“You just wanna keep hanging out with mee-eee,” she kept singing. “But you don’t want to admit it ’cause you’re a little bi-it awk-ward.”

“In Illinoidiana, we keep our feelings deep inside and never tell anyone about them,” he said. “It’s how we protect ourselves from Yankee cruelty.”

She gently moved Kyla’s head from her shoulder to the window, and then leaned forward to the cab’s open partition.

“You’re really quite a goofball,” she said.

“Well, sure,” he said.

“I mean, really. Quite. Here’s good!” The car pulled to a stop. “Help me get Kyla upstairs?”

But Kyla managed to remove herself from the car under her own power, and Derek simply followed the two of them uselessly, like a third friend pretending to help move a couch. He’d been to Violet’s once before, when she’d hosted the group, and it was as he’d re-created it in his head—a long, bike-choked hallway giving way to a large, black-and-white-tiled kitchen, then emptying out into a well-appointed sitting room, complete with Cy Twombly and Christopher Wool exhibition posters and a large television. The bedroom, presumably, was behind one of those doors off the hallway. He would not see it tonight. There would come a time when they would be equals, he reminded himself.

Kyla somnambulated to the couch, stretched across it like a cat, and fell immediately unconscious. Violet threw herself into the giant armchair and curled her legs under her dress.

“You’ve been a lovely audience, and I hope we passed the audition,” she said. “We really will have to find a way to see each other without having to pretend to read books.”

“I read almost all of it,” Derek said. He actually felt indignant about it now, and he could feel the poutiness creeping into his voice. “Am I the only one who even tried?”

She stood up from the chair and walked to where he was standing, at the threshold between the kitchen and living room. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes with the solemnity of someone trying not to laugh.

“My friend,” she said. “I think it’s time someone told you: you are not as special as you think you are.”

Was anyone, though? Could she be as special as he thought she was? He followed her gaze to their reflections in the dark television screen.

“Be that as it may!” he said. “I should get going.”

“You could stay,” she said. “I don’t think either of us is in a fit state for, you know, substantive engagement right now, and I’m, as you know all too well, slightly attached, but, I don’t know. It’s a big bed.”

Even after an oil tanker’s worth of vodka, even in the comforting dim light of the apartment he’d dreamed about more than once, he knew better. He would go home, text her in the morning. It was an investment, his decency. It would accrue interest. He didn’t understand anything about money.