“Can I have a drag?” I ask, and he holds the cigarette to my lips. When the movie ends he faces me. He inches forward, slow enough that I can stop him if I want to. But I don’t.

Afterward, after he’s pulled me onto his lap, carried me to bed, and made love to me, sweat drips off his nose and onto my chest. “Is it all right if I stay?” he asks.

I wince. The thought of spending the entire night together nauseates me. Then waking up and seeing each other’s body in slivers of light through Venetian blinds, the smell of stale sex and sleep breath. “No,” I say. “It’s not all right.”

“Why not?”

“Because I like incrementalism.”

He smiles and gets up. “Just promise me you won’t disappear.”

We spend the next few evenings together. One night he makes me dinner, fried steak. He cuts up Gouda and feeds me pieces while he cooks. “Who are your favorite twentieth-century poets?” he asks, and I’m so nervous that I answer Keats. “That’s eighteenth,” he says, smiling, “but yes, he’s all right.” We eat in the living room, and I barely make a dent in my plate, my appetite overshadowed by my libido. We put on a movie and five minutes into it we’re undressing each other on the couch. We try to watch the movie again the next night; this time we make it halfway through before I am straddling him as he clenches my shoulder blades, the flicker of the screen casting our shadows on the wall.

Some nights he wants to talk about our pasts. He tells me about his mother, how she used to sing to him before bed. “It’s amazing,” he says as I run my fingers through his hair, “the pull of a mother. I guess that’s why everyone relates to Proust so much.” He then asks if I’m close to my own mother.

“I am,” I say. “We were closer before, though.” He wants to see a picture of her, and I pull a photo album out from a desk drawer, one that I put together several years ago and carry with me from city to city. There are pictures of her on almost every spread in the album, and I feel pride when he tells me she’s beautiful. “She is, isn’t she,” I say, running my fingers across the cellophaned ridges of the page.