Tara and I continue, with inconsistency, despite some hesitation on her part, following a profession of desire on mine. “No feelings,” I promise her before the second time. It’s her only condition. That and drunkenness. So we drink a lot. Some nights nothing happens and I get in bed alone, drunk and disappointed.

I begin to dread my boyfriend’s visits. One night the three of us go to a bar, and when he gets up from the table to buy us a round, she admits to feeling possessive of me whenever he’s in town. She links her leg with mine under the table. She tells me she’s going to head out soon, and when I ask about her plans for the rest of the evening, she smiles but doesn’t answer. I can’t tell if she’s jealous or trying to make me jealous. After she leaves, he and I sit there with not much to say, or maybe he is saying something, but I am definitely not listening. We leave soon after she does. It’s snowing out, and when we finally get in his car to leave, we search for her on the sidewalk. I twistedly accuse him of having feelings for her. “I just don’t get why you care so much about how she gets home,” I say as we peer through the windshield into powdery whiteness. “She probably went to see that guy across the street.” I begin to burn inside.

“I don’t care how she gets home,” he says. “You’re the one who wanted to look for her.” I lower my head and close my eyes. Am I really doing this again?

More than occasionally, I sit on the floor and press my ear to our shared wall. She is in her kitchen, cooking for someone—I can never identify the other voice. I hear her laugh; hers is a laugh that I would like to bottle and drink. I hate whomever she is with. I panic, I pace. I call Renata, who’s on her way back from meeting with the wedding caterers. Earlier in the day she’d sent me screenshots of different cakes she’d found online, as if any of this mattered to me right then. I didn’t bother to pretend like it did, and I launched right into things. “I can’t tell who she’s with,” I say. “All I hear is muffled sounds.”

“Stop listening,” Renata says. “Just stop.”

•

By a weird and unexpected coincidence, Tara and I are both offered positions to teach at the same satellite campus of an American university in the UAE. At first I’m elated. I imagine us spending weekends together in Dubai, camping in Oman, hopping over to Turkey during school holidays, and of course, her eventually falling in love with me.