Dinner was lovely. Jen served zucchini-basil soup with julienned ribbons of zucchini piled in the bowls as a final touch, oil-poached halibut with tomatoes and fennel, salad, and crisp rosemary flatbread with pleasingly jagged edges on the side. David was in good form, conversationally, delivering frank opinions about local curators, and, after that, they talked easily about their respective trips to the Prado and their shared love of Goya, especially the Black Paintings.

After dinner David insisted on doing the dishes. Jen dried, and when they were done, they moved to the living room, a cramped, in-between space, but which after dark could sometimes become kind of cozy. Her couch was soft and cat-scratched, and she set pillows on the coffee table for them to rest their feet on. They each had a bowl of vanilla ice cream with blueberries.

The movie was a campy comedy, mostly about incestuous passions in a repressed, Victorian town set in the peaks of a grandly artificial alpine mountain. David had seen it numerous times and gleefully ruined most of the good scenes by directing her attention too strongly, which she found somewhat endearing. It seemed like a funny movie, but Jen had trouble concentrating on its arc or intentions. She was more concerned with the distance between herself and David on the couch. They were sitting ambiguously close. Not so close as to be touching, but close enough to feel each other’s heat and hear each other’s breath. But it was a polite distance that could be interpreted in various ways.

Toward the end of the movie Jen gambled and placed her head on David’s shoulder. It was a sudden move, she realized, but she felt bold, and her heart sank when David failed to respond in any way whatsoever. He just sat there immobile—so immobile, in fact, that she wondered if it was a sign of interest. Maybe he was that nervous, afraid to shift and give her a reason to pull away. Jen was stuck. She contemplated what the next move should be. Was it her job, as the interviewee, to initiate everything?

Painfully, the movie crawled on for another ten minutes, with Jen craning her neck on David’s immobile shoulder and neither of them speaking or moving, but just listening to each other breathe along with the tinny, faraway sound of the tele vision set. Finally, the movie ended, the avalanche was survived and the credits rolled, and Jen lifted up her head. David turned toward her and they looked at each other nervously.

“Would it be really unprofessional if I asked to kiss you right now?” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, trying to flirt. He continued to hesitate. Finally, she just leaned in until their lips touched. Not gay.