I smooth my fingers over my skirt, pick out the wrinkles in the material, before I speak again. “Frederic, tell me a time when I have expressed anything but the desire to be a competent host. Tell me a memory of my lust, or a shy smile that could misconstrued as want. Tell me if I have ever exhibited anything but the ambition to see you gone.”

Slowly, delicately, like a man extricating himself from the sweetest of fantasies, he turns to study my face, his gaze split between here and whatever topography his mind now travels. His smile is radiant and a little wry, one corner of his lips raised as though in farewell. “I can’t. But you haven’t said no, either.”

“I haven’t said yes.”

“All maybes become a yes,” he counters, unctuous as only he can be. “All things are made mutable in—”

His voice stutters, skips. Frederic’s eyes swell and I stretch over the table to close my hands over his own. His skin is dry, salt-dry, bone-dry, stone-dry, dry enough to flake apart, to fall into foam and rot. “Leave.”

“No.”

three

I find him on the rooftop of my apartment complex, disrupting the satellite reception, his longings intertwining with news broadcasting from the ‘60s. Over the last few nights, my face has been replicated on a hundred television screens, contorted by Frederic’s interpretations of rapture. In these visions, he imagines my breasts more colossal than they are, my waist more tapered, my hair longer and straighter, spume-white. In his fantasies, my eyes are rich enough to ransom gods.

“I told you to leave,” I tell him.

The moon fills the sky with blood. Frederic sits in a knot of razorblade limbs, cross-legged, his shoulders like knives straining against skin. He holds a kitten cupped in his hands, a wisp of grey fluff, too small to reason.

“I tried.” He whispers, voice coarse from disuse, feathered with phlegm. “I went to the bus station where we first met but I couldn’t remember what home was. I thought it was north, but the line doesn’t go north. Only to Yian and I am not yet worthy enough to walk even its first bridge. So, I thought about it and I came back, and Mara gave me tea and it tasted sweetly of salt. Like diabetic blood, I guess. Or taffy. Perhaps, taffy.”

Frederic frowns. “I would miss you too much to leave.”

“I would not miss you if you left.”

He only smiles.

I settle down some distance from him and stretch out my arms. The kitten jolts from his embrace into mine, coiling, curling into the crook of my elbow, its body a nest of deep vibrations. I caress her ears and she mewls in reply, eyes circles of pale light. “Can I tell you a story?”

“Yes. Eternity is infinite.”