He tells me about his wife, which she still is. They’re only separated, I keep forgetting this, that he’s married to a woman I’ve never met. He tells me that part of the reason they broke up was because she wanted to explore her sexuality. “She was very matter-of-fact about it,” he tells me, “as though she was telling me she wanted to go back to school or something!” On the fourth consecutive night together, I let him sleep over. The next morning I turn within his arms to face him. “Hi,” he says as he smiles and stretches. “Shall I make coffee?”

He goes to the kitchen, and as he carries two mugs back to bed he asks me why I never talk about my last relationship.

Until now I’ve managed to sidestep the subject of Anna whenever he brings it up, always turning the conversation back on him. “Because,” I say. “I was pretty terrible.”

“Did you cheat?”

I nod. “With men, and sometimes other women.” I take a sip of coffee. “Worse than that, though, I lied to her.” Matías gives me a confused look, so I continue, “I don’t know that lying and cheating always go together.”

“So have you dated women other than Anna?”

“Is that okay?” I ask, worried that I’ve revealed too much. Surprisingly, it often isn’t, at least not for men. At first it’s a turn-on; they ask many questions, have you ever done this, would you ever try that, would I be allowed to watch sometime, and could we ever do a threesome? Then it becomes a problem, as everyone starts to seem like a threat to him, both men and women. Soon insecurity consumes the relationship and it crumbles around me.

“You know,” he says, “sometimes I wish I were bisexual. But unfortunately I just like women.”

I smile. It’s exactly the right thing to say.

•

He tells me stories. Tells me about Guy de Maupassant’s insatiable sexual appetite, his mentor Flaubert’s fear that his protégé’s lust would deplete his creative energy. Joyce’s urine fetish, Dalí being bedridden for seven years after the death of Gala, the competitive friendship between Picasso and Matisse. He reads me Neruda, Calvino, the prostitute scenes from Tropic of Cancer. Tells me tales of his own sexual conquests: the neighbor’s wife in Paris, a forty-two-year-old German woman in Berlin when he was twenty-one, a Vanessa Paradis look-alike in Rio whose dress fell to the floor with a gentle lift of the straps. I tell him my stories, too, and they excite him, as his excite me. He knows more than I know, has done more than I have, and I like it.

Once, he asks, “Is it weird that I fantasize about you pregnant?”