“I push everyone away,” he told me. “I don’t wanna push you guys away too.”

“You haven’t pushed us away,” I assured him. “We’re right here.” I figured this statement was factual yet noncommittal enough that Trevor could take what he needed from it and I could still feel that I was keeping him at arm’s length. The conversation required every ounce of my concentration — it felt almost like a physical ordeal, like rock climbing, hoisting yourself inexorably upwards, every thought devoted to where you’ll next place your hands and feet.

“Promise me,” said Trevor.

“I promise,” I said. “But you need to go home now, Trevor.”

“I know,” he said. “I just need to know that I’m forgiven.”

“You’re forgiven,” I told him.

“I’m so sorry.” He mopped his face again with Kleenex and sat with his elbows on his knees, drawing cleansing and, I hoped, sobering gulps of air.

Then Trevor asked, “Can I just get a hug?”

“Yes,” I said. “But then you have to go.”

Trevor stood up and I stood up. He came at me before I was ready and took me in his arms.

It was as if he had been stuffed into an oven and basted in Captain Morgan — the liquor fumed from his pores. He held me tight, squashing my chest against his, heedless of my boobs — most men, when I was hugged in polite circumstances, discreetly arched their backs to avoid that kind of squashing contact, as I discreetly arched mine for the same reason. But I was incapable of arching, or any kind of movement for that matter, as Trevor leaned into me. I stood there, half holding him up, breathing his alcoholic perspiration and his inadequately applied deodorant — some corporate chemist’s idea of what the ocean should smell like. All I could do was swallow my claustrophobia and wait to be released.

“You are so dear to me,” he breathed into my neck. “You and the Bean. So so dear. Do you know that?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer. But then his arms tightened and he dug his chin a little into the crook between my neck and shoulder.

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. We both do.”

His arms loosened. He took a step away at last and immediately lost his balance and fell over onto the floor, knocking against an end-table as he did and causing the framed photograph of my father riding a horse in Bermuda to forward roll onto the carpet.

“Whoops!” said Trevor, and then he put his finger to his lips, admonishing “Shhh!” at the surrounding furniture. It struck me then that Trevor was a mess. A drunken mess. He would not remember any of this tomorrow. The realization hollowed out a pit in my stomach — a visceral memory of how my ex used to blindside me with the degree of his drunkenness in exactly this same way. He’d appear in the bedroom doorway sometime after midnight, call my name until I woke up, pontificate for a few lively minutes on something called “schizoanalysis” and, when I finally gathered the wherewithal to yell at him for waking me, would become incensed and tell me this was my problem exactly, I simply did not care, I was indifferent to the things that truly mattered — no, not indifferent, in terror. I was a coward and all I wanted was to bury my head in the sand and avoid avoid avoid. To wake up in the morning, every morning, and simply be permitted to fake it. Fake peace. Fake quiet. Fake well-being. Fake compassion. Fake devotion. Fake emotion. Fake humanity. And once I was good and awake, roiling with adrenalin because that’s what happens when you are under attack in the middle of the night, when your fight-or-flight reaction is initiated — that’s when, reliably, he would sink to his knees at the foot of the bed, slouch against it with his upper body, and fall asleep.