Gradually, Aubrey’s conversation with Nico dried up. They turned to Marina. “So, like, what do you do now,” they asked, “if you used to be a poet?”

“I think I’m still a poet,” Marina said, not sitting up. “I haven’t forgotten how to do it.”

“That’s real,” Aubrey said.

“Is the Nicki thing like your drag queen persona?” Marina asked, turning her head to Nico.

“Yeah, from back when I lived in Chicago,” he said. “It’s sort of becoming its own thing, though.”

“Oh,” Marina said.

When the silence seemed to stretch out, she asked Aubrey if she could see their photographs. Aubrey obligingly pulled up their artist website on their phone.

The pictures were arranged in a grid that moved when Marina swiped at the screen with her index finger. Black-and-white pictures of parts of naked bodies, zoomed in to closer-than-intimate distances, to an abstracting closeness that rendered body parts as collections of shapes. A hand grabbed a thigh covered in flower tattoos, a hand held a knife flat to a torso, another hand held a mouth open, the rest of the head out of view. In most of them, she couldn’t discern the number or gender of their subjects, for all the overlapping limbs and indistinct layers of fabric covering and revealing by turns.

“Wow, these are — intense,” Marina said, flicking through the grid faster.

“That’s the word everyone uses,” Aubrey said with evident satisfaction.

“It’s hard to describe their stuff, right?” Nico said. “Like, I dunno, so much art about bodies is so boring, or self-congratulating, like the artist expects a gold star for showing people doing uncomfortable things or even just for displaying the body. Aub is more interesting than that.”

“Definitely,” Marina said.

When she looked up from the phone at Nico, she was surprised again by his beauty and looked back down, unseeing, at Aubrey’s art, to disguise her eyes.

“Definitely,” Marina said again. She gestured with her hands and continued: “The, um, scenarios that these people are in seem kind of dangerous, or aggressive, almost? But there’s this sense of affection there, even if you don’t get to see the whole person. Or, like, the fact that you don’t get to see the whole person, but you get to see their sense of affection, even if that affection is dangerous — you know?”

Aubrey smiled. “Yeah, exactly,” they said.

“Can you guess which ones are me?” Nico said.

Marina looked back at the phone. She picked one at random and looked between him and the phone. It was a photograph of someone’s hairy, skinny torso with four female-looking hands palming it. He looked back at her with an expectant face, and she locked eyes with him for a moment.

“No,” she said, and Aubrey laughed.