‘Are you okay?’ it asked me. So it was not the cat.

‘Chris L,’ I said. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’

He picked up a pair of sunglasses and put them on. ‘How about now?’ he said.

I laughed. ‘No.’

A nature documentary was cycling on the TV. Fabulous fish in violet colours and of violent nerve were darting through the water, picking up hunks of food, and then darting back into the protecting arms of a pink anemone. ‘Look at these fancy fish,’ the narrator was suggesting. ‘These florid, fancy fish are very hungry, very social.’ As if this were the exact message you’d take from the footage and he was simply narrating what any reasonable person would see.

‘What’s up?’ I said, and plonked down in the sofa, which left a vast cushiony emptiness between Chris L and me.

‘Bad things,’ he said.

‘Pad things?’ I said, drunk. ‘What are pad things?’

‘Bad things.’

‘Pad things?’

‘Come on,’ he said, and out whipped his arm – not from underneath a shawl but from a nest of blankets, which gifted him the same effect of casual surprise. A remote control was tossed at me. Because it was Foxtel, it was a substantial remote. But it was only a toss, so it landed softly, coldly.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘That’s okay,’ I said.

‘Not really bad things.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

He was just being teenagerly, and I guessed I also was. We sat there together, radiating malice.

We watched the screen in silence while I thought wonderingly about Dan and Lachlan, and what I could say to make Dan feel better about his life. Only he would view monogamy as a personal failing, which must make it very confusing to get the things you want. I scooched closer to Chris L, just a little closer. After that I stayed where I was.

When Dan shouted, ‘Kids! Dinner’s ready,’ I was shocked to find that half an hour had passed without us saying anything; Lachlan must have been in the kitchen, entertaining Dan.

Had I ever spent this much time on a couch, not talking with somebody? Not with my family, not with Dan. But with this swaddled person.

I think he made me want to explore my sociability.

Appearing at the dinner table, drinking with everyone, Chris L, who had donned a shawl once he’d wormed out of the blanket, kept touching the arms of Lachlan and Dan in ways that I found to be both natural and charming, simple in their expressions of feeling and comfort. We talked about Lachlan’s bank job, Dan’s work at the design firm, why Chris L hadn’t gone to uni – he had been born for retail – and what I would be studying at the end of summer, which were the subjects I’d saved for last, unsequenced but introductory. Chris L’s hands kept darting from the folds of his cream shawl to respond to text messages, and I kept stealing little glances at his phone.