Finn feels her rum and Coke rising up in her esophagus. She swallows it down and excuses herself to go up to the bar – slipping away from the table unnoticed as the marketing women all crowd around Carrie’s phone, their eyes wide with the delicious anticipation of watching a catastrophe unfold – and wedges herself onto a barstool. Breathe, she tells herself. Just breathe. And that’s when he comes over, this walking distraction in a suit. She smiles at him, and he smiles back.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.

“You could,” she says, her hand snaking along the bar towards his arm. “Or we could just go back to my place and drink for free.”

She has no idea where that comes from, but it works – it’s so easy, in fact, that she can’t believe she hasn’t done it before. They take a cab from the bar to her house and he pays as Finn stumbles out into the humid summer night, over-tipping the driver, grinning at him with some kind of misguided sense of camaraderie, all boys will be boys with undertones of please don’t tell, like the cab driver gives a fuck what they’re doing.

He doesn’t ask her name, but when they get to her place he stops to scrutinize her bookshelf while she searches her bathroom for a condom, which suddenly seems so intrusive, as if everything he needs to know about her is right there in front of him, catalogued and arranged in alphabetical order. As if with the right interpretive tools, her books could be parsed to reveal the complete inner workings of her psyche. As if her collection of dogeared Agatha Christie paperbacks says it all: Spinster. Loner. Nerd.

She pulls him away from the bookcase and they tumble from room to room with the lights out, bumping into furniture and hurling themselves into the bedroom like they’re crossing a finish line. When his phone rings, he shuts it off without even checking the caller ID. Shoves it back in his pocket and moves in to kiss Finn’s neck, but not before she catches a glimpse of his background image, a black lab with a Frisbee in his mouth, eyeing the camera warily. At least it’s not a baby, some blond-haired cherub staring at her accusingly from the screen, maybe a mother’s face hovering somewhere above. Thinking about this imaginary woman, this imaginary child, Finn seethes with resentment for how willing he is to throw all of that away for a sexual experience that was going to be, let’s be honest, barely memorable for either of them.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, pulling back suddenly, and Finn realizes she is clenching every muscle in her body. “I’m sorry, do you not…”

“It’s fine,” she says, forcing herself to relax, to make the required noises and facial expressions.