Sebastian was determined that I should make acquaintance with his boat before we sailed it the next morning. I had been expecting a yacht, because of his mother’s thinness and elegance, I suppose, and was shocked to find that he had been waxing lyrical over a tiny Sunfish. Charmed, I took his hand in mine.

“What is all that on your arms?” he asked, as we watched the moon to see if it was planning anything.

“Oh, those?” I answered coolly, as if I hadn’t noticed them before. “I had an Iggy Pop moment.”

“Just a moment?”

“Yes. Only a moment.”

We slept in his childhood bed. He stripped to his boxers and loaned me a T-shirt. When he curled me under the crook of a huge arm, I began to cry.

“I love you,” I whispered. I didn’t, but I wanted to explain, to myself and to him, the parade of tears streaming down my cheeks, like floats in a carnival.

He pretended he hadn’t heard me, as he wiped the tears away.

“Sorry this bed is so hard. Same bed I’ve had since I was fourteen.”

I couldn’t answer, and, nervous, he kept talking.

“I love sailing. My father taught me how to do it before he passed away. A white man’s sport. I love skateboarding and snowboarding too. And surfing. I think skateboarding is hardest. With sailing, if you fall, it’s on water. With snowboarding, if you fall, you fall on snow. But with skateboarding, when you fall, you’re falling on concrete. I broke my ankle last summer on the Brooklyn Bridge. But that’s still my favorite place to skateboard. I love it.”

He kept saying the word love until, through my tears, I choked out a question. “Sebastian, who was the love of your life?”

He held me tighter as he recalled the love of his life, as though he were revealing an affair to a girlfriend he had been with for six years, restraining me against a crazed reaction. “Erica. She was a girl on the track team, back at college. We were together for five years, but then we kind of drifted apart. She’s engaged now, to a banker. Why, who was the love of your life?”

“Liev,” I sighed miserably.

“Who was he?” he demanded in the fake-soft tones of a man who was already jealous.

“Oh, he was just this vampire we had staying with us when I was twelve.”

“Oh.” Sebastian seemed satisfied with my response.

And then we went to sleep.

The next morning, he fixed eggs Florentine and coffee and picked me more appropriate footwear from his little sister’s closet. Then we went down to the docks and he strapped a life jacket around my chest before placing me at the back of the boat.

“Weave!” “Duck!” “Tack!” “Mack!” I couldn’t make out his instructions, as they spilled, rapid fire, from his plush lips.