“You shouldn’t,” I said, as I knew I was supposed to. “If it’s what you like.”

She bit her lip, weighing something, before speaking the next part at a rapid pace. “I saw my dad hit my mom once. I was eleven.” She drew me closer with her heels. “My mom never talked to me about it, but she saw me seeing it. I was kind of hiding in the hallway, and they were in the kitchen. She made eye contact with me, over his shoulder.”

“Fuck,” I said, and left it there, because it seemed like she wanted to add more.

“It never happened again in front of me,” she said. “But sometimes that image pops into my mind at the wrong moment. Like, before sex. Or during sex.”

“Did Jimmy—?”

“No. But control comes naturally to him. And I liked that. And that made me feel wrong. Like I was just like my mom. Like I needed someone else to tell me what I was.”

She fell quiet. I meant to reply, but as I began to calculate the appropriate response, I was seized with exhaustion. The moment ballooned; my silence became outsize, and it was too late to say anything. But our limbs were entangled, and I felt her hot and close, and it seemed clear that whether or not I was prepared, I was inextricably, obviously in—for this, and for all else she entailed.

I’D BARELY RETURNED to Berkeley over the course of those first weeks with Anita, and when I had driven up 880, I’d just dipped into my apartment to grab more clothes. Chidi knew I’d started sleeping with a childhood friend in Palo Alto, though nothing more. And while I believed my near-constant presence at Anita’s had been mostly productive and pleasurable for both of us, we had begun to prickle at each other here and there: She woke up very early; I sometimes didn’t clean dishes properly. It was mostly stuff that could be fucked away, until one morning she came back sooner than I’d expected from a cloud-computing conference she’d been contracted to oversee. She found me pacing her apartment in my boxers, listening to a podcast on double speed and picking at my facial hair.

“I thought you were working,” she said thinly. She glanced around the apartment, which had grown untidier since I’d arrived. Some of the mess was due to our shared task—the whiteboard and markers, legal pads, piles of brochures featuring the hundred-plus expo vendors and their respective wares. But some of it was only mine—my library books, my preferred snacks (Cheetos, protein bars), the hoodies I put on and pulled off during the day as my body temperature shifted.