Ollie and I talked for another hour. I was aching to fall asleep, but she was growing more excited by the moment, churning through all this new information.

I took a breath and said to Ollie, “Do you have that bottle of Alisprazole?” The antianxiety meds she’d stolen before leaving the hospital.

“They’re in my clothes,” Ollie said warily. She’d draped her wet things on doorknobs and across the room’s furniture. “But I’m not taking them.”

She was going for maximum cognitive sharpness, even if that meant flirting with paranoia. Off meds, her Clarity-wired brain was in charge. On them, she was that slave to agnosia she’d been back in the NAT, unable to connect the dots. No doctor had been able to find a chemical balance between the two extremes. My job was to decide when the paranoia was becoming too dangerous and force her back on the Alisprazole.

“Not for you,” I said. “I figure a couple for me.”

“You told me you were staying clean.”

“But we also need to sleep tonight. I’m keyed up, you’re keyed up…”

“I’m not taking those pills, and neither are you.”

After another minute of silence I turned toward her. “I suppose we could try more natural remedies.”

“Natural remedies,” Ollie said skeptically. I touched her chin. She said, “Like what?”

I slid my thumb across her jaw, then down her neck to the valley of her clavicle. Her skin was no longer cold; she felt hot, almost feverish.

I said, “I think we need a little dose of sexytocin.”

She laughed. “What about the axe-murderers?”

“Fuck ’em.” I ran my palm along her shoulder, pushing aside the neck of the fleece shirt until it dropped over her shoulder. Then I bent and kissed the side of her neck. In the hospital I’d fallen in love with the taste of her skin.

She said, “I feel like we’re making out in my parents’ bedroom.”

“That’s so hot,” I said, and she laughed again.

I pushed the fleece from her other shoulder, then let my hand glide down, hovering a hair’s breadth above her breast, not touching except for tiny incidental touches, moth wing touches that raised goose flesh across her skin. Her nipple hardened and brushed my palm. I circled there, the point of contact between us so tiny, so intermittent, like neurons firing to each other.

“Hmm,” Dr. Gloria said. She jotted something on her notepad.

“You can get the hell out of here,” I said.

“Don’t mind me,” she said.

“Out!”

She put away her notepad, rather sulkily I thought, then with two beats of her wings vanished through the ceiling.

Ollie touched my neck. “Hey. Where’d you go?”

“I’m right here,” I said. I moved my hand down, firmer now, one facet of my ring tracing a path along her ribs, across the ridge of her hip, then under the waistband of the absurd fuzzy pants, then down, my ring finger dragging across her cleft. She arched her back, and her hands gripped the carpet. “Right … here,” I said.

*   *   *

Love at first sight is a myth.

I was twenty-five, two years into my PhD program and already tired of my fellow grad students, when I got roped into going to a party in an apartment on Door Street. The place was packed, doors and windows open to the humid night air, the typical low-rent shoutfest fueled by cheap beer, grocery store cheese, and Ke$ha pounding on the speakers. I was drinking my first and last beer of the party and plotting my exit when I noticed the tall black woman with the plaited hair.

She stood in front of a pair of windows, towering over a white boy, explaining how he was wrong—about the Greenland ice sheet, or fracking, or the Supreme Court, or Radiohead, or any one of the hot topics on her agenda in those days—simply wrong, and we’d better all get our heads out of the fucking sand now. She was over six feet tall in flats, slender and muscular as an Olympic volleyball player, and wore a purple maxi-dress with a slit that ran the length of her thigh.

My body reacted on its own. Dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—the whole damn monoamine family—kicked in like a band of mustangs.

Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science. The limbic system knows what it wants and does everything possible to keep the prefrontal cortex, that yammering, censorious maiden aunt, from shutting down the party. My genes clanged their tin cups across the bars of their jail cells and shouted to fulfill their evolutionary mandate: Rep-li-cate! Rep-li-cate! Not all of them had gotten the news about my sexual orientation. Genes are notoriously indifferent to details.

So with their chemical commandments pounding in my bloodstream, I pushed through the crowd toward her and the white boy. He might have been my age or older, but his mall-issue cargo shorts and American Eagle T-shirt placed him fully in Boy Territory. I eased up between them until my right shoulder was just in front of the boy’s left, setting the pick. He still hadn’t noticed this; his attention, predictably enough, was on the black woman’s braless tits and their friendly, attentive nipples. Perhaps I noticed them myself.

She reached for her wineglass, and I saw the small tattoo on the inside of her arm, a circle nested in a hexagon. I was no chemist but I’d taken enough hours to recognize what it stood for: six linked carbon atoms, each one attached to a hydrogen atom.

I stepped in front of the boy and said to the woman, “So, you’re toxic?”

She glanced at her arm, then turned her attention to me. The boy said something like “Excuse me?” but I cut him off.

“Get the lady a drink,” I said. Her wineglass was half-full, but being an optimist for my own chances I decided it was half-empty. Mikala seemed amused by my cheek, which was what I was going for. She looked me up and down, barely moving her eyes.

“So,” I said. “Benzene.”

“The mother of all hydrocarbons,” she said. “It’s crucial in everything from plastics to … opiates.”

“And it’s also really flammable,” I said.

She smiled. “The best things are, honey.”

Maybe she didn’t say “honey.” But that’s how I remembered it.

When after three years of living together we decided to marry, we of course—Mikala being who she was, and me being who I was—set about defining, redefining, contextualizing, and negotiating everything about what our marriage would mean, and what the ceremony would communicate about that meaning, down to venue, flowers, wardrobe, and the most important props of all: the rings. What to do about the rings? We were not chattel. Traditional symbols held no weight for us, but the hex and circle was something we could get behind. The benzene ring, we decided, would represent stability and creativity, but also danger: the rings would remind us to be careful with each other.

When we told the Sprouts what we were looking for, Rovil nodded as if this made perfect sense, Edo laughed his Santa Claus laugh (a back-of-the-throat chortle he deployed at every opportunity—as greeting, as filler, as disarmament tactic in business negotiations), and Gil shook his head at us. “Nerds,” he said. This from a man who spent $2,000 for a Joss Whedon T-shirt. Not a shirt with a picture of Joss Whedon, mind you, but a shirt that had been worn by him. (It was blue.) Gil was five-two, over two hundred pounds, and flew into rages when Stupid Humans fucked up his equipment. Not even Mikala would cross him when he was in a mood. So we were shocked when a few days later he presented us with two petri dishes, and in each rested a hand-forged brass ring. It was the most touching thing anyone had done for us.

Years later, at the trial, Gil would tell the jury that he was jealous of our relationship. He was in love with Mikala, but Mikala wouldn’t leave me. That’s why, he said, when the dosage took hold in that suite at the top of the Lake Point Tower, he stabbed my wife to death.