It was not hot enough for him to forget his body, but he dozed off about a foot above the water, drifting slowly, almost touching the exuberant part of himself.

“Blithe?” his mom called. He started, waking up. It was chilly.

“Hon, some people are coming over soon. You’re welcome to stay.”

“New or old friends?”

“A mixture.”

“That’s all right. I have a lot of work to do,” he said, and his voice sounded whiny, betraying him.

“Okay, sweetheart. Well, you better get dried off.”

He changed, accepted a Tupperware of pasta. Outside, Blithe longed for Saul to hug him and remind him that he was an adult, a successful one. He dialed the number on the car screen. Saul’s voicemail picked up, but Blithe couldn’t bring himself to narrate loneliness from the inside of his car.

Back in his silent condo, Blithe sprawled out on the couch with his phone. He opened the Gram. The Gram made him feel competitive; it made him want to sculpt his life into its best possible version; it made him want to kill himself. He devoured scenes of palm trees and Sunday glasses of wine and annoying children and Incan ruins. He got to the dude who took daily self-portraits around L.A. with captions about self-love, authenticity, nurturing, forgiveness, evolution.

Aiden lounged in a hanging egg chair, shirtless. His ab muscles looked like six perfect sweet rolls rising out of his stomach, and his tattoo, BE TRUE, was annoying. A row of miniature succulents basked on the table next to him.

The photo was taken hours ago, so there weren’t enough current viewers to trigger hologram-tech and bring Aiden’s bod into Blithe’s living room, with its antique kilim rug, bamboo stalks, and unused kitchen table.

Blithe touched his own hard stomach. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to fuck Aiden or be Aiden, or savor the slippage between the two desires, another flummoxing part of the city-elite gay lifestyle.

He jerked off to Aiden’s torso, and then it was time to put the phone in airplane mode, open a bottle of wine, defrost a crawfish étouffée he’d frozen the other night, and turn on the internet-television for another lusty sequence of images. Blithe wanted Saul to signal that he was thinking of him without any actual interaction. He wanted to coast, partnered yet safe inside his fantasy world. Saul did not reach out. Before getting into bed, Blithe wrapped himself in his horseradish cashmere blanket.

How lucky we are, he said to himself.

~PAUSE IN NARRATIVE REPORT~

I flipped through another workweek, a blur of imaginings, meetings, and a brief attempt at sex with Saul, which ended when Blithe started to imagine his partner sleeping with a mousy white woman. And then I opened the Hex box.