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They veered right and joined the crowd of half-dressed people climbing the stairs outside of Building B, facing the resort courtyard and overlooking three pools and a couple lazy rivers. Some shriveled old folks were still enjoying a dip, sitting at swim-up bars, stirring their mai tais as guests shrieked by.

"You know," one guy on the stairs said to his trembling wife, "the sun's so far away that it takes eight and a half minutes for its rays to reach Earth." He was a real know-it-all type, and he had his towel tied under his armpits like a woman stepping from the shower, and he spoke loudly enough to ensure everyone on the staircase heard. "So we saw it explode two minutes ago. But really it happened ten minutes ago."

Awesome, dude. Super impressive. We'll be sure to swing by room brainiac on the second floor after Earth defrosts so you can tell us that this wasn't actually the second ice age, but the twelfth, because you didn't sleep through freshman science like everyone else here.

Dan and Mara made it to the third floor, where the crowd thinned out, and raced down the walkway to their room. It occurred to Dan that he wasn't sure what they were racing toward, because what protection would their queen, nonsmoking room provide? If phones weren't working—and they weren't, people had been trying to post pictures of the apocalypse—then what was there to do, really? They were on a remote island in the middle of the Bahamas.

Shots?

He opened the door for Mara, who leapt inside as though spring-loaded. Their next-door neighbor, a man in his fifties with graying temples and a TV soap actor face, had just opened his door. Dan and the man locked eyes for a moment, and the older man blew air from the side of his mouth and threw a hand up, like, Can you believe we gotta deal with this? Dan scoffed, like, Unbelievable, and the two entered their respective rooms, Dan grateful that at least his tomb had a minibar.

CHAPTER TWO

Their first date was Chili's.

Or TGI Fridays—he always got them confused.

He was nervous and overdressed, unsure about his top button. Was it too much chest if he left it unbuttoned? He was too buttoned-up if he buttoned it

She was relaxed. Unflappable. She repeated the waitress's name back to her and used it throughout dinner, saying things like, Thanks, Sarah, and It's delicious, Sarah, and No problem, Sarah, I'll just take the vinaigrette then.

When the bill came, she offered to pay. Not pretend-offered like a lot of the other girls, who rooted around in their purses like their debit cards had slipped through a side pocket and into the Mariana Trench. She really offered, slapped her card down before Dan could even pry his wallet from his pants. He didn't let her. He said he was a feminist, but not an asshole, and that made her laugh, and he laughed too. She threw her head back when she laughed, like a Pez dispenser.

He used the opportunity to unbutton his top button.

After dinner they went to the park. The same park he'd taken girls to since sophomore year of high school because he never moved away, the one with the wooden dock that split through the lake like it was slicing a cake. They ate cake, actually. Sarah the waitress had slipped them a free dessert to go. It was really dry and really carroty—Dan hated carrot—but he ate it because, you know, free cake. He'd never been given anything free in over two decades of visiting restaurants, so this was something. He could tell it was a regular occurrence for Mara though. She had the type of face you wanted to feed things.

He wanted to draw her face. It was a weird thought, probably, but the way the moonlight stretched across the woods and then the lake and then rested on her face—like it'd traveled 240,000 miles just to illuminate her—made him want to draw it. He was terrible at drawing. His houses looked like fire trucks, and his fire trucks looked like dogs. But that night, staring at that olive face framed by that raven hair, he thought maybe all these years, he'd just lacked the proper muse. He drew her on a blue sticky note the next day at work, using a picture from Instagram for reference. The tiny profile picture—he hadn't worked up the guts to follow her. When he finished, it was grotesque, more Crypt Keeper than Priyanka Chopra, and he threw it away and never mentioned it to anyone.