Chapter 1: Lawrence the Lonely

The cat wore a tiny tuxedo and demanded to be addressed as “Ambassador Whiskers.”

Lawrence stood in the kitchen with a chipped mug in his hand and a brown ring of coffee cooling at the bottom. The cat’s bowtie gleamed as if someone had polished it. The voice—low, assured, faintly bored—hung in the air like cigar smoke. For a heartbeat he could only stare, then the world tilted, and he grabbed the counter to keep from sliding off the edge of it.

Before the cat—before lapels and baritone pronouncements—there had been only Lawrence and the conviction that he would die alone.

Two nights earlier he had dressed for a date as if the outcome could be tricked by layers. Hoodie under the one blazer that had shoulders, dark jeans, shoes he’d scrubbed with a toothbrush because the internet said women noticed shoes. He’d stared at his face in the mirror until it separated into parts he didn’t like: eyebrows too long, stubble uneven, mouth pinched by habit. He considered cologne, set the bottle down, picked it up again, set it down for good. Real men didn’t need perfume, he told himself, which sounded braver in his head than it did whispered to the sink.

The bar had a name that sounded like an apology—Sorry Charlie or Pardon My French, something with chalkboard cursive and Edison bulbs. Kim was already there when he arrived, sitting at the far end where the light pooled gold around her. The green dress she wore was modest in theory, but the way it caught and released the ambient glow made it look like a river moving over the shape of her body. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil as if she’d been working and paused for a drink.

“Lawrence?” she said, and the way she stood made clear she was ready to sit again quickly if necessary.

“That’s me,” he said, and then, as if somebody had pulled a string in his back, he blurted, “Do you usually dress like that?”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Like what?”

He felt the trap close and stepped in deeper. “Like, you put a lot of effort in. That’s not a criticism, it’s just—signals, right? Fashion as signaling. I read this study—”

“Should we, um, sit?” she said gently, already sitting.

They sat. The bartender arrived and Lawrence ordered a beer because beer was neutral. Kim asked for something with grapefruit and gin that the bartender mixed by scent. Lawrence watched the shaker and counted the seconds because it gave him something to do with his eyes.

“So. Books or TV?” Kim asked, a friendly on-ramp.

“Podcasts,” he said. “Mainly.”

“Oh! Which ones?”

He could have said something harmless. He could have said history or design or that one where comedians talk about their bad sets. He heard himself say, “Evolutionary psychology of mating strategies,” and then, because silence expanded dangerously around the phrase, he kept talking. “There’s this episode about hypergamy. Not as a moral judgment, obviously—just, you know, the data. It explains a lot of modern dating behavior.”

Kim’s smile turned careful. “Like what?”

“Well,” he said, flushing already, “like why a lot of women swipe right on the top ten percent and the rest of us—” He laughed, aiming for self-deprecating, hitting bruised. “It’s informative. People pretend those forces don’t exist.”

“Those forces,” she repeated, as if testing the words for splinters. “So the rest of us are just ... forces.”

“I mean, not you. I’m saying in general. Look, I’m not blaming anyone. I’m a nice guy.” He hated himself the moment the phrase left his mouth. “Not—nice like weak,” he added quickly. “Nice like respectful. But that doesn’t seem to count. And then people say ‘confidence,’ like—what does that even mean? Confidence is just the aura of past success, which is a feedback loop, and if you’re not fed into the system you’re—”

She held up a hand, palm polite, traffic-cop calm. “Lawrence.”

“Yeah?”

“I appreciate the thought you’ve put into ... all that. But I kind of just came to have a drink and see if we click.” She smiled to soften it. “Do you have siblings?”

He tried to pivot, felt the tires skid. “One older brother. He’s married. Met his wife in college before all the apps turned everything into a marketplace. It was simpler then. People weren’t optimizing.”

Kim took a sip of gin and grapefruit. “Where did you go to school?”

“State.”

“What did you study?”

“Computer science.”

“Do you like your job?”

He could have said yes. He could have said it pays the rent, the team is fine, he likes building small exact things that do what they’re told. Instead he said, “It’s ... fine,” and then heard in the hollow of that word the echo of his apartment, his fridge hum, the way he ate standing up.