Is this what it is to fall in love in the modern era? To find yourself having sex without a condom, to give in to what that means, to look the other person in the eye at the exact moment you are doing it, to let go, without thinking about it in advance? To let them come inside your body—to say, Do it, I want to feel it—and for them to look at you with shock and delight, just before both of you push into each other until there is no looking back?

That night, we cooked dinner naked and fucked on the floor of his screen porch. In the morning he brought me coffee. We wove our bodies together. I watched the dust motes swirling over his skin in the sunlight coming through the window, like every lover in the history of time. He drove me to the studio. He picked me up at sunset when the day was done but pulled over two minutes later and fucked me in the back of the station wagon halfway through the driveway because we couldn’t wait another second. That night we played gin rummy naked and I told him about my adolescence. The next morning we kissed for an hour, my chin turning raw and red by the time I forced myself to go.

After work on the fifth day, we took a long shower and touched each other with so much enthusiastic tenderness you would have thought we were teenagers doing it for the first time. Later we cooked dinner and split a bottle of wine, and slept wrapped around each other. We spent an entire week this way, not apart for more than a few minutes once the workday ended. I went to the studio every day with skin like tissue paper, overflowed into buckets of paint, and then at night I went to his house and filled back up again.

I became more infatuated with him after every single reckless encounter, and I was open to him in every way that it seems possible to be open to someone. But he was not open to me.

On the eighth evening in a row that I slept at Tyler’s house, he told me about his father’s illness while we were lying in bed, the sounds of the lake and the wind in the trees drifting through his open windows. It was an awful story and he told it with clean concision, the sort that comes from having thought, if not told, the same story over and over in your mind for twenty-five years. I wondered if he would follow it with more stories about death—about Carey—but it was as though she’d never existed at all.