Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

and there was glossy Lotto with sweat beads at his temples. Through the empty living room, they could see a slice of Mathilde as she shut the bathroom door on herself, a blue morpho folding its wings. Danica had to restrain herself from licking Lotto’s cheek when she kissed him. Salty, oh my god, delicious, like a hot soft pretzel. She always went a little weak around him.
    “A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep and I could laugh, I am light and heavy. Welcome,” Lotto said. Oh dear. They had so little. Bookshelves made of cinder blocks and plywood, couch from the college common room, rickety table and chairs meant for a patio. Still, how happy the place felt. In Danica, a pulse of envy.
    “Spartan,” Chollie said, and hefted the giant Buddha to the mantelpiece, where it beamed over the white room. Chollie rubbed the statue’s belly, then went into the kitchen and had a bird bath of dish soap and handfuls of water to wash all the dumpster stink off his person. From there, he watched the arriving flood of the poseurs, phonies, and jolly prepsters with whom he’d had to contend since Lotto had been sent off to boarding school, then college; his friend had taken him in when Chollie had no one else. That awful Samuel kid who pretended he was Lotto’s best friend. False. No matter how much Chollie insulted him, Samuel was unperturbed: Chollie knew he was too low, too much of a slug, for Samuel to care about. Lotto was taller than all, shooting off laser beams of joy and warmth, and everyone coming in blinked, dazzled by his grin. They handed over spider plants in terra-cotta, six-packs, books, bottles of wine. Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.
    In twenty years, Chollie announced silently, I will own you all. He snorted. Smoldered.
    Mathilde was standing at the refrigerator, frowning at the puddle around Chollie’s feet, the water stains on his khaki shorts. On her chin there was a raspberry abrasion shining through her cover-up.
    “Hey, there, Sourpuss,” he said.
    “Hi, Sour Pussy,” she said.
    “You kiss my friend with that dirty mouth of yours?” he said, but she only opened the fridge and took out a bowl of hummus and two beers and gave him one. He could smell her, the rosemary of her silky blond hair, the Ivory soap, the unmistakable starch of sex. Ah, so. He’d been right.
    “Mingle,” she said, moving off. “And don’t make anyone punch you, Chollie.”
    “Risk destroying this perfection?” he said, and gestured at his face. “Never.”
    Like fish in an aquarium, bodies moved through the hot space. In the bedroom, a ring of girls was forming. They were looking at the bank of irises in the window above their heads.
    “How can they afford this?” Natalie murmured. She’d been so nervous to come—Lotto and Mathilde so glamorous—that she’d had a few shots before leaving her house. She was actually pretty drunk now.
    “Rent-controlled,” a girl in a leather miniskirt said, looking around for somebody to save her. The others had melted away when Natalie joined them; she was one of those people it was nice to see when you’re tipsy at some college party, but now they were in the real world, all she did was complain about money. It was exhausting. They were all poor, they were supposed to be poor out of college, get over it. Miniskirt snagged a freckled girl passing by. All three had at one time slept with Lotto. Each of them secretly believed he liked her best.
    “Yeah,” Natalie said. “But Mathilde doesn’t even have a job. I’d get how they could pay if she was still modeling, but she already caught a husband, so she stopped, yadda yadda who knows. I wouldn’t stop modeling if anyone wanted me. And Lotto’s an actor ,