“You’re fun,” the Palestinian social chair of the Arab Student Association wrote to me after an impromptu lunch my second junior year of college, during which we’d traded stories of our verbally abusive foreign mothers. “Luckily their English vocabulary is so limited,” she quipped, “otherwise who knows how much worse it would be.” A few nights later at an ASA barbecue, she asked if she could use my lip balm. I took it out of my pocket and tried to hand it to her. “My fingers are covered in chicken grease,” she said, lifting them limply so I could see. “Can you put it on for me?” She puckered her lips and I traced her mouth with a moistened fingertip. I spent the next few months introducing her to different kinds of alcohol, which she hadn’t been exposed to at her Islamic high school. “You’ve corrupted me,” she said as she swayed through my living room before puking. We once spent a week sharing a single bed in Beirut, where her extended family lived—as ’48ers rather than ’67 Palestinians, their fate was to be exiled to camps in Lebanon rather than live under occupation—and where I had “coincidentally” planned to be that summer. The two of us slept side by side, her dark hair splayed across the pillow, indistinguishable from my own. I only stayed a few days—I’d driven from Jordan, something you could do back then, when Syria was still intact—and tried to keep my flirtations restrained so that her parents wouldn’t suspect my intentions. She responded in kind, matching my restraint while remaining suggestive. During the day we’d wander through town shopping; I’d step into the dressing room with her and her mother as she tried on clothes. I tried to act natural, neither fixating on her body nor looking away entirely so that her mother wouldn’t suspect something was off. At night we’d go to lengthy dinners with her cousins and pass around argileh; I’d watch her take long puffs from the decorated pipe, the water bubbling as she pressed her lips against the plastic mouthpiece. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get her to act on her flirtations. The closest I ever came to kissing her was at a pop-up nightclub in our college town that two Turkish grad students had started, and where I occasionally DJed. “Come get this ice cube from my mouth,” she taunted. I didn’t waste any time, abandoning the booth and capturing her lips with my own, the ice cube spilling onto my tongue. Somehow it was warm. I stepped back reluctantly, and she smiled. “You just kissed me,” she said. “Gross.”