When we walked back to the tram stop we filled B’s stroller with the roses. I carried B soft and sleeping in my arms. E ran alongside and M pushed the stroller and people looked up from their tinkling tables and smiled at us as people do when everything is wonderful, when everyone has found a shade of lipstick they are really pleased with and the moments seem to be already photographed, already cut up into instants and tucked away for later, for looking at and showing. When we got back to the apartment E and B went straight into their beds and M and I unwrapped the roses and piled them into the vase and gave them water.

I had drunk more wine than I realized and of course, I had eaten less than I meant to, and I began to feel it now. The alcohol buzzing and humming me along as if I stood on a boat’s deck. I slipped a little. M put his hand on my back, I leaned into him and kissed his neck, and suddenly I couldn’t tell if these things were choreographed. The way I pressed against him, the way I slipped a shoulder out of my dress. We had done these things so many times before that it was hard to tell. Want versus habit, desire versus something else, routine maybe. My fingers here, and his here.

He kisses me twice here and I kiss him back. One. He puts his arms around me. Two. He leans in to drop his lips to my neck. Three. Now we would move to the bed. M would suggest this. Should we move to the bed? he would say. And we would leave the kitchen and I would slip the other shoulder out of my dress, my dress that I’d been longing to get out of anyway, and it would fall to the floor and we would fall onto the bed and quietly try to find something of each other there. To make of it what we could without waking E, B, the neighbours. Even in this, we had to be careful, composed. There was even now, a certain right way to proceed.

Instead, M stopped, lifting his fingers, his lips, from my skin so suddenly that I shivered, felt cold. I have something for you, a surprise, he said. My eyes must have gotten wide, maybe I looked suddenly greedy because he laughed a little to make it casual. It’s nothing really, he said, just something I picked up for you in Rome, while I was away. And, well, I meant to give it to you when I got back, but, he hesitated, trailed off. Looked at me.

But what, I said, starting to feel, well, a sharpening. A turning or a descent maybe. The conversation shifting. Suddenly I didn’t like M looking at me.

It’s just, he said, hesitating again, drawing the words out, making everything take a long time. What happened tonight, he said, at the restaurant.