Serena doesn't know how she's gotten so far into this.

It's not the first time she does something like this. Not the first time she randomly meets a guy and jumps on his bike, or goes clubbing with him, or finds herself half-naked in the backseat of his car. She hasn't done this much since she moved to Seattle, but it's not the first time.

She doesn't trust people irrationally, Eric's totally wrong about that, but she does trust her instincts. And her instincts say that this boy—twenty-something, scruffy, smells like he's been wearing the same shirt for days, like he's just realized he's hit rock bottom and doesn't know how to come back up—they say that this boy deserves her company.

She met him this morning at a small, family-run coffeehouse, and he looked like a lost puppy, like he wouldn't be able to point at the ground.

They're walking up Washington Park towards Montlake, where they're meeting some friend of his, when two things happen.

One, she asks him what he does for a living.

He turns around, hands in his pockets, and his mouth curls into a self-deprecating smile—smirk, maybe—a silent way of snorting at himself. "I'm a," he begins, with a pause for extra undervaluation. "I'm a writer." And he adds, "Sort of," like the point wasn't clear.

Two, a duck starts swimming, and on the trail it leaves on the surface of the water, Serena notices that it's beginning to drizzle.

"How can you be sort of a writer?" she asks. "Do you write?"

"Yeah. Not so much lately, though." He looks ahead, at nothing in particular. She doesn't think his eyes are taking anything in. "Sometimes I feel like I'm fifteen again, like I'm supposed to do everything over. Like I've taken the wrong path and I should go back and build my career again."

"You're not even thirty, there's time."

He chuckles. The way he does makes Serena think he's the kind of person who thinks he's seen everything, who thinks you can't trust anyone. Someone who's read too much and lived too little. It feels like, in this equation, she's not the one supposed to doubt. "It's a very random business."

"But you've been published, right? That opens doors."

"I guess."

"Anything I may have read?" asks Serena. "Don't underestimate me."

"Probably not," he says. "Self-published. Means I know where most of my books are."

"Which is..."

He breathes in, and a drop of rain falls on the bridge of his nose. He wrinkles it, and it moves down to his upper lip. "Brooklyn, New York."

Serena reaches out and clutches his elbow, catches the raindrop on his nose with her index finger, dries it off on her jeans. The drizzle progresses. "I may have seen it," she says, and he's looking at her. Looking like he's amazed, and yeah, Serena gets this, a lot, but this boy seems different somehow—like he's actually seeing her.

She's still holding his arm.

He snaps out of it and picks up his pace. Her hand slides down to his forearm. "We should walk faster if we want to reach Vanessa's apartment before we get soaked."

"Hey," Serena says, and squeezes his arm. "Hey." She smiles, looks up. "Who says we want that?" She squints, silly reaction to a raindrop reaching her eyelash. She picks it up. "See? It's harmless."

He smiles, a little bit like she's insane, a little bit like he's amused.

"You need to do a dreadcheck," she says.