The first time I kiss Kit, he tastes like jalapeños and apricots.

We’re drunk enough to be brave. Some guys from the restaurant have thrown a Halloween party at their rental house in Cathedral City, and there is a trash can full of mystery punch, and we’re twenty-two, the age at which trash-can punch sounds genius instead of evil. I did add a few glugs of apricot brandy from the liquor shelf to take the edge off, at least.

For the last four months since Kit moved to Palm Springs and in with me, we’ve been talking Halloween costumes. Slutty M&M’s. Ralph Macchio and the bully from The Karate Kid. Kit came up with Sonny and Cher—he’s Cher, I’m Sonny. He found the perfect slinky silk shift on consignment in LA, even made me lace him into a waist corset before he slipped the dress on, because he’s never met a bit he couldn’t commit to. Not even trash punch could erase the texture of his skin from my fingertips.

After, when we’re eating delivery pizza off our coffee table, Kit decides it’s time to finally talk about it.

We’ve never addressed it, not since he returned to California for college and we slipped into each other’s pockets like we’d never been apart, right to the synced, steady heartbeat of us. Theo-and-Kit, Theo-and-Kit, Theo-and-Kit. It was so easy to find the pulse, we didn’t talk about where it had gone, or why.

Kit looks at me over a stuffed crust with extra jalapeños and asks, “Why didn’t you ever want to go to Oklahoma City?”

Because it’s Oklahoma City, I almost say. But the place was never what mattered; it was the promise. When we were fourteen, a year after Kit’s mom died, his dad decided to move the whole family to New York. Kit and I got out a map and found the midpoint between Rancho Mirage and Brooklyn. Oklahoma City. We promised to meet there every summer, but I always found excuses not to go, and they were never that good.

His brown eyes are so sparkly in the lamplight, framed by his stupid Cher wig, that I tell him the truth, partly: When he left, I realized I’d fallen in love with my best friend when I wasn’t looking. And then he was five hundred miles too far for it to matter, telling me about first dates over the phone, and it hurt too much. Oklahoma City would have broken my heart.