They covered the usual start-of-semester topics — the finding of the apartments, the course load, the new research interests — and after this had been exhausted, Jenna went back to talking about Paris, which she clearly had left only in body. For maybe twenty, thirty minutes, Kenny or Lara didn’t interrupt. One story would lead right into the next one. A lot of her stories involved a clique of French boys in her classics module who would take her out on their mopeds and smoke cigarettes with her on bridges and rooftops. She often mentioned Jean-Claude, a former gymnast who studied dialectsof Latin. When Jenna brought up the French girls in her program, it was usually to indicate how stuck-up they were or how they inexplicably didn’t like her, and she only mentioned the other Americans with open derision. They didn’t understand Europe, she said, they brought America with them, they weren’t willing to try living differently.

There was a story that went on for quite a while about Jean-Claude rescuing her from a miscommunicated Uber destination and an overeager acquaintance who worked in publishing. Lara looked over at Kenny and noticed that he was staring down at the carpet. Was it possible he hadn’t heard about all of this, or that he hadn’t put two and two together? They had agreed to be “open” for the year prior, so this sort of thing was to be expected. She knew from Jenna’s emails that he had slept with a few women and that it had bothered her an appropriate amount and no more, but she could tell from Kenny’s face that he hadn’t considered that Jenna would, in less than a year, find this seemingly charming, sensitive, companionable guy who had furnished so many picturesque anecdotes.

Lara kept waiting for the balance of the conversation to be restored. Maybe being straight always means compartmentalizing, she thought; she was only surprised it was to this degree.

Fairly zoned out by that point, Lara didn’t realize she was staring at Kenny until he turned away from the window and caught her eye. Lara quickly looked away. Then she looked back at him. He was looking at her again. Again, Lara met his eyes and then looked at Jenna, who had moved on to a discussion of a particularly stiff-nosed famous classicist whose seminars she had sat in on.

She studied him studying her. He looked intent, curious. The brow knit slightly, his mouth left slightly open for a beat before he closed it again. He looked like he wanted to ask her a question but couldn’t find the words.