I told myself I stayed for the figs, which is the first of the night's small lies and by no means the largest.
There were figs, to be fair. One had split on the conservatory floor at some hour I'd stopped counting, and its sugar-rot still threads the green animal warmth of this place — the overwatered soil, the cold breathing off the glass. Condensation slides down the panes in slow seams. Beyond them the transit hums like something asleep and patient. I came for the conversation, I'd said, when Mira invited me. For the talk, the old fruit trees gone feral against the dome, the rare company of people who still make things with their hands. I am very good at the sentences I tell myself. It's nearly my profession.
What I remember, in the order I have chosen to remember it: Orrin's hand at the small of my back, broad and unhurried, the inked forearm a ladder of dead code I traced with one bitten nail while he laughed his late-arriving laugh against my hair. Mira's mouth at my shoulder, the press of it, light as a question asked and answered. The blankets still warm under me now, holding the shape of all three of us like a mold of something poured and cooled. I was the center. The night turned around me. I am sure of this the way you are sure of a thing you have decided not to examine.
The Ascent has dimmed the ambient systems to almost nothing. Blue dawn. In my body the old ghost of work tomorrow still stirs, though no work waits for any of us — not for years, not ever. That's the whole ache of this era: the abundance that left us nothing to be necessary for. Orrin feels it worse than I do. I watched it move across his face all night, that hunger to be load-bearing, to carry something. I let him think he carried me.
Mira's motes drift across the ceiling, dimming and brightening, a slow shifting constellation that answers to her pleasure like weather to pressure. She is small and luminous and shorn close, all economy of motion even now, even half-asleep. She makes people feel seen for a living — the most coveted talent we have, and the most hated. I knew exactly what I was doing, accepting it. The way her eyes held mine a beat past comfort, cataloguing. I told myself: she chose me. She does this for everyone and she meant it for me.
Now she stirs. Lifts on one elbow. Her gaze finds my face, and for the length of one held breath the whole reconstructed night confirms itself — yes, here, this, the axis — and I am ready to be the rare uncollected thing she's spent her life hunting, the moment no one performed for an audience.
Then the angle shifts.
Her eyes travel past me. Past my jaw, my shoulder, the place she kissed. To Orrin, who is awake and watching her with his whole slow weight, and something passes between them — wordless, sealed, complete — a recognition I am not inside of. Her motes flare. Not for me. They have never once, all night, flared for me.
I wait for the jealousy. I am braced for it, the green clean cut of it.
It doesn't come.
What comes instead is stranger, and I will lie about it too, but later. Right now it floods me warm and illicit: the thrill of witness. To be the one who sees the thing happen, the keeper of it. They lean toward each other across the small distance of me and I do not move, do not break the line of their looking. The fig-sweet air, the sweating glass, the dying-star ceiling — I hold it all the way I hold a curated experience for a client, framing the meaning, making the ordinary into something that aches.
Without deciding to, I press my thumbnail into the soft inside of my wrist — not hard, just enough to feel the small white crescent of it, the body confirming: present, awake, real. A thing I do alone, never witnessed. I do not know why I do it now, here, in front of them, except that no one is looking.
I tell myself this is generosity. That I am giving them the corner of the triangle I was always meant to occupy — the loneliest one, the one with the view.
It's the largest lie of the night. I choose it gladly. I lie very still so as not to disturb the picture I've decided I am only here to keep.
