Nobody ever built cupboards for normal-sized people like me. I had to stretch up on my tiptoes, and since he didn’t move away from his sauce, my whole body brushed against his. He put out a hand to steady me and concentrated on his cooking. “The silverware is in there.” He nodded to the drawer that was partly blocked by his hips. To reach it, I had to squeeze my arm between his body and the kitchenette. Muscles and shirt grazed against my arm as I did so, and the breeze from the window stirred the hairs on the back of my neck. He smiled a little, but he focused on the sauce. Was he shy about the fact that he was deliberately seducing me?

“You’re doing this on purpose,” I muttered.

“What?” He raised his eyebrows innocently. Then he looked out the window, and I swear he blushed a little. But he didn’t button his shirt.

“Nothing.”

After dinner, which proved to be delicious, he stood at the window railing, smoking a cigarette that he kept extended out of the apartment with one hand. The white shirt parted and fluttered against his flat stomach in the breeze from the noisy street outside. He made no move on me whatsoever the whole evening.

That was fiendish behavior. And he calculated all that. Every single part of it, except for the killer touch of shyness. That man played dirty. If I had even a modicum of emotional courage, I’d never have made it out of there.

I don’t have any emotional courage, of course.

He took me back to my apartment. “Coward,” he whispered after he finished kissing me there, before turning around and taking the Métro all the way back to his place again.

Okay, I breathed, kind of like I was practicing Lamaze. I could do this. I should do this—carpe noctem. Maybe the next time. I dressed particularly nicely as I’d been doing in extreme self-consciousness ever since I met him. “Let’s go have dinner with my friends again,” he said. “I want you to get to know them better.”

Oh, boy. His friends seemed nice, and very funny, but having dinner with them a second time was still nerve-wracking. They’d been best friends most of their lives. What was he going to do for an encore, make me have dinner with his family? Surely not. I mean, the weekend before, he’d had to go to his uncle’s PACS celebration, which was a “pacte civil de solidarité,” a wedding for same-sex couples, and he’d mentioned having me come along. But a brother of mine and his wife had happened to pass through Paris on a flying twenty-four-hour visit the same weekend, so I’d been able to duck both the PACS and having my family meet or find out about Sébastien. It was best to keep these two worlds safely separate.