‘Let me start again,’ he rasped. He cleared his throat. ‘Hi,’ he said.

I blinked at him. ‘Are you sick?’ He shook his head. Just skeezy.

I bobbed around the room, scrutinising.

‘Ooh, bookshelves.’

All he had was romance novels, beach reads and Lonely Planets, a couple of years out of date and stuffed with takeaway menus.

‘They’re not mine,’ said Vivian.

Of course they aren’t, I thought, with the lubricating feeling of several keys sliding into several locks at once. I wondered, but knew not to ask, because why be a dickhead, if this apartment happened to be free just whenever he wanted or only whenever he ran out of money in New York. However, this was very bitter, and besides, my own rent was humiliatingly subsidised; Dan paid fifty dollars a week more than me for a bedroom that had barely a square metre on mine, another complicated gift he had bestowed on me, and this before he’d graduated and started working full time.

It was getting up my nostrils, the darkness of the unit, the suggestion of hypocrisy, the whole greasy shebang. There was something in the layout that made the air feel stale, as if the billowing curtains had been a hallucination, the phenomenon localised and spooky. It was weird how both these men had personalised grottos, teenage-boy aesthetics played out on the scale of a single-occupancy apartment. I wondered what I would do if I ever lived alone, but could picture only our house when nobody was home.

‘What’s so interesting on your phone?’ I said.

He held up the screen and waved it.

‘Come over and see,’ he said.

My legs tensed up. I said, ‘Light it up and show me.’

He laughed across the void.

‘Why won’t you come over?’

‘I don’t like questions,’ I deadpanned, even though this conversation had been with someone else. But actually I was very unsettled. It was weird how one person could attribute to me a sense of unquestionability but Vivian was totally unable to see the same thing. It suggested, uncomfortably, that I did not possess it, and that with Vivian I would have to rely on some other quality.

‘Are you seeing Chris L?’ I said.

‘Not really,’ he said.

That cinched it. My question had been clear and plain. Even though I was fun enough to come to this apartment, I was not fun enough to swim around in a quantum stew with a co-swimmer whose stakes were in another hemisphere. I wasn’t friends with Chris L, was I? ‘Not really’ also. But I hated guys who were masc and cool, chill and casual. I had learned this from Dan, this peering-in-the-mouths-of-gift-horses, this following-the-money. A grey area could hide a lot of black and white ideas.

‘See ya,’ I said, and walked back towards the door.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Not so fast.’

I stopped. He did not get up.

‘What’s your number?’ he said.

I rolled my eyes and said.