Thirty Seven

The jukebox was playing that same Counting Crows song it always plays. The Scholar's Stool has a rule, apparently unwritten, that the year is 1996 forever. The floors are sticky. The booths wobble. I've been coming here for twenty years.

"Forty-two," I said, turning my glass in a slow circle. "Almost forty-three. Tomorrow, in fact."

Louis was already two sips into his pint. He does this thing where he waits. Lets me get to the sad part of the evening at my own pace. He's an adjunct mythology professor, forty-four, and he has the patience of a man who studies stories where nothing happens for three hundred pages.

"Forty-two," he agreed.

"Forty-two years old and I've got a half-dead succulent collection and a dating history that reads like a list of footnotes."

"Footnotes can be important."

"Louis." I looked at him. "I've gone on, what, a hundred first dates? Lloyd Stephens, four years ago. Nice man. Remembered everything about me except that I exist, apparently, because he never called again."

"He's shy."

"He's a visiting researcher in forensic anthropology. He spends his days looking at dead people's bones. Shy is not the word."

Louis smiled into his beer. That's another thing he does. Smiles into things instead of at things.

"I'm done," I said. "That's my announcement. Official. On the eve of my forty-third birthday, Hillary Fletcher is retiring from the search for the one."

"Retiring."

"Done. Finished. I'm going to be the weird aunt who teaches data science and dies surrounded by succulents." I drained the rest of my glass. "The spark isn't real, Louis. I've read a hundred novels where it's real and not one of them told me where to find it."

"It's real," he said. Quietly. Like he was stating the weather.

"Oh, sure. Easy for you to say. You probably have women lined up around the Classics department."

"Not really."

"You don't talk about yourself enough for me to know either way, that's the problem. Eighteen years of friendship and I could not tell you your middle name."

"Emil."

"See? Now I know. Terrifying."

Desiree came over then. She's been tending bar here for as long as anyone can remember, thirty-nine years old, hair always a different color and currently a green that probably has a name I don't know. She saw the empty glasses and did that math she does.

"Anniversary or funeral?" she asked.

"Both," I said. "Birthday."

"Ohhh."

She held up one finger. "Shots, then. On me. Birthday shots, and you're not allowed to refuse, it's the law."

"That's not the law," Louis said.

"It's the law in this establishment. I wrote it. It's on the back of the door."

She went off and came back with three little glasses and a look on her face like a woman with a plan. Desiree has been watching the two of us orbit each other for over a decade. I know that now. I didn't know it then. She set the shots down with ceremony.

"To Hillary," she said. "Who deserves whatever it is she's going to wish for."

"I wasn't going to wish for anything."

"You were absolutely going to wish for something. Everybody does. Close your eyes."

"Desiree."

"Close your eyes, birthday girl."

So I closed my eyes. I'm forty-two years old and I closed my eyes in a sticky-floored bar because a bartender told me to. I thought about what I actually wanted, which was embarrassing, because what I actually wanted was simple and stupid. I wanted to be seen. Really seen. I wanted someone to look at me and not see a systems analyst with a mild succulent problem but the whole thing, whatever the whole thing was. The wish went out of me quietly, no words attached, just the shape of it.

I opened my eyes. Louis was watching me.

Not in his usual way. His usual way is warm and half-amused and slightly elsewhere. This was different. His face had gone still, and something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't read, and I've had eighteen years of practice reading Louis Larsen.

"You alright?" I asked.

"Fine," he said. Too fast.

"You look like you saw a ghost."

"I'm fine. Drink your shot."

We drank the shots. Desiree grinned at us both and swept away, and I decided the look on his face was probably about his mother or a grant application or something. I was wrong, but I wouldn't find that out for another hour.

Here's what you should know about Louis, or what I thought I knew. He teaches mythology as an adjunct, which means he's been passed over for tenure-track twice and pretends not to mind. He lives in an apartment near campus. He goes home every December for two weeks and never says where. He doesn't swim, which for a man built like a swimmer is odd, and when I asked him once why not, he said he didn't like the cold and changed the subject so fast I got whiplash.

He is my best friend. He has been my best friend since a grad student mixer eighteen years ago, when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-six and we both knew nobody at the party and ended up hiding in a corner by the cheese table, talking about the Odyssey for three hours. I married the wrong person a few years later and he was there when it fell apart, and there's never been anyone since who knew me the way he did.

Anyway.

"Come back to my place," Louis said, about forty minutes and one jukebox breakdown later.

I raised an eyebrow. "Bold, Louis."

"No. Not. I mean."

He set his glass down. "I have something to show you. It's important and I've been putting it off and tonight seems like the night, for reasons I'll explain."

"Reasons I'll explain. Very romantic."

"It's not romantic."

"You said it was important."

"It is important."

"Mysterious man invites me to his apartment on the eve of my birthday. My birthday, Louis. If Desiree sees us leave together she's going to start planning the wedding."

"Desiree is not invited to this conversation."

"She's already planning it. Look at her. She's polishing that same glass and watching us."

He glanced over. Desiree raised her polisher and gave a small, shameless wave. Louis sighed the sigh of a man who has lost an argument before it started.

"Please," he said. "It's a ten minute walk. There's something I've needed to tell you for a long time and I keep. There's a version of tonight where I chicken out again, and I don't want that version."

Again. He said again. My stomach did something small and unhelpful.

"Alright," I said. "But if this is a pyramid scheme I'm leaving."

"It's not a pyramid scheme."

"That's exactly what a pyramid scheme recruiter says."

We paid up. Desiree said something as we left, I think it was "finally," but she said it into the glass and I couldn't be sure. The night outside had that October bite to it, the kind that finds the gaps in your jacket. We walked the back way, past the library, past the dumpsters the raccoons own, and Louis was quiet the whole way. Not comfortable quiet. The other kind.

"Louis."

"Mm."

"You're being weird."

"I'm aware."

"You've been weird since the shot. Since my wish."

He didn't answer for half a block. Then he said, "What did you wish for?"

"None of your business."

"Hillary. Please."

I looked at him. His jaw was set. His hands were in his pockets, and his shoulders were up around his ears like he was braced for a wave.

"I wished someone would see me," I said. "The whole me. That's all. Pathetic, right?"

"No," he said. "Not pathetic."

We reached his building. He fumbled his keys out, dropped them, picked them up. Louis, who is the least fumbling man alive. He got the door open and stood aside to let me in, and before I crossed the threshold he caught my arm.

"Hillary. Before I show you. You have to promise not to scream."

I laughed. It came out thinner than I wanted.

"That," I said, "is a truly alarming thing to say to a woman on her birthday."

He let go of my arm and went in first. I followed, because I'm a fool with a birthday wish and bad judgment about men, apparently, even after a hundred first dates.

His apartment looked like it always looked. Books stacked on books. A couch with a plaid blanket. One lamp. The kitchenette with the kettle he'd owned since before I knew him. Nothing sinister. No shrine to me. No corpses.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand. Standing feels safer."

"Fair." He went to the bedroom. I heard a latch, then a heavy scrape, wood on wood. He came back carrying a cedar chest. Not a big one. The kind of thing you'd keep letters in. Or ammunition.

He set it on the coffee table and stood there with his hands hanging at his sides like he'd forgotten what hands were for.

"Louis."

"Give me a second. I've rehearsed this about four hundred times and none of the versions survive contact with your face."

"My face is fine."

"Your face is doing the analyst thing. Where you take everything apart."

"That's my face, Louis. It's the only one I've got."

He nodded. Then he opened the chest.

Inside, folded like something precious, was a pelt. Grey and silver and dark at the edges, dappled like the light you get through water. It was the size of a large dog, maybe bigger. It looked old. It looked loved. It looked, and I want to be careful with this word, alive.

"What is that," I said. Not a question. My voice had gone flat, the way it does when the data stops making sense.

"Sealskin," he said. "Mine."

I looked at the skin. I looked at him. I looked back at the skin.

"Okay," I said. "So it's a prop. For a lecture. You brought it home and now you're doing a bit."

"It's not a bit."

"Louis."

"Hillary."

"You're forty-four years old. You teach mythology. This is a cruel joke and also kind of an elaborate one, and honestly