“Ye-es, the one and only. Sometime when Edward isn’t being so boring, he’ll tell you all about how he met him, it’s the stuff of legends! Edward was with his ex—a different ex, an Italian girl from a while back—and they’d been invited out on a superyacht owned by her aunt’s husband, an Italian count. Gianluca had been working as a performer on some luxury European cruise line until he was sacked for sleeping with the guests. He was abandoned in Saint-Tropez and the countess discovered him busking outside a café. She invited him on the yacht to teach dance lessons, told her husband he was gay of course.” She smiles and bites her lip as the man himself approaches, pulling Edward into a handshake that becomes a swift and hearty hug.

“Hey, man!” Edward says. “Glad you made it.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it. Hello, Gemma,” Gianluca says, leaning in to kiss her cheeks. “Edward, you know she’s the star student in my intermediate class.”

“Naturally.”

“This is our new friend Liz,” Gemma says, and he turns to greet me with the customary two-cheek kiss and a smile of bottomless confidence. He’s the star who’s come down to earth. I know because I used to be on the other side of this divide. I used to wave to screaming throngs: feeling their energy, hearing their clattering cowbells, the roar of them as I came over the last rise, seeing the blur of their faces and the fluttering flags through the spray of white as I came to a stop. The fans. The moments you shared with them were both impersonal and addictive. People love watching sports because they feel like they’re a part of something, and they are.

I know that everyone in the room has suddenly developed a burning desire to be able to dance like Gianluca and his partner. And in the drunken revelry, they reckon they could. This is what great athletes do: make it look, if not easy, at least possible. I’m not fooled, of course. I know the years and years of training that must have gone into making that spectacle look so effortless.

“That was beautiful to watch,” I say. We’re speaking English, thank goodness. I’m too drunk to try for much in Spanish. Though everything else about the two men is different, Gianluca has something Luke always had in spades: the warmth of star power radiating off him.

There’s something else too. From a distance, Gianluca was compelling, but up close, he has such raw sexual energy I’m unsettled. He has a low, sonorous voice, and when he leans in to kiss me hello, I can smell him. He’s wearing some sort of cologne, but there’s something more to it; the scent of his sweat mixed with it is so intoxicating it gives me a contact high.