I spotted a few other friends and drifted away, but kept tabs on him out of the corner of my eye, returning to his orbit, sometimes alone, sometimes with other people, throughout the night. I knew what it was like to feel ill at ease in a new place, so I wanted to make sure he didn’t have to dance alone for too long. He seemed a little delighted, a little awestruck, each time I appeared, and I found his why-me expression endearing.

At the end of the night, I invited him to join me in my after-clubbing ritual with the Harvard crew, slices at Hi-Fi Pizza around the corner before walking or cabbing home, depending on the weather and the state of our bank accounts. Rafe and I sat against the wall in front of a long table with Kit and a few friends. In the bright light, I could see the early wrinkles around his eyes, the flecks of gray at his temple, and guessed he was around a decade older, which I didn’t mind, but I could sense discomfort in the stiff way he held himself even though it was obvious he liked me. I wanted to give him a clear but discreet sign that I really did like him back, so I extended my hand on the bench and touched my pinky finger against his. He didn’t move his hand, and that was how we stayed for the rest of the meal, until we headed off in opposite directions, with plans to hang out in the near future.

—

Between end-of-semester craziness and holiday travel, Rafe and I didn’t manage to get together until shortly after winter break. On a Friday in January, at a Thai restaurant near MIT, which tried to compensate for its industrial setting with saturated yellow walls and paintings of the Buddha, he informed me that even though I was pronouncing his name correctly, it was actually spelled Ralph.

“Of course, because you’re English,” I said. “Like Ralph Denham from Woolf’s Night and Day.”

He grinned. “I usually say Ralph Fiennes.”

I told him about D. A. Miller teaching his students how to pronounce E. M. Forster’s Maurice so we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves. But since then, I’d discovered a bunch of other British words whose pronunciations were odd, like Bee-chum for Beauchamp, or wes-cot for waistcoat, which I didn’t know was a vest until I saw the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

“And a vest for us is what you call a T-shirt,” he said. “Also my old Oxford college sounds like maudlin but is actually spelled like Magdalen. It’s all to keep the riffraff out, you see; the more bizarre the pronunciation, the easier it is to tell if someone doesn’t belong.”

“You mean riffraff like me.”

“Oh no, I-I don’t mean—” Ralph stammered. “I detest Oxford snobbishness myself.”

“I’m just teasing you.”