to find for exactly that reason, but . . .”

He’d help her, only he had no idea what the hell she was talking about. “I’m sorry?”

“I got you a gift,” she told him cheerfully, and kept digging.

He stared down at her, speechless. The last time anyone had given him a present with no ulterior motive, no special occasion or achievement to celebrate—

Well, that had never happened before. Not once in his memory.

“There it is.” Lifting her head, she smiled with satisfaction and put something extremely heavy in his palm. It was wrapped in newspaper, but vaguely round. “Open it.”

The sheets of newspaper crinkled as he carefully unfolded them, revealing . . . stone. The most beautiful stone he’d ever seen. It was a rich, intense blue, speckled with white, veined in what appeared to be gold. A polished sphere, cool in his cupped hand.

“It’s lapis lazuli.” With a fingertip, she tapped the stone. “When we went to that gem and mineral warehouse the other weekend, I picked it up. While you were in the bathroom.”

He’d have appreciated anything she gave him. Movie tickets. One of those fossilized pieces of feces—coprolites?—they’d seen in the warehouse. A soda. Whatever.

But this . . . this was gorgeous, as lovely as the woman who’d gifted it to him.

Then she kept talking, and his heart swelled to fill his entire chest and push up into his throat.

“Lapis is a metamorphic rock. The original rock is subjected to intense heat and pressure, and then . . . this.” She laid her palm on his chest, over his expanding heart, her touch reverent. “Beauty.”

He’d bitten his lip, unable to respond directly to the implied praise without weeping. “Those veins in the rock aren’t actually gold, are they?”

“Nope.” She lifted a shoulder, the movement a bit jerky. “Pyrite. Fool’s gold. Sorry.”

Shit, she thought he was criticizing the gift, and nothing could be further from the truth.

“Gold couldn’t make this any more beautiful than it is.” Tipping up her chin, he kissed her with all the adoration one man’s overfull heart could contain. “Thank you. I love it.”

Maybe she hadn’t said the words, but he’d recognized the gravity of her offering. It wasn’t just a sphere of stone, but—

Her heart. It had felt like her laying her heart in his palm, despite all her fears.

When it came to bravery, April possessed more than her fair share.

When it was much too late, he’d been brave too. He’d told the truth, all of it. He’d exposed his heart to her without artifice or omission and told her, This part of me is pyrite, not gold.

And once she knew, she didn’t want him. He was a liar, valuable only to a fool who mistook him for something more.

And now that she was gone, he was no longer more to anyone. He was no longer a sphere of rich, speckled blue, polished and beautiful but substantial too. Weighty in his palm, then and now.

Now he was a speck of a man. One of the sunlit dust motes that sparkled and floated inside her car, glinting and aimless and adrift.

Yes, he was angry that she’d dismissed his concerns about his career with such blithe disregard. But he was angrier at himself. Still. Always.

He never learned. He never, ever learned.

His phone buzzed from the top of the dresser. Another text from Alex, who’d apparently received Marcus’s own message at long last.

Dude. I’m so sorry, read the bubble on the screen. I’m coming over.

Marcus exhaled. Thank fuck. He needed his best friend, and he needed something to both puncture the silence of his house and quiet the cacophony in his head.

Alex could do all of that easily, with a single rant about unrealistic judging expectations in televised baking competitions. Especially if he brought—

Another incoming message. I know it’s not your usual thing, but wanna get drunk? I can pick up booze on my way there.

Yes, Marcus wrote back. Please.

He didn’t unwrap the lapis sphere. Instead, he placed it, still swathed in newsprint, in the back corner of his closet, behind the shoe box containing a pair of hiking boots he’d never managed to break in.

There, it couldn’t taunt him with what he’d lost, and it couldn’t remind him of what he’d never truly had.

APRIL WAS DONE hiding. Which meant, unfortunately, that she was going to Con of the Gates tomorrow, less than a week after her breakup with Marcus. Public scrutiny and potential humiliation and her own misery be damned.

She didn’t fool herself. It wasn’t going to be comfortable. After all those tweets and blog posts and articles, too many people knew her face now. They knew her body. There would be no hiding in a crowd, and no hiding the fact that she and Marcus hadn’t attended the con together.

Cynics would roll their eyes and say they’d recognized a publicity stunt from the start. The unkind would laugh instead. So much for his white-knight ambitions, they’d crow. Even such a gifted actor couldn’t pretend to want a woman like that for long.

Whatever. If they judged her, fuck them.

And even if she’d wanted to hide, like hell she’d let her Lavinia costume—the product of hours of dedicated effort by Mel and Pablo—languish in a closet out of cowardice. And there was no way she’d ever, ever skip her long-awaited gathering with her closest Lavineas friends.

They’d notice her distance from Marcus and wonder, of course. Hopefully, they’d be kind enough not to ask. Or, failing that, smart enough to ask with a fresh tissue box nearby.

After tucking the last of her clothing and travel toiletries into her suitcase, she zipped it shut and rolled it just inside the apartment door. Afterward, she sat on her couch beneath a blanket and listened to a podcast.

She tried to pay attention, but she kept thinking Marcus would find the topic interesting. Not so much because he paid special attention to unsolved serial killings, but because he was as hungry for knowledge as anyone she’d ever met, his innate curiosity matching her own.

Fuck, she missed him.

When she realized she hadn’t registered the last ten minutes of the podcast, she turned it off. In the gathering darkness of her living room, throw pillow held to her chest, she sat and stopped trying not to think about it. About them. About her life without him.

So quickly—or maybe not that quickly, now that she knew he was BAWN—Marcus had made ample space for himself in her daily life and thoughts. But he wasn’t everything, and he wasn’t all that mattered to her. Her work and her costume and her upcoming meeting with her Lavineas friends were proof enough of her non-Marcus interests. So were her dinner plans with Bashir and Mimi next week.

She wasn’t lost. She wasn’t.

Even if his absence from her home, her bed, her arms, left her hollow-eyed and aching down to her joints some days. Even if she watched British baking shows while she ate takeout for dinner, because claggy sponges and underproofed dough reminded her of him.

Even if she loved him, and he loved her in return.

When she shut off her bedside lamp way too late at night, she still saw him behind her eyelids, face crumpled and stricken and adoring as she railed against him in her car. Eyes wet, but too honorable to use his tears or his love as tools to force her forgiveness.