Go write stories.

I don't know what it is about these words that kicks my brain into gear, but whatever it is, it works.

After going home briefly to shower and change, I spend the entire afternoon at the Happy Duke, writing the way I used to write – with a ballpoint pen in a spiral notebook, and without an end in sight. I do something I never really thought about trying before, and I tie six or seven of my short stories into one. I change names, I change characters, I add meat to my old plot skeletons and backbone to my old plotless characters.

I'm lucky, in a way. The Happy Duke is busy as all hell, so Sora doesn't end up having all that much time to spend at my table, distracting me. Towards the evening, though, the crowd finds its way out the door and I'm one of only a few patrons in the café.

It's alright, I think, when I hear Sora telling a coworker he's taking his lunch. My hand was starting to get tired anyway.

I refrain from looking up until I hear him sit down across from me.

"What's up?" I say, offering it as more of a statement than a question.

"Your turn," he replies, resting his upper body on the table in exhaustion. "Actually, my turn. 20 questions in reverse."

I was hoping he would have somehow forgotten – that he would rather bitch about how busy the café was than ask me personal questions. It would appear to be quite the opposite.

"You're 26," he says.

I agree. "I'm 26."

"Did you always live here?"

I shake my head. "I grew up on the East Coast. Tried to go to college in the Midwest. Spent 6 years all over Europe, and finally ended up out here."

"Tried to go to college?"

"I dropped out."

"Your major?"

"Undeclared."

"Philosophy," Sora says, his smile widening. "Or… Creative Writing."

I blink. "I was undeclared."

"I know," he says. "I'm just thinking of what it would have been."

"Aeronautical Engineering," I reply, making a face.

"You're kidding."

"I am. I've never been into physics, any of that stuff."

"Me neither," he says, taking a sip of my coffee. Yeah, that's right, he's drinking my coffee. Without asking. Am I gonna say anything about it? Probably not.

"I don't get it," I say. "How could you major in rocket science without being into… rocket science?"

Sora stares at my coffee, swirling it around. "I like things that fly," he says, after a while, and I leave it alone. After another minute or so, he looks up, eyes bright again. "Okay. So you dropped out. You traveled Europe, like every other American dropout, trying to soak up some kind of culture and free yourself of strip malls and McDonald's and Starbucks and find something real."

I narrow my eyes. "Are you mocking me?"

"A little," he says, grinning. "What! Look, everyone does it, everyone rich enough, anyway."

"So you're calling me a spoiled rich kid?"

I feel ridiculous. I'm too old for this bullshit. I'm too old to be bothered by it, but I am. I'm really bothered by it.

"I lived under a bridge for a fucking month," I snarl, way too defensive. "I-"

"You did drugs," Sora says. "Lots of drugs. And you drank all the time. And you lived under a bridge and you were friends with hookers and you spoke, like, fourteen different languages. I bet you dated an anorexic Swede – maybe you even have a kid," he whispers, overdramatic.

I hate how spot-on he is. No, I was never friends with hookers, and no, I didn't actually speak fourteen different languages. I did date a guy – briefly – in Sweden, but I most definitely do not have a kid, and he was only anorexic because- oh, good God.

"What do your parents do?" he asks, visibly pleased at my dismay.

"I'm 26 years old, what do my parents have to do with anything?"

"Oh, calm down," he says, leaning back in his chair with a hearty smile. "Look, I owe you a little more credit than most – you stuck with the whole expatriate thing for much longer than most people do. I'm sure you weren't that predictable the whole time, or the continent of Europe would have thrown you out for being too much of an unbearable hipster."

I grumble. Like he's not? He works in a fucking coffee shop. He's wearing another sweater today. Solid black, and loose, straight cut blue jeans. I wish I could call him out with hipster shoes, but they're just a pair of classic Adidas, black and white, three stripes, the usual. I wish they were a different pair, one with flashy colors, or – God forbid – Converse, but I can't find anything fad-oriented about him to make fun of.

"What do your parents do?" he repeats.

"They're both in real estate."

He nods. "When was the last time you spoke to either of them?"

Oh, fuck you. "… about a year ago."

"Oh, that's not so bad!"

"Next question," I growl, wishing I had coffee to sip angrily. It's really too bad mine was stolen.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'll be nice. What brought you out here?"

"It's a long story," I mutter.

"Well, I have 14 minutes of lunch break left, so get crackin'."

I hate telling this story. It's a story that highlights all my failures and all of my friends' successes. But whatever. Fair's fair, right?

"My friend Zexion owns the house I live in right now. I've known him since I was in preschool. He's smart. Really smart. Like, he graduated high school in two years and went straight into college, got an MBA and a phenomenal job. He's… doing pretty well for himself. So he bought a house, but he's never around to live in it, because he works mostly overseas."

"Is this one of your stories?" Sora asks nonchalantly.

I glare. "No, this is my life. And I'm not done. You asked, now listen. What brought me here was the offer to live in a luxury home on the water for free, compliments of my childhood friend. My roommates are… well, there's Axel, who Zexion met at school. He's in advertising, works with a guy named Roxas who's over at our place so often he might as well live there. And there's Demyx, who's a sound tech at the convention center."

"And why does that make you so angry?" Sora cuts in, slurping the last of my coffee from the cup.

"Excuse me?"

"You look mad."

I hesitate. "Because I love where I live, but I can't keep- I can't… I, ah… I don't like that I live there for free. I don't like being in debt to anyone, much less one of my old friends."

"Well, it sounds like he just wants to look out for you guys. You know, he takes care of his friends, that's all. I'm sure he's not expecting any of you to pay rent, or he would have asked, right? I mean, not that I know him. I'm just saying."

I say nothing. I can feel Sora's eyes on me, and I swear to God I can almost hear his brain clicking and whirring and figuring out-

"But you're the only one," he says slowly. "You're the only one who isn't paying, aren't you?"

"Actually, this whole thing is none of your business," I snap, fidgeting with my pen and wishing more than anything that Sora would just leave.

"And you feel bad, because you think you're freeloading off of your friend because the others have jobs and pay rent, and you don't."

"Stop," I say. "Just stop."

"That's gotta be hard."

I can't tell if he's mocking me again or not, but I don't like it.

"I'm not," he says suddenly. "Mocking you. I'm not."

I'm starting to think he's actually inside my brain.

"Look," I say. "Can we just-"

"Go to the next question?" he asks eagerly. "Yeah! Um, let's see… what's your favorite?"

"My favorite what?"

"Anything," he replies, tilting the chair back on two legs. "Food, color, vacation destination, breed of cat."

This makes me laugh a little, and his easy smile relaxes me. I put down my pen and try to think of my favorite, well, anything.

"Favorite food," I repeat, biting my lip. "Pie. Probably pie. My favorite color is green. My favorite vacation destination… would have to be… Rome. And I don't like cats."

Sora looks immediately alarmed. "You don't like cats?"

"No, I think they're… annoying?"

I'm kind of at a loss. He looks deeply disturbed by this information, and it's making me kind of uncomfortable.

"I love cats," he says eventually, quietly, and after another moment of silent memorial for all the cats I could have loved, he brightens up again. "What else do you like?"

You get it, right? Why I'm laughing now? Why I can't help but laugh? I mean, really, what else do I like? Well, a lot of things.

"Raindrops on roses?"

He laughs then, and he tips his chair back to the floor. "Whiskers on kittens."

"Uhhh, something with mittens. Brown paper packages wrapped up with string. I dunno, you got me."

"These are a few of my favorite things," he murmurs, and from behind the counter, I hear a timer go off. "That's my cue," he says, and he takes my coffee cup when he leaves.

A minute or so later, he comes by with a new cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie.

"For humoring me," he says, and I make sure to wave goodbye to him when I finally leave.

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Jump with me, now – it's two weeks later, and I'm sitting next to Kairi on a train, watching rain fall on what I'm sure is called "marsh" or "wetlands" but is in fact something more along the lines of "lots of mud". We're on our way to visit her family, something I grudgingly agree to do every once in a while, and we've been on the train for three of the six estimated total hours of the trip.

"You don't mind, do you?"

Despite my constant assurances, Kairi is quadruple-checking that I'm okay with her "stealing my find".

"He's all yours," I reply, gazing intently out the window. "He's not really my type, anyway. I mean, for dating, that is."

She raises an eyebrow.

"Not your type?"

"Not my type."

"Well… what's wrong with him?"

Dear Lord, women irritate me.

"Nothing's wrong with him," I sigh. "I just like him better as a friend."

Kairi responds by pointing out the window at the now-visible Pacific Ocean.

"Yes, Kairi. Water. Big water."

She smacks my arm, glaring at me.

"It's pretty," she says petulantly, and I think I may have escaped the Sora conversation – at least for the time being.

I think I see an otter. That's right, a fucking otter. I really "otter" go online when we get to Kairi's parents' and find out if otters even live in this part of the world, I think, and I momentarily wonder when making puns with the word otter became something anyone under age 75 could even fathom doing. This disturbs me, so I think about Kairi instead.

Whenever Kairi and I do anything together, which is pretty often, all things considered, people always think we're a couple. Kairi loves this – absolutely lives for these moments. She'll hold my hand at the mall and take pictures, oh God, the pictures. I can't tell you how many pictures I have in front of various landmarks and monuments, me smiling half-heartedly and Kairi pressing her chapstick'd lips onto my cheek like some kind of middle school girlfriend. For a time, we were listed as engaged on Facebook (yeah, I went there), but then she had a boyfriend, so our engagement unraveled, and then we never got around to putting it back after she and Boyfriend broke up, because neither of us actually gives a flying fuck about Facebook.

Two little boys are running up and down the aisle, shrieking at the tops of their lungs. They're playing Cowboys and Indians, and this makes me think of Sora. I should probably be more ashamed to say things like that, but I'm not. Not really. I imagine Sora skinning deer and dancing around a fire, and then I imagine him imagining me on a white horse, spreading disease across his country and slaughtering his family, so I decide to leave stereotypes behind and wonder if what I saw in the water was really an otter. I can't remember ever playing Cowboys and Indians at any point in my childhood, and I wonder if I missed out. Probably not.

"He asked me to dinner on Friday," Kairi says suddenly, and I pry my eyes away from the renegade children.

"Next Friday?"

"Mmhmm." She nods, carefully examining her French manicure. "And you won't believe where."

I'm drawing a blank. "Uhh… where?"

"L'Ora di Mezzanotte!" she exclaims. "Where we had our first date!"

I roll my eyes. "He would take you there," I mutter. I like to practice a healthy skepticism regarding young men who try to date Kairi. She's quite a find, and I won't settle for any less than the best for her.

Naturally, her parents love me. Every time we visit them, her father tries once again to coerce me into reconsidering my sexual orientation and marrying his daughter. It would be awkward, but I've grown accustomed to it, so it's become a sort of joke between me and Kairi.

The last time we went to visit Kairi's family was spring – maybe it was Easter, I don't remember. Either way, it's freezing cold now, and the holidays are just around the corner. When we finally get off the damn train, we hurry to her mother's waiting minivan and within minutes we're lugging our bags into her childhood home, one of those ancient Victorian homes that can only be described as grand. Kairi's room hasn't changed since she moved out after high school, and after dropping her bags unceremoniously on her bed, she helps me set up camp on the floor beneath an Alanis Morissette poster.

We return downstairs for the best meal I've had in months, courtesy of Kairi's mother, and once we're on round three of after-dinner coffee, Kairi and I decide to make our escape. Despite the cold, we've retreated to her old treehouse to share a bottle of wine, and I'm listening to Kairi theorize about her future loneliness.

"If," she begins, gesturing widely, "If I- I mean, if we both reach… if someday we're both old, and we're both alone, will you, Riku Walker, will you marry me?"

I snort. Fat chance.

"That won't happen," I say, swishing the wine around in its bottle. "Not to you. And anyway, isn't the cutoff for these deals traditionally 40 or 50? Why do we have to be old?"

"Because," she says grimly, "If I'm going to be lonely, I at least want the chance to be one hell of a cougar before I marry my gay best friend."

This is precisely why I love Kairi.

"Will you?" she pleads, gently pulling the bottle from my fingertips. "Please, Riku!"

"I'll agree to it, but it'll never happen," I say again. "You're a rarity, Kairi – you're intelligent and funny and outgoing and ambitious, and you also happen to be drop dead gorgeous."

Kairi exhales for kind of a long time, shaking her head. "Whatever," she says. "I'm ordinary. Dreadfully so."

"You're 25 years old and you own and run your own business."

"So I'm mildly successful," she admits, taking a long swig off the bottle. "I'm certainly not drop dead gorgeous. If anything, I might be kind of cute sometimes. You know, like a little kid or a baby animal. I'm not sexy. Men want sexy."

"How do you figure that?" I ask, flicking a rapidly approaching ant out the door of the treehouse. I look up when she doesn't say anything, and I truly do wonder how she figures she isn't blindingly beautiful. Her hair is a deep maroon in the shadow of the tree, and where the sunset shines through the cracks it glows a bright magenta. I don't think I've ever seen a zit on her face, and her eyes are a blue I've never seen on anyone else in the world, with the exception of Sora. That's just it though – the things that really make Kairi beautiful aren't her expert application of eyeshadow or her dangly little earrings – they're the things that girls never seem to want to appreciate about themselves. The curve of her legs, splayed out in front of her on the old, splintery wood of the treehouse; the shadow coming off her collarbone in the kind of mountainous, momentous sunset you can only find on the West coast; the blue of her eyes and the long, slender silhouette of her fingers wrapped around the neck of a secret bottle of wine. The fact that she even suggested we sneak away from the family gathering to drink together in the treehouse – some kind of clandestine society of young drunks – these are the things that make Kairi beautiful, and of course she'll never believe it.

I'm trying to figure out a way to tell her when a head pops up over the edge of the ladder.

"Seriously, you guys?"

It's Kairi's older brother, Leon, and he hoists himself into the treehouse after eyeing our wine disapprovingly. I will admit to having a major crush on Leon, but alas, he's married, and anyway, I'd like for once to be the older guy in a relationship.

"We had to escape," Kairi says apologetically, stretching her legs and scooting over to make room for Leon to sit down. "Once Mom started talking about arranging a family vacation, I figured it was time to disappear or be roped into some kind of terrible road trip."

The treehouse creaks as Leon gets situated, and I wonder for a fleeting moment if the whole thing will come crashing down under our combined weight. Leon laughs, a deep, throaty laugh that makes me kind of melt a little in my stomach, and he reaches for the bottle.

"I oughta confiscate this," he says, grinning. "My little sister, getting wasted in the treehouse! And you!" he adds, shoving me a little. "An accomplice!"

"She said she was legal!" I reply incredulously, and Leon laughs again amidst Kairi's semi-drunk squeals of "I'm 25 years old!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Consider it confiscated," he says, and he tilts his head back to drink. I watch the way his jaw juts out, the straight lines of his face. I've never told Kairi how hot I find her brother, but then again, why should I? She'll just make fun of me. He makes a face as he swallows, handing the bottle back to me.

"Or not," he says. "How much was that, six bucks? God, Kai, I expected better from you!"

"Hey now, at least it's not from a box," she says, as if this helps her case, and I zone out a little as they swap memories from when they were younger. I perk back up when I hear Leon badgering her about her love life.

"Shut up, shut up, my love life is nonexistent," she's saying, kicking Leon furiously as he laughs at her.

"Uh, excuse me?" I cut in, glad to finally be able to participate. "Did you not just tell me you had a hot date for next Friday night?"

"It's not a hot date," she protests, and Leon raises his eyebrows, looking back and forth between her and me.

I blink at her. "Well, what is it then? A lukewarm date? I mean really, he's a nice enough guy."

"Well, he's nice, yeah, but he probably doesn't even like me. I mean, we only met because he was interested in you, Riku."

"Whoah, whoah, wait, okay, hold on. This guy is into both of you?"

"He's not into me," I say, holding up a hand to stop Kairi from attempting to explain. "I met him because I go to the coffee shop he works at, like, six days a week. He asked me if I wanted to catch some music with him and his friends, and I brought Kairi with, and then-"

"And then he called me later and asked me out," Kairi says loudly, clearly trying to head me off before I tell her brother about the rest of the night.

Leon looks at me, then at Kairi. "Did you sleep with him?" he asks.

Kairi says "no" at the same moment that I say "yes", then we switch and I say "no" while she says "yes", and then I'm silent while Kairi turns red and tries to explain.

"Okay, maybe I slept with him, but Riku was there too!"

This causes Leon's eyebrows to shoot even higher than their previous position, and I wonder if they'll just keep going and disappear into his hair.

"No, that sounded bad," she says, and she pauses to take a large gulp of wine before trying again. "Okay. We both went to his place and played cards, and we were all really drunk, and… I slept with him. But Riku was totally there, just… passed out. In the other room."

Leon shakes his head, grinning. "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," he says, and I laugh.

"It's not really as skanky as it sounds," Kairi says in a small voice, and I lean over to pat her on the shoulder.

Leon takes another sip of wine, despite his earlier criticisms, then leans back against the wall of the treehouse.

"Okay," he says. "So what's his name? Tell me about him."

"His name is Sora," Kairi replies, tucking her hair behind her ear. "Sora Panucci. And, let's see… Well, he works in a coffee shop. He's… 23? He went to MIT…"

"He went to MIT and he works in a coffee shop?"

Kairi nods.

"Did he… graduate?"

"Um, I think so, I mean, I don't- I don't really know," Kairi says, shrugging. "I don't know him very well yet."

"Oh, he graduated," I say. "He's a fucking rocket scientist. He has a degree in Aerospace Engineering."

Kairi's eyes widen. "Really?"

I nod slowly, wishing I didn't know more about him than she does. "Yeah. We had breakfast after you left. What else did I learn… He's got a degree in rocket science, he's half Indian, or Native American, or whatever's politically correct these days, and half Italian. He has tattoos. I dunno. It's not like I know him either."

"Tattoos?" Leon repeats. "Of what?"

"Birds," Kairi and I say in unison, and she stares at me.

"On his back. And an airplane," she says slowly. "With a coyote, on his arm. And a pair of wings on one of his ankles. And… the symbol for Mercury."

Leon and I are silent.

"You know, like the planet."

"I didn't see that one," I say, without thinking.

"It's on his… hip. Area," she says awkwardly, and her face is almost as red as her hair.

I can't think of anything to say, and Leon clears his throat.

"Honestly?" he says, after a moment. "He sounds kinda weird."

"He's not weird," I say, defending Kairi's taste in men. Okay, so maybe I'm defending my taste in men, but at this point, he's still Kairi's interest. "I mean, he's a little… eccentric, I guess. You know, with the tattoos, and the coffee, and the rocket science. But he's a really nice guy, and he's not weird like, I dunno, Actually-Insane-Weird, he's more like Interesting-And-Quirky-Weird."

To tell the truth, I didn't just talk to Sora when we had breakfast after Kairi left that day. I talked to him every single day for the two weeks that followed, with the exclusion of the four days out of those fourteen when he didn't have work. I talked to him this morning, before we got on the train. I may not have learned many tangible facts to list off, but I feel like I know him well enough to say that he's not a creep, and he's genuinely interested in Kairi, and he's charming enough for her to be genuinely interested in him. I guess they talked a couple times during that time as well, but mostly just to figure out a night when they were both free so they could have a proper date. On these occasions, I would get an unashamed phone call from Kairi directly after the fact, and the next morning, Sora would plop down across from me at my table and mention it off-handedly, asking me for advice on what to wear when the day finally came.

I have to say, I'm actually enjoying the experience, and right now, which is to say, now now, I'm enjoying looking back on it with kind of a disappointed fascination. Thinking back, I'm watching this relationship bloom in front of my very eyes, and now that I've realized how crazy I am for Sora, I wish more than anything else that I'd realized it in time, before he'd fallen in love with her, before any of this had gone anywhere.

On the other hand, who's to say that if Sora and Kairi weren't together, he'd be with me? Who knows? Whatever. This is Walker, signing off for the night. I know, I know, it's only 10:30, but I gotta get my laundry in before I go to bed, and… why am I bothering to type excuses into a manuscript? Fuck it, what are first drafts for? Goodnight, computer. Goodnight, Word document. Goodnight.