Rick was wrong about the wings. He'd been wrong about them last week too, but that hadn't stopped him from ordering a second basket and then complaining about them for twenty minutes like a man who'd been personally betrayed by a chicken.

"They changed the sauce," Rick said, holding one up to the light as if it might reveal something. "This isn't the same sauce."

"It's the same sauce," said Demarcus, not looking up from his phone.

"It is absolutely not the same sauce. Salvar, taste this."

"I'm good."

"Taste it."

"I don't want your wing, Rick."

Rick set the wing down with a kind of wounded dignity and wiped his hands on a napkin that was already destroyed. The Lantern was half full for a Friday, which meant about forty people trying to pretend they weren't cold and wet. November had come in mean this year. The rain hadn't stopped since Tuesday, the kind of steady miserable rain that didn't have the decency to be dramatic about it, just sat on everything and soaked through. Every time the front door opened a gust would push in smelling of wet pavement and dead leaves, and the whole place would shift a degree colder before settling back into its haze of hops and body heat.

Salvar hadn't wanted to come. He'd been halfway through a problem set for thermodynamics and had a legitimate reason to stay in, but Rick had that thing he did where he'd stand in your doorway and just keep talking until the energy it took to resist exceeded the energy it took to put on shoes. So here he was. Damp jacket draped over the back of his chair, beer going warm in front of him, half listening to Rick and Demarcus argue about wing sauce while Kevin scrolled through something on his phone and laughed to himself at intervals that didn't line up with anything anyone was saying.

It was fine. It was a Friday night and he was twenty one and this was fine.

He didn't notice her right away. Or maybe he did and it just took a while for the noticing to organise itself into something he could name. She was sitting at the bar, three stools from the end, her back to him. Dark hair past her shoulders. A green jacket, the canvas kind, with the collar turned up. She was with two other women, one on each side, and she was leaning slightly toward the one on her left, listening. Something about the angle of her shoulders. The way she held her head, tilted just a fraction, like she was giving whoever was talking her full attention but also thinking about something else entirely.

Salvar looked at his beer. Looked back.

There was no reason for it. She was just a person sitting at a bar. But something in his chest had shifted, like a drawer sliding open that he'd forgotten was there, and now he could feel all the junk rattling around inside it. He didn't like the feeling. It was the kind of thing he'd trained himself to be suspicious of, that pull toward someone you haven't even seen the face of, that gravity your body invents because it wants to believe in something your brain knows better than to trust.

He took a drink.

"You're staring," Rick said.

"What?"

"You're staring at that girl. At the bar."

"I'm not staring at anyone."

Rick leaned back in his chair and craned his neck with all the subtlety of a man trying to see over a fence. "Green jacket? Yeah, she's cute. Go talk to her."

"I wasn't staring."

"You were staring, man. You had the face."

"What face?"

"The face. Demarcus, tell him about the face."

Demarcus glanced up. "You do have a face."

"Everyone has a face."

"Go talk to her," Rick said again. He said it the way he said everything, like the idea had just occurred to him and was obviously brilliant and the only thing standing between Salvar and happiness was Salvar's unwillingness to stop being an idiot. "What's the worst that happens?"

"She throws a drink at me."

"Has that ever happened to you?"

"No."

"Then statistically you're due. Go."

Salvar didn't move. The woman at the bar laughed at something, and the sound cut through the noise of the room with an odd clarity, the way sometimes a single voice will find a gap in the crowd and reach you clean. He couldn't hear what she was laughing at. Just the sound of it. And something about that sound made the drawer in his chest slide open a little further.

He stood up before he could think about it. If he thought about it he'd sit back down and spend the next hour wondering, and he'd done enough of that in his life to know it was its own kind of cowardice, the kind that disguises itself as caution.

"There he goes," Rick said behind him, and Salvar ignored it.

The walk across the bar took about fifteen seconds. It felt longer. The floor was sticky near the pool table, and someone had left an empty glass on the edge of the jukebox, and these were the things his brain decided to catalogue instead of formulating anything resembling an opening line. He was three feet away when one of the women next to her, the one on the right, a tall woman with braids and sharp cheekbones, noticed him approaching and gave him a look that was part curiosity and part checkpoint.

"Hey," he said, directing it at the back of the green jacket. "Can I buy you a drink?"

It came out fine. It came out like something a normal person would say in a bar on a Friday night. He was almost impressed with himself.

She turned around.

The world didn't stop. That's not how it works. What happened was smaller and worse. His stomach dropped about six inches and his throat closed and for one half second everything he knew about himself, every careful thing he'd built in the last five years, every wall and routine and comfortable resignation, all of it just. Fell.

"Leigh?"

He said her full name. Both parts. Like a question he already knew the answer to, which was the stupidest thing, because she was right there, she was sitting right there, and her face was her face and her eyes were her eyes and he knew them the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in even in the dark.

She looked at him. There was a flicker, maybe half a second, where her expression was just open surprise, and then something else moved behind it, something he couldn't read, and she said, "Salvar."

Not a question. A confirmation.

The woman with the braids looked between them. "You two know each other?"

Neither of them answered. Leigh was staring at him and he was staring at her and the noise of the bar seemed to have retreated to a respectful distance, though it hadn't, people were still talking and the jukebox was playing something with a lot of guitar and Rick was probably watching from across the room with his mouth open.

"Yeah," Leigh said finally, still looking at Salvar. "We know each other."

He sat down. He didn't ask if he could. The stool next to her was open and he sat on it and his hands were on the bar and he could feel the grain of the wood under his palms, that varnished smoothness worn rough in patches, and he held onto it like an anchor.

"I can't," he started. "I mean. What are you."

"I wondered if I'd run into you," she said.

That stopped him. He'd been building toward something, some version of "I can't believe this" or "how is this possible," the standard vocabulary of shock, and she'd just. Taken the whole thing and tilted it.

"You wondered."

"I moved here three weeks ago. For work. Biotech firm off Route 9. I knew your school was close." She picked up her drink, something amber with ice, and stirred it with a thin cocktail straw. The ice clicked against the glass in a small circular rhythm. "I figured there was a chance."

For him this was lightning. For her it was weather she'd checked the forecast for.

He didn't know what to do with that. He sat with it for a moment, the asymmetry of it, while she stirred her drink and the ice went click, click, click.

"How long has it been," he said, though he knew.

"Five years. A bit more."

"Five years." He said it like he was testing the weight of it. It was heavier than two words should be.

The woman with the braids, who'd been watching this exchange with the expression of someone trying to decide whether to intervene, leaned forward. "I'm Kariana. I work with Leigh."

"Salvar," he said, and shook her hand, and the normalcy of the gesture felt absurd, like shaking hands during an earthquake.

"You went to school together?" Kariana asked.

"High school," Leigh said. She was still stirring her drink. Click, click. "We dated."

"Oh." Kariana's eyebrows went up. She looked at Leigh, then at Salvar, then back at Leigh with a look that communicated something in a language Salvar didn't speak. "Oh."

The first ten minutes were awful. Not awful like fighting, awful like wearing a suit that doesn't fit. They did the catching up. Where are you now, what are you studying, where are you living. Leigh answered in clean sentences, composed, almost disappointingly calm. She'd finished undergrad in Portland, biology, worked in a lab for a year, got recruited out here. She liked the area so far. The rain reminded her of Oregon. She said all of this and he listened and nodded and asked follow up questions and the whole time he felt like they were both performing a version of this conversation that neither of them actually wanted to have.

It was Leigh who broke it.

"Do you still say it wrong?" she asked.

"Say what wrong?"

"Keen oh ah."

The laugh came out of him before he could shape it, sudden and real and too loud for the bar. Quinoa. Her parents' dining room. Her mother's face when he'd asked for seconds of the keen oh ah salad with complete confidence and Leigh had kicked him under the table but couldn't say anything because she was laughing too hard. He'd only found out later. He'd been saying it wrong for years.

Leigh was laughing too, and it was the same laugh, the same one he remembered, the one that started in her nose and worked its way out. And something cracked. Some pane of glass between then and now that had been holding everything at a polite distance just. Gave.

"I actually looked it up after that," he said. "I've been saying it correctly for five years and nobody cares."

"Your parents didn't tell you?"

"My parents eat rice."

She laughed again and this time it was easier, the way a door is easier the second time you push it. He stopped gripping the bar. His hands relaxed. The jukebox changed songs to something quieter and the bartender put a fresh drink in front of Leigh without being asked, which meant she'd been here long enough to be a regular already, three weeks in, and that felt so completely like her that it almost hurt.

They talked. Really talked. About Portland, about the rain there versus the rain here, which she insisted was colder but he argued was wetter, a distinction neither of them could prove. About his thermodynamics class and her lab and the specific misery of pipetting for eight hours. About people they'd known in high school, where they'd ended up, the ones who'd surprised them. She told him Marcus Devlin was a youth pastor now, which was genuinely shocking considering Marcus had once set a trash can on fire during a pep rally. He told her about bumping into their old English teacher at a grocery store and the man not recognising him at all, which had bothered him more than it should have.

She tucked her hair behind her ear when she was thinking. Left side. Same gesture. Same tilt of the head. He caught himself staring at it and looked away and the ice in her glass went click, click, and he focused on that instead because looking at her face for too long felt dangerous in a way he couldn't articulate. Like something bright.

At some point Kariana and the other woman, whose name he never caught, drifted to a table. At some point Rick and the others ordered another round. The bar filled and then slowly began to empty, the Friday night crowd peeling off in layers, couples first, then groups, then the dedicated.

He looked up once and caught Rick's eye across the room. Rick didn't do the thumbs up. Didn't shout something across the bar. He just looked at Salvar, and then he nodded. Once. A small serious thing, barely a movement, and then he turned to Demarcus and Kevin and said something, and they started gathering their jackets.

Salvar watched them go. Rick didn't look back. Salvar felt something thick and wordless rise in his throat that he'd probably never be able to say to Rick directly. Maybe in ten years. Maybe never.

Kariana appeared at Leigh's shoulder sometime later, hand on her arm.

"We're heading out," she said. She looked at Salvar. "Nice to meet you." She squeezed Leigh's shoulder in a way that contained an entire conversation, and then she was gone, and it was just the two of them.

"She seems good," Salvar said.

"She is. She brought me a plant my first day. Like a real one, not from the office. She'd gone to a nursery."

"What kind?"

"A fern. I'm going to kill it. I've never kept a plant alive."

"You were a biology major."

"That's animals. Cells. Not ferns."

"Cells are also in ferns."

"Shut up."

He grinned. She grinned. The bartender called last orders and the overhead lights flickered once in warning, that universal signal that the night was ending whether you wanted it to or not.

Outside the rain was still going. Not cinematic rain, not the kind that looks good in a movie. November rain. Steady, cold, the kind that finds the gap between your collar and your neck and just sits there. They walked. His shoes were already soaked through from earlier and now they made a sound like wet cardboard on the pavement. Her shoes did the same, a half beat off from his, and neither of them adjusted, and there was something in that small distance that he noticed but didn't name.

His jacket smelled like wet wool. Her jacket smelled like something else, something faintly sharp that might have been a perfume or might have just been the cold. Their breath came out in small clouds that the rain dissolved.

"It's up here," she said, pointing to a street he didn't know well. "The blue one."

The blue one turned out to be a narrow townhouse with a porch light on and a dead hanging basket by the door that she'd clearly inherited from a previous tenant. They stood on the porch and the rain rattled on the overhang and neither of them said anything for a moment.

"I should," he started.

"Yeah."

"Can I take you to dinner?"

He watched her face. It did something complicated. Surprise first, though he didn't know why, since they'd just spent three hours talking and it seemed like the obvious next thing. Then something else, a kind of weighing, her eyes moving across his face like she was reading something written there. Then she settled. A quiet steadiness, like a decision arriving not all at once but sliding into place.

"Yeah," she said. "I'd like that."

"Okay."

"Give me your phone."

He pulled it out. The screen lit up blue white between them and she took it and her thumbs moved fast, tapping in her number, and when she handed it back the phone was warm. Not from the battery. From her hand. He noticed this with a specificity that embarrassed him.

"Goodnight, Salvar."

"Goodnight."

She went inside. The door closed. The porch light stayed on.

He walked. The rain came down and his shoes were ruined and the streets were empty and shining under the streetlights like someone had lacquered them. He passed a kebab shop that was still open, a single guy behind the counter watching something on a small television, and the smell of lamb and grease drifted out and mixed with the rain and the cold and none of it mattered.

He wanted to believe it meant something. That's what scared him. Not the coincidence itself but how badly he wanted it to be more than coincidence. Because if it was fate, if the universe had actually done this on purpose, then he was being given something back, something he'd let go of when he was sixteen and hadn't stopped reaching for in the dark. But he wanted it so much that he didn't trust the wanting. You can convince yourself of anything if you need it badly enough. He knew that.

And then there was what she'd said. I wondered if I'd run into you. She'd known. She'd moved twenty minutes from his campus and she'd known it was possible and she'd. What? Hoped? Planned? Or just acknowledged it the way you'd acknowledge any probability, without attaching weight?

He didn't know. He couldn't know. His phone sat heavy in his pocket with her number in it and the warmth had faded by now, replaced by the cold of the rain, but he kept his hand around it anyway.

A car passed, throwing up a sheet of water from the gutter that missed him by about two feet. He flinched, then kept walking. The rain kept falling. His shoes kept making that wet sound on the pavement, steady and rhythmic, like something