“Do I seem the same?” I ask, busying myself with a sip of wine.

He nods. “Mostly. Bit more relaxed, actually. You haven’t broken up with me this week, so that’s different. Though I guess, we’re not together.”

He doesn’t say it in a mean way.

“Why do you put up with it? With … me?”

He takes a nip of the wine and then says, “The sex. It’s really good.”

This shocks me and my eyebrows shoot up my forehead as I say, “Cillian!”

“I’m only coddin’ you. Not about the sex. That really is very good.” His gaze is steady on me. “Very good.”

I smile, my heartbeat quickening. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, matter-of-fact.

I’ve inched a little closer. He leans on one arm, clasping the edge of the counter.

“But that’s not why I put up with it,” he says. “I do that because I love you, Meg.”

The words make me weak. In my real life, when a man tells me he loves me—off-screen—I’m sent into a strange tizzy. It feels as though a truth serum pulses through me and I physically can’t bring myself to lie and tell him I love him too. Even when it’s a real relationship, and I should love the guy by then.

This is the exact opposite experience. I shouldn’t love him. I don’t even know him. And yet I feel more compelled to say the words and mean them than I ever have in my life.

“I think I love you too,” I say, using the apologetic I think not to white lie, for once, but to soften the intensity of what I’m really feeling.

He nods. “It would be nice if you could talk to the other version of yourself. The one I know. Maybe put in a good word.”

A smirk plays at his lips.

“I could kill her,” I say, laughing. “She’s screwed up a really good life.”

“Nah. Figuring it out. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I always try to hold you too close. The old saying about the bird.”

“Or Lenny and the puppy.”

His eyebrows go up and he says, “Oy, I’m not that bad.”

I laugh, and then there’s a long, heavy silence between us, filled by the Sarah Vaughan record I put on right before he arrived.

I change the subject. “So is the sex really that good?”

He stares at me, looking amused, and bites his bottom lip. “No one has better sex than us.”

“No?”

“Mm. No.”

“I bet it’s only fine,” I say, flirting and trying now to cover up how strangely, how intensely I want to find out. “Ya know, I mean most sex is fine.”

He hesitates, then pushes off the counter and comes toward me.