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: : : A BOOTH AT THE MEXICAN place on the corner. Fletcher and Clark and Oliver sit there, grimy and flushed—they've been loading furniture and boxes into a Ryder truck all day. Fletcher chugs down about half of his Corona about a second after the waitress brings it.
—Don't get too hammered, Clark says. —You're still planning to drive all the way to, what, middle of Ohio tonight?
Fletcher breaks from his beer just long enough to say —Toledo.
Clark shrugs, then raises her own bottle. She eyes it a little warily. It's been seven months since she's last gotten shitfaced drunk, but tonight she's hot, and exhausted, and all she can think is how good it would feel to just pound a beer like Fletcher's doing right now, and then another, and then another after that. She notes that Oliver ordered a Coke.
—Toast me, Clark says, and she holds her Corona out and waits until the guys join her.
—To the future, she says. —To what it may hold.
She smiles at Fletcher across the table, and he smiles back, wryly, and they hold their bottles together, touching, in the air above the table, and Oliver retracts and sips at his Coke, and both of them ache a little. They've known each other for so long now that they can say what needs to be said just by looking at one another, and there's a way in which Fletcher doesn't have that with Cassandra, and there's a way in which Clark doesn't have that with Oliver, and it makes both of them wonder, just for a second, why they made the choices they made, why they're going to be off with other people for the rest of their lives when they could be with one another, looking into one another's eyes like this and basically getting high off of telepathy. And each of them can feel that that's what the other is thinking, and that's part of what's there, in the sort of fused-up smile-moment that's happening here. It holds for only a moment, and then one or the other of them comes back to earth, and remembers oh yeah real life, which is where all the reasons live, all the reasons that explain why they're not together. And it's OK. It's enough that it's just a moment. Each of them can see that the other one is happy, where they are, neither one of them needs to burn down everything so that they can chase the other, and that's OK, at least they've had this moment where each of them knows, really knows, that the other one loves them.
—To the future, Fletcher says.
—To the future, Clark agrees.
—You said that already, Fletcher says.
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