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At eight twenty, Merry is outside the bar where trivia night has happened every Thursday for the past six years without an ounce of my knowledge.

Her eyeliner looks perfect. She looks flawless.

“You survived.”

“Barely.” She steps toward me and kisses me hello. “I almost blinded myself.”

“Well, you look beautiful.” The words come out before I think about them, and Merryweather’s smile that follows is one of those ones I have seen only a few times, blinding and breathtaking and perfect.

She takes my hand and pulls me inside the bar. “Come on. I need you.”

“For trivia?”

“I have weaknesses, believe it or not.”

Something warm moves through me.

“You don’t know all of them yet,” she says as she looks back at me for a second. “Give me time.”

Then her smile falters, some of the playfulness disappearing from her expression.

“Okay.”

Inside, the bar is loud and crowded, and Merry has decided that our two-person trivia team will take the grand prize, despite having no idea what the prize is.

We are terrible at sports. Merry is inexplicably good at eighties movies.

I know some geography, science, and an embarrassing amount about nineteenth-century literature because Mamá went through a period where she believed reading the classics would make Fausto and me more cultured.

It did not work on my brother. I tell Merry this, and she laughs so loudly she snorts again, then covers her mouth with her hand and blushes the most adorable pink I’ve seen yet.

Halfway through the second round, Merry becomes convinced that the capital of Australia is Sydney.

“I just feel like it’s Sydney,” she says, and she reaches her hand to tuck an errant lock of my hair behind my ear. “Sydney is giving me capital vibes.”

“That’s not how capitals work, linda.”

She giggles, and I am almost one hundred percent certain she’s putting up a fucking act and flirting shamelessly. I love it.

“It’s Canberra,” I tell her.

When the answer is announced, she turns slowly in her chair. “I find competence extremely attractive, you know?” She kisses my cheek and reaches for the next answer sheet.

At some point, without asking, she shifts her chair closer to mine because the bar is loud, and her knee stays pressed against my thigh for the rest of the game.

She does all these little things that normally I wouldn’t have thought mattered. Except that I’m starting to think that’s all knowing someone is.

Consistent attention, over time.

Primavera comes into my mind then, unexpectedly. All those conversations and all those small observations she’s been collecting because I told her to look. Pay attention, I’ve been telling her. Look closely at your own life instead of wanting for the universe to hand you an answer.

I wonder when I decided that advice only applied to other people.

Merry bumps her knee against mine. “I’m so glad the universe put us on the same path,” she says, almost absentmindedly. She looks at my mouth, then leans in to give me a chaste, innocent kiss.

Her hair is falling out of whatever updo she’d tried to do with it earlier, and there’s a faint pink mark on her cheek from where she rested her face in her hand. She’s smiling at me like she expects me to know something she doesn’t.

“Huh,” I reply. Merry leans closer until her shoulder presses against mine. “I was thinking the same thing.”