By the time we made it inside my apartment I was already halfway undressed. As he groped me against the wall before leading me to the bedroom, I felt an eerie familiarity, as though he were channeling Matías. For a moment I genuinely believed he was there in the room with us. I fought to the push the flashes of him from my mind.

I’ve seen the Enthusiast almost every evening since. Tonight he’s over at my apartment. We watched a documentary about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement before making our way to my bedroom. “I better get going,” he says afterward. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow.”

“No problem,” I tell him. Perfect, in fact.

At eleven the next morning, I’m still in bed when my phone rings. It’s an international number—Matías. I haven’t thought about him in almost three days.

“Mi amor!” he says when I answer, a frantic urgency attached to his voice. “I need to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

“Do you still love me?”

I look at my nightstand and notice that the Enthusiast forgot to throw out his used condoms before leaving. “Yes, I do love you,” I respond. “Why are you asking?”

“Because I just booked my plane ticket,” he tells me, the urgency replaced by smug satisfaction. “I’m coming to see you, baby.”

•

I know that I need to move on, I need to forget him. But in between nights with the Enthusiast, Matías becomes a character in every novel I read and reread. He is Swann. He is Heathcliff, Valmont, Rodolphe. He is Henry Miller, the one I know through Anaïs Nin’s diaries. We Skype almost every day, him regularly appearing in boxer briefs if it’s the end of the evening, or in a leather jacket and tight-fitting Diesel jeans if he is on his way out. We describe our airport reunion to each other dozens of times—twenty-first-century TSA security never factors in to our fantasies. All the while, I’m hoping that I’ll wake up the next day and no longer want him.

“You’re not sleeping with anyone there, are you?” he asks periodically. “Because I just think it will be so much better when we finally do see each other, if we both hold out. I know I’m planning to.”

Renata and Thomas each remind me that Matías wasn’t able to “hold out” from sleeping with someone else while he was sleeping with me, when we lived in the same zip code, let alone thousands of miles apart. “He loves himself too much to go without sex,” Thomas tells me over FaceTime, Renata visible in the background, shaking her head while studying for her board exams. “He needs the constant validation that comes with boning a variety of random women.”