“Okay!” she said, palms splayed. “Okay.”

Sam texted again:

What are you up to tonight?

I slid the phone back into my jacket pocket. There was the napkin.

I saw you. I saw you. I saw you. How far down had he seen?

We transferred to the C at Jay Street and got out at Eighty-Sixth, right alongside Central Park. It was almost dark, thin black branches slicing into lavender. Jojo was hunched over her phone. I gazed toward the buildings facing Central Park: most were doorman buildings, their names stretching in script across their awnings. I had grown up in a building like that on the other side of the park and had an instinctive aversion to them now, those long awnings’ promise of protection.

“Found it,” Jojo huffed at her phone. She looked at me, then lightly slapped my cheek. “Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

A guy wearing spandex under his shorts ran past us, threads of muscle flexing in his pale, skinny calves. His face had a set, almost vacant expression, like he was freezing and miserable, malnourished and tired, but conscripted to run and run. He turned into the park and I watched his thin back, tilted forward toward the heart of the woods.

Jojo blew heat onto her hands, rubbed them together, the tips of her ears bright pink. “Let’s do this,” she said.

The building was a brownstone with a stoop, flanked by a fence wound with ivy. Even in the darkening night, I could tell it was fake, the papery green leaves linked by black wire—but if you looked quickly, it was picturesque, even dreamy. Celeste’s apartment was on the fifth floor. We’d barely knocked when one of her friends opened the door. Benny. He had been in Jojo’s year in college, but we’d taken a music class together; we’d fucked in one of the practice rooms after class one afternoon, underneath a piano. Shit. But this guy slept around, sex was nothing to him, he probably wouldn’t have told anyone or cared, he was nothing like Dominic, it was okay. If it was just him, at least, it would be okay. I still remembered the sheen of that piano, how I’d pictured someone polishing the expensive wood each day, one arm reaching back and forth across the instrument. The party was already madness, a wall of hot air and sound bursting through the doorframe.

“Oh, heyyyyy!” Benny said, stretching his arms wide, ragged, holey T-shirt emblazoned with our college’s name. Jojo gave a grand bow in greeting.

“Sir,” she said. Her hair hung over the back of her head toward his feet, almost grazing his toes. She flipped her head back over, a cascade of burnished gold. He grinned, his mouth practically a boner. I moved between them, placed both hands on his shoulders.

“We come in peace,” I said. I stared at him, telegraphing the memory of our joint reflection in the floor-length mirror, the piano guarding us, me on hands and knees, jolting forward over and over—