The next time, we met in public, at a rooftop restaurant. The night was thick with promises of summer and the roses budding on the trellises. She ordered a bottle of Sancerre and I ordered zucchini frites. She wore a shapeless white tunic and I wore a striped shirt and nice black jeans without worrying that our styles did not complement each other. We spoke of nothing serious. The night was loose and open and long. Stepping out on the sidewalk with her, I assumed that we would go back to her real apartment.

“I want us to start over. Let’s pretend we haven’t been fucking for a year.”

She pulled me in, and we made out with a new ferocity. When she stopped, I was ready to fuck her in the street, in the car, in any type of apartment, real or fake.

“I want you to woo me,” she said, and I was floating off to another plane, a softer one.

R texted me every night—Sweet dreams or Xoxo or Hope youre thinking about me—and arranged elaborate dates, after which we would kiss and head to our separate bedrooms. As my initial excitement subsided, I started to feel like she had initiated a new game, one that I had not agreed to, one with no safe word.

When I told Sophie about this “new phase,” she grimaced.

“I’m just wondering what will be left of the relationship if you take out the sex,” she said.

Sometimes, I hated her directness.

On an early Friday evening, R texted me to meet her for oysters in Soho. After the server verified that she was really expecting a guest, I found her sitting at a small table in the back of a brasserie, no makeup, old white tank top, white jeans, dykey boots. Even in her college-sophomore-lesbian outfit, she still exuded the type of charm that had the maître d’ running over, pouring us little glasses of calvados from Bretagne.

When I opened my mouth to speak, she put up her hand.

“I can’t. Not right now. I just want to sit.”

Everyone around me seemed immersed in their despair, which was odd for a low-key fancy restaurant.

Was I the only one slowly finding my way out of it?

Pen, in a crisp white button-down and teal SpaceShoes that were not even available to preorder.

R ordered oysters and Aperol spritzers and frites for us both. She was already drunk.

I wouldn’t have minded eating in silence with her if she hadn’t been manipulating me for the past few weeks. A couple next to us argued about splitting the housework fifty-fifty. (“Well, it’s more like Esmerelda does eighty percent and we’re arguing over who takes care of the remaining twenty percent,” the guy chimed in.)

I thought that roommates represented a uniquely horrible arrangement whereby you were subject to the domestic whims of strangers, but choosing to live with a partner who reasoned that he should be responsible for only 5 percent of housework to your 15 percent because of the relative ardor of his real job was definitely worse.