Archive of Our Own

“Do you want to see a magic trick?” Gen asks her, leaned up against the wall with his hand in his pocket rattling whatever weird nicknacks he has stashed in there today. They’re holed up in the back room of a house, ignoring the larger party raging outside. 

Irene raises an eyebrow at him. “Is this the start of some terrible joke I’m not going to laugh at?”

“No!” Gen says with mock outrage. He pulls out a deck of cards from his pocket. “It’s a real trick.” 

Irene doesn’t know what’s compelled him to suggest something as silly as a magic trick at 10:30 on a Friday night at his cousin’s house party, and frankly she isn’t one for magic tricks. But she’s avoiding her problems, and Gen is smiling sweet and eager, so she caves. 

“Sure,” she says, taking a sip of her rum and coke, dark red nails nearly the same shade as her Solo cup. Drinking top shelf rum out of a plastic cup is still jarring. She’ll never understand his family. 

“Great,” he says, sliding to his knees in front of her chair. He opens the card box flap with his thumb. “But first, I’m going to need a hand.”

Always with the hand puns . 

She rolls her eyes. “What if I don’t know how to shuffle?” 

Gen shrugs. “Fake it.” He holds out the pack. 

Irene takes it with her free hand, and looks for somewhere to put down her drink. But before she can make moves, Gen’s fingers are sliding against the back of her hand as he grabs the cup from her. He takes a sip.  

“That’s yours now,” she says, voice icy. He should know better — she does not share food. 

Unfazed, he smiles at her, a one-sided upturn of his mouth. “Worried you’ll catch my cooties?” 

She stares, deadpan, until he laughs. 

“Shuffle the cards,” he urges, gesturing at the box with his hand, still clutching her — nope, his — cup. 

Irene cuts the deck, right hand still cold and clammy with condensation from her drink. Without a table to work with, she straightens the cards out against her thigh and shuffles them midair. 

Gen raises an eyebrow at her. 

“I know how to shuffle,” she says. With a poker face like hers, she’s won a lot of money playing card games.

Gen takes the cards back, eyes sparkling and brow furrowed in surprise. Irene feels a small glow of pleasure — Gen is hard to impress. 

“Pick a card,” he says, deck fanned out between his thumb and forefinger. “Memorize it but don’t show it to me.” 

Feeling ridiculous, like a little kid at a birthday party, Irene reaches for one. But before she can grab it, Gen pulls his hand back. 

“Care to make a bet?” 

She arches an eyebrow. Irene knows him too well not to expect that the next thing out of his mouth will either send her eyes rolling to the back of her head, or make her question all the life choices that have led her to this point. With her luck, it will be both. 

“If I can’t guess your card, you can have these earrings you love so much.” 

That surprises her. She looks at the earrings, delicate gold hoops attached to a bar, ending in a prong-set raw ruby. She would never have picked them out for herself, but she had fallen in love with them the first time she’d seen Gen wear them, the red and gold standing out against his dark hair. She would give anything for the earrings. They’re an outrageous thing to bet on a magic trick, but Gen and his relatives make a hobby out of over-the-top, asinine bets. His father’s cousin Ornon had once lost his Dodge Ram truck after betting that Gen couldn’t beat him in an arm wrestle. Gen had driven himself to every family gathering for a month straight after that, just to gloat. 

Irene says, “And if you guess—“

“GEN! Where are you?”

Irene winces as a booming voice cuts through her question. 

Gen swears violently under his breath, face flushing. “In here! What do you want?” he calls over his shoulder. 

A huge, hulking man peers into the room, already answering. “Does your girlfriend want to play — oh, hey, Irene. Do you want to play pong? Sophos got too drunk last round and Helen and I need a third.” 

“She’s not—no, neither of us want to play,” Gen answers before she can, tone sharp, and turns back to face her. He always bristles at his family’s implication that they’re dating. 

Aulus throws his head back with a booming laugh. “I wasn’t asking you to play, you silly bastard. No more lightweights on my team. For that, we’ll wake Sophos up. Why are you hiding back here anyway?”

She can see Gen’s eyes narrow. “Maybe I don’t want to spend my night surrounded by a bunch of drunk mountain trolls.” 

Cutting off whatever well-deserved insult Aulus was halfway through slinging back at Gen, Irene asks, “How did Sophos lose at pong?” Sophos might be a lightweight, but he’s a perfect shot. She’s lost to him at darts enough times to know. 

Aulus shook his head. “Helen. She has the worst aim.” Irene raises an eyebrow in question. “Oh, Sophos is drinking for her,” he says meaningfully. 

“Oh?”

Aulus raises his hands in mock innocence. “She hasn’t said anything and I’m not asking.” 

“But surely…” Irene murmurs, but Gen cuts her off. 

“She’s messing with all of you,” Gen says toward the ceiling, back still to Aulus. “She’s waiting to see who brings it up first.” 

“Yeah, and I learned not to play chicken with Helen when I was thirteen and she beat me and Pylaster with a wooden stick for eating her Halloween candy.” 

Gen turns his head again, arms crossed, cards tucked in his fist. “She was ten and half your size.” 

“Yup,” Aulus says, and Irene can see Gen’s grin from the side of his face. “And she told us if we ate her candy she would hit us with a stick and no one would ever believe us because, and I quote, ‘I’m too small and cute.’ And guess what?” Aulus points at the scar over his eyebrow. “Which is why if she’s not talking about it, I won’t be mentioning any babies until I’m introducing myself as Uncle Aulus to a newborn.” 

“She runs a tight ship,” Irene murmurs to Gen. 

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” he answers, just as quietly. And then, turning his attention back to his cousin, he says more loudly, “I’m surprised Cleon hasn’t put his foot in it yet.” 

Aulus shakes his head. “He almost did but Boagus decked him.” 

“I wondered what the black eye was from,” Gen says conversationally. 

Aulus considers him for a moment before asking, “Do you know when she’s due?” 

“August.” Gen turns back to Irene again. “And I already got them a cradle, so make sure no one else does.”  

Aulus nods, then looks past him at Irene. “Are you sure you don’t want to play?” 

“We already said no, fuck off!” Gen snaps, looking back over his shoulder at his cousin, who throws his hands in the air. But Aulus recovers quickly, calling out “Have fun!,” laughter fading as he walks down the hall. 

Gen turns back to Irene, looking sheepish. “Sorry. Did you actually want to play pong?”

“You know I didn’t.” 

He gives her a tight smile, and she turns her attention back to the cards folded up in his hand.

“So, this bet?” 

“Never mind,” he mumbles, reaching for the empty deck box on her thigh, but she stops him with a hand on his wrist. 

“No, Gen, you can’t dangle those earrings in front of me and then change your mind. So you screw up, I get your earrings. And if you guess right?”

She wants the jewelry, but she’d seen the innocent look on Gen’s face when he suggested the bet. It was the same look he’d once given in a Religion and Politics class, just before correcting the professor on the court case he’d been teaching that day. A case, moreover, that the professor had helped try years earlier. Gen had, of course, been right. 

So, Irene is pretty sure he can do this magic trick too. 

Gen looks down at her hand on his, and then up at her face, expression unreadable, before he finally relaxes. 

“If I can guess your card,” he says, a small smile playing on his lips. “You kiss me.” 

Oh. Irene blinks at him, hand frozen on his wrist.  

*

Aulus reappears in the crowded living room, sound intensifying a tenfold from the back of the house. 

“Were they?” Crodes asks. He doesn’t have to elaborate. 

“Of course they weren’t,” Aulus says. “Gen’s sitting on the floor doing some stupid card trick.” 

“I don’t know why you’re all holding out hope,” Therespides says, palm out to collect the series of $20s being dropped into his hand. “He’s never going to make a move.” 

“She’s not even into him!” Cenna, perched on the arm of the black leather couch, calls across the room. There’s no danger of being overheard — the music and the size of the house are enough to muffle even the loudest voices all the way in the back office. Sitting on the couch below Cenna, Hegite points up at her cousin in agreement. 

“No, no, he’s not into her ,” Timos says wisely with an exaggerated nod of his head that makes him slosh his drink down his shirt. “Fuck!” 

“Oh, of course they’re into each other!” Agape calls. 

“How do you know that?” Cleon yells. 

“Because I have eyes!” 

“Quit it, all of you,” Helen says, voice cutting through the noise even as she never raises it. “It’s none of your business.” 

Boagus throws a giant arm around her. “Where’s the fun in that, Helen?” 

She rolls her eyes. “He’s never going to get anywhere with all of you breathing down his neck,” she murmurs. 

“Where’s Sophos?” Aulus asks, appearing at Boagus’s side. He’d been passed out in the armchair when Aulus had left the room.  

“Asleep in your bed,” Helen says. 

Aulus rolls his eyes and lifts his hands melodramatically up to the ceiling. 

“Relax,” Boagus says with a laugh, pulling Aulus toward him with his free arm and kissing him on the temple. “I’ll carry Sophos to the couch before we go to bed.” 

Ducking out from under Boagus’s arm, Helen turns toward the table, set up with a fresh game of beer pong. “Let’s finish the game,” she says, grabbing three cups from the side. Turning to Aulus, she says, “Boagus landed these. Drink them for me.” 

With narrowed eyes, Aulus stares Helen down as he knocks them back one by one. Slamming the empty cups down on the table, he looks at Boagus. “ You’re sleeping on the couch tonight,” he grumbles, and picks up the ping pong ball for his turn. 

*

Irene feels like she’s buffering, and Gen still hasn’t broken eye contact when he says, “Take it or leave it. You know the earrings are custom.”

Something squirms in her chest as Irene weighs the likelihood of failure against how badly she wants the earrings. Never mind the fact that Gen’s just said he wants to kiss her when he’s never shown any interest before. It’s been a relief, honestly, even if she did sometimes notice the shape of his mouth or the crinkle of his eyes when he grinned. The problem is, men are never interested in friendship with her. Too many times, she had naively believed their show of interest was platonic, only to discover that romantic rejection made them vanish; the friendship had always been a farce. Eventually, she stopped letting men be nice to her all together.

Except Gen. Always on her guard, she’d assumed Gen was after the same when they’d met. She had kept him at arm’s distance too, but he had weaseled his way past her defenses. Weeks had turned into months, and then months into years and at some point, she had believed that he really did just want to be friends. 

But, it’s fine. They’re at a party. They’re drinking. People sometimes kiss friends at parties. Well, Irene doesn’t. But some people do. It’s fine. 

Her eyes flit back to the earrings. 

She draws a card. She’s done worse for less. 

Irene memorizes the card and looks at him expectantly, heart beating hard in her chest. Her gaze slips to his lips. She forces herself to look away. 

“Cut the deck anywhere you want and put your card back in,” he says, deck resting in his palm. She does as she’s told, topping off the stack when she’s slipped in her own card.  

“Eye on the prize,” he says with a wink, gesturing at one of his ears with his right, handless arm. The sleeve of his yellow floral print button-up is rolled up so just the edge of his stump shows. 

He evens out the deck between his fingers, and shuffles one-handed, cards arcing between his fingers in a tiny bridge. Once, twice, three times he repeats it before holding out his palm to her. 

“Cut the deck anywhere you want and put the other half on top.” 

She obliges, still wondering how he’s going to pull this off. Instead of taking the deck back, he grabs the top card off the stack in her hand. 

“Was this your card?” Gen asks, holding up one of the jokers, its blue-and-peach outfit and floppy hat making it look like he’s dressed like a pitneen.

“No,” she says, a little disappointed. She’d expected a more impressive trick. 

“Damn,” he says, and pulls out one of his earrings, dropping it in her outstretched palm. Irene blinked; she had forgotten about the earrings. “One more guess for the second earring,” he says.

She considers arguing, because those weren’t the rules, but she wonders if this is part of his schtick, and she does kind of want to see him pull off the trick. Gen is annoying like that, always unexpectedly making her want things and try things, leaving her just a little off-kilter

She deliberates for too long, and in the silence he draws a card off of the top again.

“King of Diamonds?” he asks hopefully, looking a little bashful. 

She shakes her head. Not that one either. 

“Damn.” Both cards now tucked in his right shirtsleeve, just barely poking out, he hands her his second earring. 

She looks down at the gold circlet earrings in her outstretched palm. They’re even prettier up close, the raw gem actually a rich magenta, surprising her in the best way. Years she’s loved these earrings. She stares at them in awe.

“Are you going to put them on now?” he asks, gesturing at the earrings. She isn’t wearing any of her own tonight. Not yet, anyway. 

“I was going to...” she says warily, but he just nods. 

“The clasps are fiddly.” She looks down at his only hand. Surely not that fiddly. “Do you want help with them?” 

“I think I can manage earrings, thanks.” Irene isn’t sure why she’s snippy with him, when he’s just given her her favorite piece of jewelry, except that she’s feeling overexposed from being too long in a loud, crowded space, late at night, no matter how quickly they’d escaped to the privacy of the back room. But Gen doesn’t take it personally, just smiles and nods easily. 

“Can I have my cards back though?” 

She pats down the deck and takes the two missing cards from him, slipping the deck into the cardboard box. He slides it back in his back pocket and smiles at her. She suddenly feels like a deer caught in headlights.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she says, standing up abruptly and stepping around him. She leaves before he can follow.

*

Irene slips out the back into the empty courtyard, a palpable relief spreading through her as the door shuts behind her, dampening the sound. She shouldn’t have let them rope her into playing beer pong, but she’d wanted a distraction, and the loud, drunken throng had offered one up ready-made. After one round, she hadn’t been able to take it anymore. She likes parties, but she also likes solitude. She lives alone for a reason. 

“Hi,” says a voice that makes her jump. Eugenides is sitting on the brick wall that runs along the perimeter of the courtyard. A fruit tree hangs over it, white blossoms of late spring shining bright in the moonlight. Beneath the leafy branches, Gen had been hidden in shadows.

She walks over to him, adrenaline still pumping from the shock. With Gen on the wall, they’re eye level with each other, and Irene can look right into his face. Even in the dark of the shadows, his eyes sparkle. Smoke billows from a lit cigarette in his hand, a thin strip curling upward in the still night air. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him smoke. “What are you doing out here?”

“Oh, you know. Avoiding the knife fight Cleon almost got me into because he drunkenly threatened some guy on my behalf.” She couldn't tell if he was joking, but she had met Cleon and could guess. “And you?”

“Did I almost get into a knife fight?”

He laughs. “What are you doing out here?” 

“Getting away from the noise.”

“Mmmm,” he nods, taking a drag from his cigarette. “Shit, sorry,” he says, voice strangled as his lungs hold in the smoke. “Do you mind?” He nods at the cigarette in his hand. 

She waves with her own hand. “Go ahead. When did you start smoking?"

Head tilted back, he releases the smoke slowly. She watches the column of his throat, sees the way the tension drops from his shoulders on the exhale. 

“I don’t usually unless I’m drunk.” He takes another drag and lets it out quickly. “Or nervous.” 

He pulls a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. She wonders vaguely how many cardboard boxes he’s carrying. 

“Do you want one?” 

“You know I don’t smoke,” she says, even though she hadn’t known he did either. He pockets it again. 

“You surprised me once tonight. You could have been two for two. Where’d you learn to shuffle like that?”

“You can win a lot of money at poker with a face like mine.”

He nods. With a small smile, he says, “You are distractingly beautiful.” 

Gen teases her like this all the time, poking fun at the frequent, unsolicited compliments that men — strangers, acquaintances, and colleagues alike — insist on doling out. She hates those compliments, hates being put on the spot, hates what they reduce her to, hates the expectation that she should appreciate them. Gen has borne witness to it countless times, men coming up to her when she’s been in line at a coffee shop while Gen held a table, or when she’s been reading a book in the library, or even occasionally when she’s been standing right next to Gen talking to him, other men unconcerned that he might be her partner. (“ It’s because I’m shorter than you ,” he always insists, only sometimes managing to mask the bitterness in his voice). It helps, when Gen makes light of the situation. He’d slowly turned a lifelong isolating experience into an inside joke between the two of them, and the jokes make her feel more human. Or, at least, they usually do. 

Tonight the joke lands wrong. She feels exposed, blushing and awkward, head empty of her usual retorts. She wishes he hadn’t suggested the damn bet. 

Gen breaks the silence, clearing his throat. She’s grateful for it until he actually speaks. 

“Did you check yet?” he asks quietly. 

The bar exam results were released today, like some sick joke, at 9:30 on a Friday night. Gen had invited her to the party to take her mind off of the results while she waited. 

“No,” she says stiffly. 

“Hey,” he says, reaching out and putting his hand on her shoulder, his other arm pressed into her bicep. “It’s going to be fine. I’m sure you passed.”

“You can’t be sure of that.” 

“Irene,” he says gently. “I studied with you. You absolutely passed this test.” 

She has no idea if she passed. People who thought they passed the bar failed all the time. That she was regularly acing practice exams was neither here nor there. 

She had gotten a late start to college, after her mom died, and then had to delay law school even longer when, ironically, legal issues with her estranged father’s estate took up years of her life. So here she was, 30, clerking, and desperate to be finished with school and tests and be working at the job she was actually good at. 

“C’mere,” Gen murmurs, and pulls her into a hug, awkward with his position on the wall, but familiar and comforting. Gen rubs a hand up and down her back in small motions, then angles her head down with his hand and kisses her briefly on the top of her head. All the while, her arms are still crossed. 

When Gen lets her go, they’re still standing close, Irene’s hip bones right against his knees. Without thinking, she reaches up and touches his face, and Gen stills beneath her hand, eyes wide and lips parted just a little. He looks like a startled deer. Irene is all too aware of how easy it would be to kiss him now, feels her thoughts wandering as she imagines calling his bluff and closing the gap. She’s furious with him for putting the idea in her head. 

They stand like that for a few seconds, her hand still on his face, until Gen rubs his palm back and forth along his own thigh a couple of times and points at something across the courtyard behind Irene. She turns, away from thoughts of his pretty mouth, toward the quiet street. 

“My great-great-grandfather built that building,” he says, gesturing at the beautiful brick structure on the far side of the street from the open courtyard. 

“That’s my new office building,” she says, surprised not to have known. They’d bonded over architecture when they first met. Irene had been TAing a political science class Gen was taking. He was younger, but whip smart and devastatingly funny, and when Irene had let slip her fondness for old political buildings — anything from palaces to old courthouses — Gen had stayed after class to talk to her. He’d been an architectural history major, and they’d talked so long that he had invited her to coffee. Wary as she’d been, their conversation had been so engrossing that she’d agreed. They’d talked for three more hours in the cafe. (Later, she learned that he skipped two of his classes, including an exam. “ It wasn’t an important one, it was fine ,” he had assured her), and she hadn’t been able to shake him since. Over the years, his friends had become her friends and she’d ended up with a rarely-used standing invitation to all of his family’s parties. They had a lot of parties.

She knew his relatives had designed some of the buildings in town — they had other architects in the family — but she was sure Gen had never told her about the beautiful Gothic Revival that had been converted into office space. She had been thrilled about her firm’s move, even though it meant a longer commute for her. 

He smiles. “I wondered, when you told me what part of town they’d moved to. Have you been up on the roof?” 

“No, there’s no access to the roof.”

His smile slips to mischievous. “There is if you know where to look.” 

Irene turns back to look at the building, with spiraled towers and a steepled roof that no one could reasonably walk on. He seems to be able to read her mind. “There’s a flat roof on the west side. Do you have your office key with you?” 

“Are you suggesting we break into my place of work drunk on a Friday night?” 

“No, I, a sober person who has drunk the grand total of the dregs of your rum and coke tonight, am suggesting that we use a literal key to access a building. There’s nothing illegal about that.”

She hesitates. It feels dangerous — even though he’s right, she has a key and she works there and this is hardly the weirdest hour someone has ever been at a law firm — but she really wants to see that roof. 

“Fine,” she says, “but this is a stupid plan.”

He hops off the wall without warning, landing almost silently on the concrete. For an instant, his body is flush against hers. She inhales sharply. 

“I love stupid plans,” he says, bubbling with mirth. And then he’s sliding around her, grabbing her hand and pulling. “Come on, this will be fun.” 

*

“Guys, guys, guys!” Crodes runs into the house, staggering a little. His hip knocks against the French door as he slides in, slamming it behind him. “Genny’s making moves!” 

The what? s and bullshit s and I don’t buy it s are drowned out by the resounding cheer for their absent baby cousin. 

“All right, all right,” Cenna calls loudly, quieting them down enough to focus, phone already in hand. “Bets are starting. Who says they’re together by end of week?” 

“I thought you didn’t think she wasn’t into him?” Boagus asks innocently. 

“I still don’t, and I want some sucker’s money!” Cenna says gleefully, slapping her thigh for emphasis on each word. “So come on, who’s in?” 

“Put me down for ‘ together by Halloween ,’” Hermander says, pouring himself a gin and tonic.  

“A tray of Agape’s edibles says absolutely not,” Therespides counters. 

“You’re on,” Agape says, smiling sweetly. Her edibles were a force to be reckoned with. 

As the family put down their bets, Helen’s voice cuts across the room. “Crodes, what exactly did you see?”

This would not have been the first false alarm. Irene has been showing up at parties and family weddings for six years, and they’ve all been invested since the start. The cousins had once lost their collective minds when Janus had, allegedly, seen Gen and Irene kissing in the car. Ever mature, they had sent Sosias out to investigate. When it turned out that Gen and Irene had just been watching a video, sitting close and both leaning over Gen’s phone, Temenus had thrown Janus right into the pool, Janus’s own phone still in his pocket. 

Crodes answers Helen, telling the group that he had seen them, tucked under the orange tree in the back. 

“They were standing real close, and Gen had his arms around her. So, you know, they were definitely necking.” 

“Oh, come on! That doesn’t count!” Hegite groans. Turning to Cenna, she says, “I’m changing my bet!” 

Helen stares at Crodes a moment longer before a slow, broad grin spreads across her face. She calls out her prediction to Cenna. 

“I thought you were too good for these games?” Aulus says blandly. “Thought they were beneath you?” 

Helen stares down Aulus while she calls out, “Hey, Cenna. Put me down against the whole pool and Aulus’s Harley Davidson.” 

*

Up on the roof, the views are incredible. It looks over the college town, sleepier than usual on a Friday night while most students are away for the summer term, and beyond into the forest, illuminated by the night’s full moon. 

Less incredible, however, is that Eugenides has stopped holding her hand. 

Irene hadn’t expected his hand, warm in hers, to feel so nice. But it had, as he’d dragged her across the courtyard and the empty street, and she’d been disappointed when he’d let go so she could fish out her key to the door, and a little giddy when he had crowded against her, just a little, in the doorway while she unlocked it. 

It was hardly the first time they’d been so close but tonight it felt...different. 

He’d led her through three doors and up two staircases she’d never noticed to a door that opened out onto a tiny patio, just as he’d said, on the west side of the building. 

“My grandfather brought me here when I was a kid,” he was explaining to her now as they looked out over the city. She wishes he were standing closer, and curses herself for letting him get in her head, for letting an innocuous joke about a kiss — because she realizes now it was a joke, like everything he says and does, that Gen would never have made a serious bet on something he wasn’t entire certain he do — to leave her feeling like this, thinking thoughts about one of her only friends she absolutely should not be thinking. “I don’t think they’ve encouraged using the roof in years but they never seem to lock the doors.” 

“Do you…come up here often?” Irene asks. He clearly knows the building well. 

“Not terribly often. But sometimes, in the evening, if the front door is still open. The sunset is incredible from up here. You should watch it one day.” 

“Come after work one day this week,” Irene suggests, her throat clenched, as though they don’t see each other regularly. She needs to get a grip. “You can show me.”

“You’ll still be working,” he says with a snort. 

“I can take a ten minute break to watch the sunset.” 

Gen turns away from the views, leaning back against the railing and looks at her. 

“You should check your results,” he says. “It’s just going to be looming over you.”

“Sure, because finding out I failed is going to be so easy on me.”

“You didn’t fail.”

“And what if I did?”

“Then we go right back down to the house, knock back a dozen of Cenna’s mojito Jell-O shots, and I will personally make sure that screaming debates over the better Beowulf translation are the only fights you and Sophos try to get into.” 

“That was one time!” Irene rarely drank, but she’d been drunk at a bar one night when she’d found a woman crying in the bathroom over a cheating boyfriend. The details were hazy, but according to Gen, Irene had stormed out of the bathroom and enlisted Sophos and Boagus to help her find the cheating bastard. Sophos and Boagus, always eager to crack deserving skulls, had readily agreed. It had taken the combined force of Helen and Gen — because they were a force when combined, there was no denying — to talk the three of them down from their noble hunt. 

“And I will never let you live it down,” Gen promises. 

She’s still as a statue as she glares at him, but he’s equally stubborn. And he’s right. She’s going to wear herself down with worry the longer she waits to check. 

Wordlessly, she pulls her phone from her pocket, and follows the instructions in the email to login and see her results. While the page loads, she forgets to breathe.

Finally, it appears, just one, short, anticlimactic sentence. 

“I passed,” she says, hearing the relief in her own voice.

Gen grins, wide and bright, and it’s infectious. She’s smiling now too, and he moves in to hug her again, arms wrapped tight around her waist, face right against her neck. She hugs him too, this time, arms around his shoulders, the sweet smell of his shampoo all around her with the side of his head pressed against her face. 

The hug goes on longer than normal, but with the feeling of Gen’s breath hot against her neck and her quickening heart rate, Irene is afraid of what she might do if she lets go. 

But it’s Gen who moves first, his head slowly pulling away from her shoulder. Finally, releasing her, he says, “I thought you were going to wear the earrings?” 

She flushes. “I couldn’t get them on.” 

“I told you they were tricky.” He smiles. Looking down to adjust the cuff of his sleeve, he says, “Do you want help putting them on now?” 

She sighs and concedes, reaching into the pocket of her black jeans. He plucks one from her palm and pops open the thin wire clasp with his thumb, the same motion he’d used to open the card box. Leaning in so close that she could count his eyelashes, his face set in concentration, Irene feels him thread the gold wire through her lobe.

“The clasp is a nightmare to close, but they’re much easier to remove.” He leans back to look her in the eye, expression unreadable. Even as he moves back, she feels herself swaying toward him. “The other one?” 

She drops it in his palm while he holds her gaze, then moves to thread in the second one. When it’s finished, Gen leans back again and looks from ear to ear as if admiring his handiwork. His hand remains, cupping just under her ear. 

“There.” He meets her gaze again. “Beautiful.” This time, when he says it, she believes him.

She feels the breath leave her body, and with it, her inhibitions. Leaning down, Irene kisses him. 

Gen inhales sharply. His lips are soft, and the warmth she’d felt when he’d held her hand comes flooding back. He tastes a little bitter from the cigarette, but, with a warm hand on her cheek, the way he moves his mouth against hers is gentle and exhilarating all at once. 

It should feel weird. It should . Irene doesn’t kiss friends at parties.

It feels exceptionally normal, as if they’ve been meant to be doing this the whole time. As if Gen’s fingers, pressing softly into the back of her neck, have found their place. As if an upturned cup has righted. She melts into it. 

There’s nothing but the sound of the wind and the slightly tacky sound of their kissing until Gen pulls back. Looking at her, he lets out a quiet, pleased laugh, almost in disbelief, like he’s just as glad as she is. 

“I’m glad I made that bet,” he says, looking up at her from under his lashes. 

She laughs, maybe too loudly, letting out some of the unexpected elation that’s thrumming through her and making her limbs feel shaky “Your card trick was awful, and now I have your earrings. That I —” she fumbles, almost like saying it out loud might break the spell, “—kissed you has nothing to do with it.” 

“Oh, it was the ambiance of the roof, was it?” he says, confidence returned. He slips his arms around her waist. 

Wrapping her arms around his shoulders, she says, “You’re cuter when you’re not talking.” 

“Fair enough,” he murmurs, leaning up to kiss her again, and she can’t stop the smile threatening to split her face in two. He kisses her, very briefly, before saying against her lips. “But I am very good at magic.” 

“Okay, Eugenides,” she says, eager to kiss him again. 

“You don’t believe me?” His mouth a fraction of an inch away from hers.

“I believe you.” She does not have a single care for magic tricks right now. 

“Well, you will, at any rate,” he says, cheerfully, and straightens up. Slipping his left arm out from behind her back, he holds up a single playing card.

The card she’d drawn earlier in the night, pale-faced and glowing in the moonlight

“Queen of Hearts,” he says, expression endearingly halfway between dreamy and bashful.

She gapes at him, brain sputtering as she processes. 

“ How ?” 

He grins and pulls back his other arm, sliding the dark-haired queen up his sleeve. 

Irene stares at his sleeve, confusion making way for horror as realization creeps up her spine. Her body goes rigid.

She hears her own voice, cold as ice, even as she realizes her heart is breaking.“You did this...to win a bet?”

She feels like she’s been played for a joke she couldn’t see. It’s happened all her life, missing things like this, and it’s made trusting people very difficult. Gen has never — but — 

“What?!” he says, wide-eyed, voice frantic. “No!”

She gestures at the card in his sleeve. “Then why—?”

Gen’s mouth opens and closes a few times while he searches for words, but he never drops Irene’s gaze. She’s already thinking about how quickly she can get home and what she’ll do with one less person she trusts in her life, which really should be par for the course at this point. But this one hurts worse than the rest, like her sternum has been split in two and her stomach tied into complex sailors knots, all while she waits, arms folded across her chest, braced for whatever gotcha! or awful excuse he’s about to spit out. 

Finally, he looks down at the card in his hand and says, almost too low for her to hear, “I wanted you to know that you could kiss me. That I wanted to kiss you.” 

There’s nothing but the sound of the wind while Irene processes, Gen still looking at his feet — or rather, not at her. 

“Gen,” she says, taking a step forward and touching his face. He inhales sharply, looking up at her, in fear or hope she isn’t sure. Maybe it’s both. 

But she doesn’t actually know what to say, had reached out to touch him on an impulse. All she knows is that she’s feeling something and she wants to kiss him again. And so she does, angling his face up at hers and meeting his lips for a kiss that’s better than the first. 

*

“The earrings look really nice on you,” Gen says breathily, laying on top of her. The earrings are the only thing she’s still wearing.

The earrings . Something still doesn’t make sense to Irene, niggling at the back of her brain about the night of the party. It’s been a week but she’s been...distracted. 

“Why did you bet the earrings?” she asks. Gen loves these earrings, she knows that much. And if he was throwing the bet anyway, she doesn’t understand why he would bet his favorite jewelry.

“Oh I—” he says, stammering, suddenly impossibly, endearingly nervous. Irene smiles softly. Gen slides off of her, onto his side, face buried in her arm. Voice muffled, he says, “I had them made for you.” 

She blinks up at the ceiling, processing. “But these are your earrings?” 

Gen sits up beside her, cross-legged. He looks down at her. “Yeah I…” He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “I had them made, for your birthday. A couple of years ago. I meant to take you out and give them to you but. I uh. Lost my nerve.” 

Oh . 

Irene has seen Gen in a lot of tense situations, but she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him look so nervous, looking down at her through his lashes, like this confession, out of all of them, might be what drives her away. Here, while they’re in her bed, as if she isn’t the happiest she has ever been in her life. She sits up beside him, folding her legs, hands in her lap. 

A couple of years ago . Irene’s heart twists, wondering how long this has been going on, what signs she missed, what had passed between them that she had written off as a normal marker of friendship. She’s thought of little else all week, but the admission about the earrings sends her mind into overdrive. 

“Did you plan...all of that?” The magic trick. The bet. She’d assumed it was on a whim but...

He nods. “I thought if you knew I wanted to kiss you then maybe…but if not, at least you’d finally have the earrings.” He smiles tentatively. “I’m glad you like them.” 

“Not your subtelest plan,” she teases. 

He laughs then, so loudly that it surprises her. The sound echoes through the otherwise silent apartment. “Irene, I left any notion subtle behind years ago.” He leans forward and buries his face in her shoulder. “I was embarrassingly obvious. Only you could fail to notice.”

Irene flushes. She wants to argue but, with her track record, she realizes he’s probably right. She wonders what she would have done if she had noticed the signs sooner. 

Gen picks at the golden coverlet bunched around him, suddenly nervous. Irene hesitates, but she lays a hand on his knee carefully. He covers it with his own, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb. 

He looks at her, and for a long time, they’re quiet, holding each other’s gaze. It feels charged, somehow more charged than anything that has happened in the past week. So it shouldn’t surprise her when Gen finally speaks, voice quiet and hoarse. 

“I love you,” he whispers, like a confession. Like a prayer. 

It hits Irene like a ton of bricks, like the wind has been completely knocked out of her. And it has, maybe, because she forgets to breathe, forgets to do anything but look at him. She’s feeling so much at once that she’s at a loss for words. 

Gen, watching her through the silence, eyes filled with hope, says, “It’s okay if you—” 

“—I love you,” she says. Because it’s true. Of course she loves him. All roads lead here, to her bed, alone with the only person she has ever fully trusted with her heart. She had loved him without realizing it. Of course she loves him. 

Gen smiles wide, eyes soft. He leans forward and kisses her, slow and soft and languid. Her heart swells, at the familiarity and comfort. When he pulls back, Irene can see there are tears in his eyes. Fitting , she thinks, to match her own tears.

 Hand on his cheek, she kisses him again. 

Three Months Later 

The collective sound of a dozen phones pinging and vibrating cuts across the music and chatter on the patio. 

“The little bastard eloped!” Lias, already looking at his phone when the text came through, screams. 

Frantically checking their phones, the cousins gasp and cheer as they pull out their own phones or peer over each other’s shoulders. Gen sent a single text — a picture of two left hands, one warm brown and one ghostly pale. On each is a wedding band. 

In the echoing chorus of cheers and jeers and his phone’s already off! , someone yells, “Okay, who had them eloping this summer?” 

Aulus, already checking the shared note that makes up the running family betting pool, screams. “Bullshit!” 

He turns to find Helen, palm outstretched, looking smug. In her usual, pleasant tone, she says, “Pay up, everyone.” 

“ Fuck! ” Aulus hisses, pulling out a $100 from his wallet. Around him, nearly everyone is doing the same. 

Helen hadn’t just bet on Gen eloping this summer. Her bet had been right down to the day . Aulus stares down at her. “How the fuck? You must have cheated.” 

“How could I have cheated?” she asks, voice even as ever. “We were all in the room when Crodes told us he’d seen them. I made my bet in front of everyone.” 

“The two of you really are scary fuckers,” Aulus grumbles. This is hardly the first time Helen and Gen have been eerily right about the other, but this is certainly the most impressive. “You always pull this crap.” 

“And yet you always bet against me.” Helen smiles wide. “Don’t forget the best part.” 

“This is bullshit,” Aulus says, handing over the key to his motorcycle. “How are you even going to ride it like that?” 

Grinning bright, looking every bit eight months pregnant, Helen says, “Like what?” 

Walking away, Aulus growls over his shoulder. “I hate you.”