Louis had always gotten rooms with king-size beds. I couldn’t touch him without rolling over entirely. I’d seen my parents’ California king—played in it, even—without realizing how much space it left between their bodies every night. They’d always known what they needed, their bed a compromise and declaration. It took me years to find that distance, to stretch my hand into its darkness, seeking the hard rise of a man’s back, and find only rumpled sheets, already cool.

I’d cried at that, feeling his body out of reach, and then I felt ashamed for crying. He stroked my back and said, “Please don’t.” I’d seen the fear in his eyes, and I thought he was afraid of feeling close to a woman. Looking back, this seemed foolish. He’d been afraid of a woman feeling close to him. I didn’t miss you. But I’m glad to be with you now. He’d never promised me anything. The disappointment had been of my making entirely. There were times I saw his face flushed red with regret.

One night at the inn I got a late call from New York, well past midnight for them. The man said brusquely, “I need to speak with the assistant.”

“You mean the manager?”

“I mean the assistant.”

“Tom?” I said.

It was him. He wanted to know what the job was like. “So you finally got one?” he said, as if I’d been unemployed for years. I told him it was very diverse, a word I wouldn’t have used with anyone else. I said I was designing a new publicity campaign for the owners. I maybe exaggerated a little.

Tom’s teasing made it easier to talk about what was hard—the strange hills of this other city, the way fog settled over everything. We argued about our towns. New York had better street music, he said. I said yes, it did, but it was also dirtier. It was back and forth. New York had better subways but more pigeons. “You haven’t said any good things about your city,” Tom said. “Only bad things about mine.”

“Our pigeons aren’t just fewer,” I said. “They’re better, swear to God. They’re brave. A lot of them are crippled. They’re survivors.”

“When you put it like that,” he said, “it sounds fantastic.”

We spoke night after night. We’d never spoken with such ease. The distance had done it, maybe, the fact of needing someone far away from where we were.

“They must keep you pretty busy at work,” he said. “If you’ve got all this time for me.”

The next night, five minutes into our conversation, I made a point of pretending I had another call. I did the same thing the next night, then the next. “Fine,” he said, laughing. “I get the point. You’re very busy.”

It wasn’t until later that I thought: What about him? Every day after work he was alone at home, calling to ask why I wasn’t busier.