If they ever stayed together longer than a summer, things wouldn't be perfect. They both know that, they're not stupid. Three months is the honeymoon period, the golden age. After that, the problems start, and so Arthur's ticket home is ready and waiting, in a cream-colored envelope stuck on the fridge with a beer cap magnet Eames stole from their favorite bar, the one with the drag show on Thursdays, the one where the bartender always angles for a threesome and plies them with beer so cheap it doesn't matter that they get it for free. The ticket sits, a silent watchdog on the otherwise bare fridge. Arthur glances at it just once, when they're fucking on the kitchen counter: he didn't intend to, it was just in his eye line, but he can't stop himself from staring at it. He knows the contents like the back of his hand, like the way Eames's tongue feels in his mouth, like the steps in dismantling and rebuilding most firearms. He knows that three months to the day, he will leave Eames, as always.

But that's three months away, and right now there are long afternoons of sex and laughing over takeout and drinking and dancing and more sex. There are long walks that turn out to be very bad ideas because it's so fucking hot outside, and tall sweating glasses of something Eames claims is tea but is really a mishmash of various unmarked packets he found in drawers in the flat. Arthur just hopes they're neither drugs nor lawn clippings, and pours three heaping spoonfuls of sugar in.

There is bad TV and worse food, because neither Arthur nor Eames can cook anything edible. Eames's friend Joanna throws a costume party and Eames builds what turns out to be a kissing booth costume, and Arthur can hardly breathe for laughing as Eames soundly kisses everyone at the party. Arthur wears a top hat Eames stole from somewhere and borrows some of Joanna's eyeliner, walks around saying "ultraviolence" and performing a terribly off-key rendition of "Singin' in the Rain," because Arthur, it turns out, cannot carry a tune to save his or anyone else's life.

Sometimes there are night terrors, because Eames killed too many people before he left the SAS and Arthur's never had a stable subconscious even before playing guinea pig for the Army. Sometimes there are stupid people who say things, and Arthur has to hold Eames back or Eames has to take away Arthur's gun or any of the many permutations of those reactions. Sometimes there are unpleasant run-ins with ex-coworkers or just with exes, and Eames smiles in the way Arthur knows means he's thought of at least four different things to say that would utterly break the person to whom he's speaking. Sometimes Arthur is the one smiling, and Eames is the one casually looking around the room to double-check exit strategies, just in case.

Mostly, though, there is sex and laughter and food and guns and more sex, and it is, as always, made strangely more perfect by the explicit expiration date. Because of the envelope, because it's always there and always the same, Arthur never looks inside it. He knows the date, the flight number, his seat, the gate…everything. Why would he look at it? So he's to be forgiven, really, for not noticing that it has become ever so slightly thicker than usual. Every summer it's like this: Arthur shows up wherever Eames has set up camp, or vice versa. They act like they've got forever. Then, three months to the day, they drive back to the airport and fuck in a bathroom, a last hurrah, and they say goodbye. See each other on the next job, casually sleep together at night and keep up the facade of friendly rivalry in the morning, avoid touching each other in public. Three months of a relationship plus a few weeks here and there of what Eames calls an affair: it adds up.

If Arthur had bothered to think about it, he'd realize that this three months in Mombasa meant they'd been doing this for five years. Eames doesn't mention it. Wakes up early, some days, to look at Arthur's face in the bright sun, thinks quiet thoughts, walks through the plan one more time in his head. Five years, he thinks, is quite enough time for this pattern to go on uninterrupted. Eames is, after all, a gambler.