Afterward, I pulled on jeans and slipped my phone into the back pocket.

Downstairs in the living room, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a magazine, her long legs curled under her. Her flushed cheek was still etched with the crosshatched pattern of her blanket.

“Morning,” I said, and she smiled sleepily and stuck one leg across the couch, rubbed the cushion with her foot. Her feet were long and delicate, like greyhounds. I could feel the email boring into my skin through the denim, a spot of heat. I slid my phone out of my pocket and put it on the little table next to the couch and sat beside her.

Jojo looked like a catalog model, even in her thin gray sweatpants, fringed at the bottom where she’d cut off the elastic. Women instinctively touched their boyfriends when she passed. She had been three years ahead of me in college; her previous roommate had left to move in with her boyfriend, and I’d found the apartment over the summer through the alumni email list. My toes were close to Jojo’s thigh and I wanted to wedge them underneath. She tossed her magazine on the side table and stretched her arms up with a little squeal, her shirt inching up her stomach, the tiny blond hairs there glistening like fine tinsel. The waistband of her sweatpants stretched between her hipbones. She asked me what had happened with Sam.

Her brother. An image of his wide-open eyes last night, locked on mine as we fucked, surged into mental view. I winced and then, conscious of Jojo’s gaze, coughed into my elbow.

“He went home late,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, extending the vowel and squinting at me. My stomach clenched.

“Nothing happened,” I said, as casually as I could. I picked at a scab on my arm, then bent toward it, investigating it, absurdly. The Indian restaurant, his knee touching mine, the party, the kiss in the stairwell, the walk home, the moment outside our door. Jojo had left the party early, was already asleep. I had snuck him in—“Shh,” I’d said, over and over, whether to him or to myself, I didn’t know. “Why?” he’d said, too loudly, teasing me, but I’d only shaken my head, made my eyes wide to make him shut up, grabbed his hand and pulled him up toward my room, the why being, of course, that Jojo couldn’t know. She couldn’t really know—though the fantasy that she would, despite my having clamped Sam’s hand over my mouth while he fucked me, had made me feel high.

Finally I looked up at Jojo, whose gaze ping-ponged between my two eyeballs, as if to figure out what I was hiding. In the few months we’d been living together, I’d tried never to bring my private life to the apartment, to always maintain the veneer. I didn’t know how much she knew or suspected, and was always alert for signs she’d discovered the essential me under whatever illusion she was accustomed to seeing. At times, I was overcome by the conviction that although she was several years ahead of me in college, she must know my reputation—I imagined her whispering with her friends about me, telling them with wide, mischievous eyes what it was like to live with me. Yet usually I could talk myself out of these reveries, remind myself how little she’d seen, how little she probably knew.