“We went back to her place.”

“Okay.” I stood up. “Okay then.” I sat down. I put my hands to my cheeks and then clasped them in my lap. “All right. All right then.”

He watched me, braced for whatever was coming. I crossed my arms and looked away. So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it.

“I think this is good,” I rasped.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.

I waited for her to say more, but she was done talking, so I took over. Yammering away, I went back and forth in my mind about whether there was a charge between us—I wasn’t overcome by lust, but then, she didn’t seem to be, either. She was sober so I decided not to vape. If I wasn’t aroused by the time things got physical I could astral-project myself into a more taboo situation, clamp the invisible screen over my face. Of course some people didn’t have sex on first dates, she might be like that. Or maybe I was mistaken, maybe this wasn’t a date, given that it had been three hours now and neither of us had laid a hand on the other. By one a.m. and with great disappointment I started to give little hints that we should wrap it up. I yawned and she said, God, I’m not usually this nervous; come over here.

He was supposed to be working at a Sacramento Hertz, lost in memory and yearning. Or pacing around their shitty little house with Claire telling him to take out the trash and him saying What? And her saying Take out the fucking trash. Blazing around the stage, doing the thing he was put on this earth to do while encircled and adored; it didn’t get better than this. This was the one shared dream that wasn’t only a dream.

I prayed for their dance to go wrong somehow. Not an injury, God no, but some kind of creative faux pas that would break his spell over everyone and return him to me. Maybe Davey and Dev wouldn’t know how to end it, they would wear out their welcome—or plagiarism. Did they have that in dance? It only took one bad review to ruin a career, especially if plagiarism was invoked.

I was aware that I was being profoundly ungenerous—miserly, small-minded—but that only made me more wretched.