In the international aisle at Whole Foods, Sam switched the plastic shopping basket to his left hand and held his cellphone against his ear with his right. Amy’s voice, once she answered, sounded distracted. “I told you, it’s in the Indian section.”

“I’m not seeing it. There’s a hundred things here and not one of them is labeled in a language I speak.”

“It’s in a canister. It’s called ghee. G-H-E-E. Clarified butter. I know it’s there.”

“Amy, it’s not—ah. Got it.” He chucked the canister in the basket. “Right in front of me the whole time.”

“Great. Any idea when you’ll be home?”

“Forty minutes or so.”

“Forty minutes? How long does it take to get through the checkout line?”

“Yeah, well.” He hurried down the aisle past a woman stopped with two toddlers hanging off her cart. “I need to make a pit stop on the way back.”

“Just hurry. Everybody will be here in an hour.”

“Got it.” He clicked out of the call, swung past the floral displays, and grabbed three bouquets of flowers. Spilling out everything onto a conveyor belt, he stretched his arms behind his head and exhaled an energetic sigh.

The cashier, a slender woman about his age with dark hair tucked under a sky-blue bandanna, offered a sly smile. “Busy evening?”

He smiled back, but without the subtle flirtation. “Oh, I’m only getting started.”

~ * ~

After leaving Whole Foods, he drove to Fairview Lake on the eastern end of Portland. The parking lot was beginning to clear out, as families gathered up their kids and took them home to dinner. Sam grabbed the bouquets from the back seat of his car—Amy’s car, really—and carried them over to the lake’s most isolated corner, far from the playgrounds and spray park and even the old guys fishing for trout. Taking a pen and a folded scrap of paper from his pocket, he wrote a note, his thigh making do as a writing surface. He went over every letter several times to darken it, until at last it was satisfactory.

TABBY, LOVE YOU ALWAYS.

The result, thanks to the scratching of his pen, came out looking a little violent. A little desperate. But then, that wasn’t wrong. He fastened it to the stem of one rose using the skinny rubber band that had secured the bouquet. Then, one by one, he began tossing the flowers into the water.

They rested on the surface at first, drifting along briefly, before gradually succumbing to the pull of gravity. He tossed them far enough out that they would not get caught in the lake’s muddy edges, and would drift, he hoped, to the bottom at full depth. After the last flower of the second bouquet, he threw in the rose with the note attached. It went down headfirst, its stem tipping upward. He imagined it falling slowly past her eyes down there, the little note waving like a bit of waterweed. He wondered if she even knew it was April the twenty-third.

One year, exactly.

He threw most of the remaining flowers into the lake in a single fistful. They disturbed the surface, sending out ripples in every direction, and lingered for some time before disappearing beneath. If she could see them, they would come upon her like a shower of blossoms from above, and she would have no doubt that he remembered her. It was a fanciful idea and he knew it, but it was what he needed, to go on.

For several minutes, he looked out over the still surface of the lake, his hands tucked into his jeans pockets, and simply suffered his thoughts. His memories. The long, long list of things he wanted to say to her, and tell her about, and reassure her that he was doing.

But Amy was waiting for him. He needed to go.

He waited one final minute, as if she might emerge, and then set off reluctantly for his car.

~ * ~

The house was a Craftsman bungalow on one of Portland’s older streets, set back from the street and half-hidden behind the sprawling, low-hanging branches of a eucalyptus tree. Along the porch, large potted ferns partially concealed the occupants from view when they stepped out to chat or smoke or escape the close air of a home that harbored six busy adults. Sam hurried up the steps and pushed the door open with his shoulder, stepping directly into the kitchen in which Amy was bent over the oven, pulling out naan bread. Tufts of her hair had rebelled from her chestnut ponytail, and her gaze looked a little frantic. She wore an apron-- the one her sister had sent her for Christmas, pink and covered in cartoonish drawings of cupcakes, trimmed with a white frill. She had made a face of disgust when she first opened it, but it would suffice when all the ones from the bakery were in the wash.

“Finally, you’re back,” she said. She set the tray of naan on the stovetop and pushed her hair out of her eyes with the side of her hand. “Did you find everything?”

“Yep.” As she looked through the paper shopping bag, he grabbed her around the waist and nuzzled her just above the ear. “That apron’s kind of hot.”

“Oh, stop. I feel like a ’50s housewife.”

“Maybe that’s what’s hot.”

She elbowed him in the ribs, although he knew she didn’t mean it. In a few hours, once dinner was over and the other couples had wandered off to their rooms and left them alone, she would be on him like a junkie going after a fix. She always was.

He left her to her cooking—it irritated her when he tried to help, anyway—and climbed the stairs to their bedroom. The door beside theirs was closed, with murmuring noises coming from behind it; Rose and Kevin were already here, then. He shut his door quietly and sat down on his side of the unmade bed, touching the contact name of his missed call from earlier that day. The call connected immediately.

“Isaac,” he greeted his friend, keeping his voice low despite the mercifully thick plaster walls. “Sorry I missed you earlier. I was at the grocery store for Amy.”

All the way down in Tennessee, Isaac was laughing at him. “Gotta say, I never thought I’d see you on this short of a leash.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Sure. So tell me what I can do for you.”

“I need an Oregon driver’s license.”

Isaac made a noise of disdain. “The New York one I made for you is just fine. It doesn’t expire for like three more years.”

“Yeah, except—one, I’m in Oregon now—and two, it says ‘Jesse Maclaren’ on it.”

“So what?”

“Eventually Amy’s going to see it. Look, man, I’ll pay you whatever it costs. I just need one that says ‘Sam Sullivan’ and shows my current address. And fairly quick, if you can.”

“Sam Sullivan,” Isaac repeated. “I’m sorry-- have you lost your damn mind? I am not putting your real name on a fake license. And what current address are you even talking about?”

“This house. The one I’m living in, in Portland.”

“With Amy?” Now he sounded genuinely dismayed. “You’re living with Amy?”

“At the moment. I moved in the rest of my stuff a couple weeks ago.”

“You’re living there full time? How are you even pulling that off?”

“Very carefully.”

Isaac snorted. “Man—you don’t need a driver’s license. What you need is an intervention. Listen to me—right now, pack your shit, get in your car, and come down here to stay with Susanna and me. There is no way you can—”

“It’s going just fine,” Sam interrupted. “I only need a license.”

“It’s not fine.” Isaac’s voice had risen to something closer to a shout. “It’s bullshit and you know it. We all know you miss Tabitha, and I know it’s hard to hang on, but living with a—Jesus—”

“Is that a no?” Sam’s patience was thin, but more of concern was that this would become a shouting match that Amy would overhear. “Do I need to order one from China or something?”

“You need to leave tonight,” insisted Isaac. “She’s going to figure it out. If you think she won’t, you are fucking delusional. And then you’re never going to get Tabitha back. Have you given any thought to that at all?”

Sam blurted a laugh. All I do is think about her, he wanted to say. But instead he replied, “Let me be the one to worry about that.”

“Listen, I gotta go. But I’m gonna have Susanna call you tomorrow to sort this out. And in the meantime, I’m dead serious, man. I’m making up the guest bed tonight. Your ass had better be in it by tomorrow night.”

From downstairs, Sam could hear Amy calling his name. He clicked out of the call and stepped out of the bedroom, falling behind Rose and Kevin as they headed down to dinner, his presence attracting no more attention than it ever did. Blow me, Isaac, Sam thought, but he smiled at Amy as if nothing was amiss.

~ * ~

Sure enough, after the meal, once Rose and Kevin had returned to their room and Lola and Remy had left to catch a movie, Amy caught up with Sam out on the porch. She snuck up behind him as he leaned against a support beam, smoking his after-dinner cigarette. Her timing wasn’t great; in that moment of peace and quiet, after the several hours of convivial chatter and meal-sharing and even a game of Cards Against Humanity around the kitchen table, Sam’s mind was inevitably pulled back to the significance of the day. April the twenty-third. One year ago, almost precisely to the hour, he had kissed Tabby goodbye on the shore of that lake, feeling her sob in his arms. At the time he had taken it in stride, certain that she was overreacting, that she would be back before dawn. The news, when it finally came, struck him like a series of seismic waves. He had actually vomited, which he had believed his body couldn’t even do in its current state.

And yet here he was, one year later. Working a job at the restaurant supply warehouse, paying bills, forming one little wedge in an intimate circle of friends who, twelve months ago, he hadn’t known at all. Standing on the porch of a comfortable house, finishing a smoke and feeling a girl’s cool hands slide up under his shirt, waist to ribs.

He turned around, crushing out the cigarette in the ashtray, and grinned at her. She took the opportunity to run her hands over his stomach and up to his chest, moving them as if torn between whether to memorize him or devour him. “This body,” she said, and stopped there, as though the phrase explained it all.

He cradled her face between his hands and kissed her. This face—the elfin angles of her wide cheekbones and pointed chin, the cool hazel of her eyes, the way the tiny stud in the corner of her nose accentuated its rounded shape. Hers was a bohemian face, distant gypsy ancestors mixed with paler folk of the peasant class. Beside him, with his black hair and broadly formed Irish features, they called forth whispers of an ancient Europe. Their children, if it had been possible to have them, would look like imps.

“You ready to go upstairs?” she asked.

He slid her hand down to the front of his jeans, and she had her answer.

In their bed, he kissed down her body, pausing on each of the places he found most worshipful—her nipples, the tattoos at each of her hips, her navel, the smooth insides of her thighs. He went down on her until he felt the throbbing pulse of her orgasm, then kissed up her arms as she recovered. From his kiss she turned away, disliking the taste of herself, but she was eager when he aligned his body with hers and eased himself into her. She twined her legs around his and made little effortful noises as he worked on her, until at last he grew tired of this polite form of lovemaking. He disentangled himself from her, coaxed her sideways on the bed and slid her up until her head hung off its side, and he took her decisively, lifting her hips as he thrust into her. Her climax rocked her muscles so thoroughly that she nearly slipped from his grasp, but he held her firm and took his own. By the time he set her down, he was panting from the exertion.

“Holy shit,” she said, her head still more or less inverted, her voice slow and gravelly. “How do you do stuff like that.”

Sam knew better than to answer. He laid down on his side of the bed and pushed the sweat from his forehead to his hair. She followed slowly, with clumsy, half-drunken movements, until she lay nestled against his side. He wrapped an arm around her and tried to focus on the ceiling, but still his eyes closed to relish the moment of postcoital bliss. Getting off felt so good. There was no better high this world could offer.

She reached a curious hand between his legs and began to play with him. At his body’s response, she laughed. “You have no waiting time at all,” she said.

“It’s called a refractory period.”

“Yeah, you don’t have one of those.”

“Sure I do,” he told her, though it was mostly a lie. To distract her, he brushed away her hand and said, “I have to pee.”

She rolled onto her stomach as he stepped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. The fan turned on automatically with the light, which he was grateful for. That feature had saved him many, many times from actually having to produce urine, or at least the sound of it.

Instead, he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. He couldn’t imagine how she couldn’t see on his face what was going on inside his mind. To his own gaze, his dark eyes looked hollow and distressed, the set of his mouth reflected resignation, and his overall expression—his countenance, as they used to say—both weary and bleak. But Amy didn’t see that, or if she did, she didn’t let on. Maybe it read to her as an appealing, brooding quality. Or maybe she was so obsessed with his body that she cared little about his face, which was not handsome by anyone’s definition, anyway.

He flushed the toilet, then quickly washed his hands and face. While he was at it, he took a swig from the Listerine bottle and rinsed out his mouth, so she would kiss him again. Of all the sexual quirks that Amy had introduced to his life lately, her refusal to let him kiss her after he had serviced her with his mouth was one of the top three most obnoxious. Tabitha had liked the taste, and with good reason. But then, Tabitha did a lot of things that would have set Amy shivering with Puritanical repulsion.

He emerged from the bathroom and, at the sight of Amy half-asleep on her stomach, felt a wave of remorse about his critical thoughts. Amy was lovely. She indulged his bottomless sexual appetite, and put up with his foolishness outside the bedroom, too. She was fun and mischievous and provided him with constant companionship, which, when compared with the miserably lonely months he had spent after Tabitha’s vanishing, was downright blissful. And she gave of herself freely and honestly, which was far more than Sam could say of himself.

He flicked off the light and crawled into bed beside her, setting her alarm for the next morning. Carefully, he nudged her into his arms, her back curled against his chest, the way he had fallen asleep with Tabitha for years and years. “You’re so warm,” she murmured, and shook back her hair as if his heat bothered her. For a moment he remembered Isaac’s words of warning: she’s going to figure it out. But he was tired, and she was soft against him, and so he fell asleep without a further thought.

~ * ~

Six Months Earlier

Sam had seen the trio at Brunson’s Restaurant Supply dozens of times in the months before the conversation that shifted everything. Checking receipts at the exit, examining people’s carts to ensure they only carried out what they’d paid for, he chatted daily with many dozens of the regulars who kept Portland’s brewhouses and delis and bakeries running. Some he knew by name, others by face, and these particular three fell into the latter group—but they were easy to remember. There was a tall, bespectacled guy in his late twenties who bore a passing resemblance to Jude Law, though more Cold Mountain and less The Talented Mr. Ripley; a ballerina-thin woman with cornsilk hair streaked with pink and magenta and twisted up into two tight little buns like a nymph’s horns; and the shorter, darker, cuter girl whose bed he would eventually share. He knew only that they worked at a bakery-and-coffeehouse called Cascade Mocha Crafters, specializing in coffee-flavored brownies and cake pops which had developed a cult following in the area. And this he knew only because they bought King Arthur flour and insanely expensive artisanal butter in copious quantities.

On a particular afternoon, while he was taking a smoke break on the loading dock behind the building, he saw the three of them wheeling out their flatbed cart to a Saab that looked absurdly undersized for the task. By mutual effort, they loaded everything into the trunk and back seat, then stood there conferring as the man held the orange cart to prevent its drift through the parking lot. Some decision was reached; the man handed the cart to the pink-haired girl, and he walked over to Sam.

“Hey, man,” he said. He offered a half-chagrined smile that informed Sam that this errand was not fully by choice. “The girls over there want to know if you’re interested in coming to a party.”

“Depends on the party.”

“Like, food and games and stuff. And beer. Just hanging out.” He looked for Sam’s reaction with an expression absent of any guile, although in retrospect, Sam suspected otherwise. “At our place here in Portland, around eight. On Rockledge Street.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah—you got plans?”

Sam always had plans. But he said, truthfully, “I’m flexible.”

“That’s cool. Here’s the address.” He handed Sam a slip of paper written in a feminine hand obviously not his own. It listed an address and phone number, punctuated with a smiley face. He jerked his head toward the women. “And Amy’s number. She’s the brunette.”

Sam concealed a grin. He looked up at the girl in question, and she gave a sheepish little wave. He waved back and said, “Tell her I’ll try to make it.”

It had all seemed a little childish at the time, almost hinting at a prank, but there was nothing dishonest about that party. When he arrived, the steps were already crowded with people drinking and talking; the distinctive perfume of weed drifted out the door, mixing with the crisp scent of the late-autumn air. He slipped inside and was greeted like an old friend—It’s Sam from the warehouse!, the pink-haired girl shouted—and within less than a minute, someone had plunked a beer into his hand and was giving him a sommelier-level description of its flavor notes and provenance. The party was, to his surprise, fantastic.

And sorely needed. Things had been on a steady downhill spiral for him since that day in April, and the job at Brunson’s was the one constant and dependable thing that he hadn’t yet found a way to fuck up. He was technically homeless, although that was nothing very new, but his choices of sleeping grounds and had grown increasingly indifferent and careless. In early July, he had totaled his car by wrapping it around a tree—an accident severe enough that he had climbed out the passenger window and sat by an adjacent tree for a while with his head in his hands, looking at the crushed metal and excoriating himself over what would have happened to Tabby if she had been in the car, which was an irrational line of thinking on every level. Fortunately it was in the middle of the night and nobody had witnessed it, and he eventually gathered the presence of mind to empty the car of identifying items and leave unseen, mourning for that SUV as he had mourned for nothing else, save one. It had been a good, faithful car.

And then there was his sex life, the one thing he should by all rights have been able to control, and even that was shitty. But that was his own fault. He observed his partners’ pleasure with a dim sympathetic satisfaction, like the sun peeking over a dark Arctic horizon, before collecting his own like a ticket from a machine. He took solace in the knowledge that they couldn’t tell—but nonetheless, it was barely an existence.

“Hello, Sam-from-the-Warehouse.” The girl named Amy appeared in front of him, a coy smile lighting her face, a bottle of beer in her hand. Above the deep plunge of her neckline, he observed a tattoo of elaborate script that dipped in a semicircle from one shoulder to the other: Not all who wander are lost. “Glad you could make it.”

“Thanks for the invite.” He gestured to the top of his own chest. “That’s a Grateful Dead thing, right?”

“No, Lord of the Rings. You see the stickers on Deadheads’ cars sometimes, though.”

“It’s a good quote, whoever said it.”

Her smile broadened, showing a dimple. “Do you have any?”

“Tattoos? No.”

“Not even one?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, come on—everybody has at least one these days. Really? Wow. A real tattoo virgin.”

He almost snorted at the characterization. It had been a very long time since anyone had accused him of being a virgin of any kind. “I’m saving myself for marriage,” he replied gamely.

“You should get one right here.” She traced a line on his bicep, lingering a bit longer than was necessary. “Or here,” she added, and poked him in the hip. “Those are sexy on a man.”

“I’d have to think about what I’d get.”

She lifted the bottom edge of her shirt and flashed him a little skin-- her own hip, decorated with a stylized bird in flight, a dove or a swallow. The gesture stirred him, and he felt the spark of attraction—that zigzag of energy between them, setting aside any doubt that this flirtation was worth a try. But she was a little bit high, he could tell, and messing around with girls who were drunk or stoned ran afoul of his code of conduct. Still, he reached out and touched the bird with his thumb, tracing it from its tailfeathers to its beak. “I like it,” he said.

Before the evening was over, she lured him into the shadowy corner by the coat closet, and he gladly took the bait and kissed her. He did it the way he knew she wanted, backing her against the wall gradually, keeping up the banter while letting the electricity of the moment crackle around them until, at last, he locked his mouth over hers. It was a hungry kiss on both their parts—one that spoke to a slow starvation each was experiencing unseen, and of the ruthless kamikaze desire that each would loose to satiate it.

But for nearly a month, until he couldn’t push it off any longer without causing her to take it personally, that was all they did. He knew she had no idea what she was getting into, after all. And there was also the matter of his heart. How could he lose himself in making love to her, he wondered, when he was already lost?