Overhead, every star that had ever lived seemed to hang in the velvet sky, with the Milky Way gauzed over with light. I was quiet, trying to work over what I was feeling, so instead I counted stars. More than I’d ever seen in the permanent mauve twilight of Boston nights. I’m sure I learned a lot of the names of the constellations when I was a kid, but I forgot most of them. I mapped new ones as I sloshed wine over my tongue. The Lovers. The Sacred Machine. The stars twinkling like the spotlights at one of Genesis’s shows.

Figueiredo’s voice tried to sneak in on the wind, whispering that me and Yusuf were just using each other. But for what? Sex was too easy to finger-point. I’d woken up after enough one-nighters to know that sex isn’t proof of some magic union between souls, or whatever. It just feels good to slam your body into someone else’s for a while. Even if—or, especially if, sometimes—both slammers know that it doesn’t mean much once the sheets are in the hamper. And sometimes when your relationship is imploding, like me and Narek’s had been almost from the start, sex is the only thing gluing it together.

Yusuf wasn’t just a distraction. Unless I was chasing some ghost of the way Tiago and Figueiredo looked at each other in the footage. Even a quick glance in a room cluttered with green-coated staff, a little smirk. We belong to each other. But that wasn’t really it, either. I don’t think I’m being all aw shucks I’m such a dumpster fire with obnoxious fake self-deprecation if I admit that people like Yusuf who have ambition and brains and their shit together don’t normally go for people like me. And I don’t think I’m some smokeshow who can vaporize underwear with a single glance, but I know that sometimes people see me—the docs, or the tattoos, or me standing at the edge of a crowd by myself—and get this idea that I’m cerebral instead of bored. That they’re more interested by the outline of a person that they paint-by-numbers into life.

I knew when you’d been with someone for a while, you could look at them and see more of what you projected onto them than who they really were. I just didn’t want to go into whatever this was with us already thinking that.