“This is where I live,” he said, offering her the room’s only chair. “It’s not as nice as where you live.”

“I like it,” Scarlett said. And it was true. Eric could have lived in a box behind a pizza place, and she would have said she liked it and meant it.

“You know what? If I went to school in North Carolina, I could rent an apartment about twelve times this size for about half as much. Anyway, I have something to show you. Just sit there. Don’t look. Close your eyes.”

Scarlett slowly closed her eyes. She heard things being shifted around.

“Okay, open!”

He was holding up a boxed set of Gone With the Wind DVDs.

“This isn’t the normal version,” he said gravely. “Oh, no. This one has everything, all the extra footage. It has like…nine hundred hours of footage. If you’re in my family, this is what you watch on Christmas. My grandma gave this to me when I moved here so I wouldn’t forget the glorious cause.”

He set it on the floor by her feet and then went and sat on his bed, which was the only other piece of furniture on offer. Then he seemed to think better of it and sat in the middle of the floor.

“When I first met you,” he said, “I was so amazed to meet someone named Scarlett. I thought it was a sign or something. I had come to New York, and there was Scarlett, and she lived in a hotel. And she had beautiful blonde curls…”

He put the tips of his fingers together and touched them a few times. For several minutes, he said nothing at all. Then he dragged himself over to the foot of the chair and moved the wayward curl out of her eye.

“That’s always there,” he said. “I always want to move it. Hope that’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” she replied, her voice dry.

“The thing…from the other day…”

He waited, as if thinking that Scarlett would need some time to recall the kissing.

“In the theater?” she asked.

“Yeah. That. Did you…like that?”

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she replied, with a sudden and surprising candor.

“So, if it happened again…you wouldn’t be upset?”

Only a shake of the head this time. Saying “no” was way too complicated. He reached up his hand, offering her help down from the chair. When he kissed her this time, he leaned her back against the floor, guarding her head with his hand. Scarlett lost all sense of where she was, or anything else that could possibly have been happening when the whole thing was broken by the most horrible buzzing noise that she had ever heard.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just my door. Hold on.”

Spencer’s voice entered the room, very loudly.

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t find Scarlett. Is she up there with you?”

“Uh…” Eric looked down at Scarlett. “Yeah. She is. We’re coming down now. Meet you in a second.”