I swear I feel Gianluca walk into the room. God, I’m crushing hard. Though maybe I’m mixed up between the appeal of the dancing itself and the man who’s brought it to me. I know Luke would find this man ridiculous. Luke was narrow-minded about masculinity: he felt that his way—athletic, dominant, his whole body and being just screaming “I’m a man!”—was the only way to be male. He dismissed anything that diverged from that: the flabby, the weak, the effeminate, the artsy. At least Blair and I had gotten him to drop his habit of saying “Dude, that’s gay” whenever he found something unimpressive. Gianluca, with his flair, was an entirely other kind of masculine.

He calls out to Cali before he notices me, and she glides across the bar to kiss his cheeks and give him a long hug as though it’s been weeks rather than days since they’ve seen each other. I wonder still if Cali has slept with him, realizing now that she sort of glossed over it. Gianluca has a friend with him: handsome but rough-looking with a thick neck and tattoos up his muscled arms.

“You remember my friend Mauro,” he says in Spanish as they order a round of drinks. Cali goes to find another bottle of Fernet, and I feel the unsettling weight of Gianluca’s eyes landing on me.

“Oh, hello.”

“Hi, Gianluca.”

“G, please. My name is a mouthful.”

The way he says mouthful sounds obscene, and I think, from the way he’s smiling, that he means it that way.

Mauro nods a hello and tells G he’s going to get them a pool table, leaving us alone for a minute while G waits for their drinks. He’s standing so close to me, leaning forward on the bar with one hand, unnervingly in my space.

“Che, I have a nickname for you,” he says, smiling.

“Excuse me?” His eyes are sparkling. I have the stomach-dropping anticipation of impending humiliation.

“I. Have. A. Nickname,” he says, cocking his head at me, “for you.”

“You barely know me.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder, laughing off my defensiveness. “Relax,” he says, squeezing it. I’ve absorbed everything from the past two years into the space between my shoulders. “I have nicknames for all of my favorites. And you need a nickname if you’re going to live here, you know. Your Buenos Aires name.”

Is he flirting? Is this how people flirt?

“Well,” I finally say.

He raises his eyebrows at me.

“What is it? What’s my nickname?” I turn my stool to face him, trying to get my bearings. I feel myself leaning in, close enough that I can smell him.

He seems delighted that I’m taking the bait.

“Tiger,” he says.

“Why Tiger?”

He shrugs. “Fierce feline. Tiger, tiger burning bright. Eye of the tiger.”