Camila was very still in the way she got when something had caught her full attention, and she was deciding how to handle the information.
“Which cousin?” she asked.
And there it was. The question I’d been circling for three days without landing on—not because I didn’t know the answer, but because saying the name out loud felt like doing something I hadn’t yet decided to do. Like the name had weight, and I wasn’t ready to put it down somewhere and see what it meant.
“I didn’t say,” I said.
Camila looked at me. “Sofia.”
“I know his name. I’m choosing not to say it yet.”
A beat. “Why?”
I looked at the table. Looked back at her. Tried to find the words for something that was equal parts embarrassing and inexplicable, and landed on the least dignified version of the truth because it was Camila and she would find the less dignified version anyway.
“Because I don’t want to know if he has a girlfriend,” I said. “Or a wife. Or any prior claim on his general existence that would make the last three days of thinking about him feel even more pointless than they already do.” I paused. “Which I’m aware is completely irrational. I’m aware of this.”
Camila’s expression did something complicated and then settled into something that was unmistakably the precursor to teasing.
“Sofia Alvarez,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“Three days.”
“Camila—”
“This is it,” she said, with the delighted certainty of someone delivering a verdict they had been building toward. “This is your chance. Lose the virginity. Do it. It has been twenty-two years—”
“It’s been twenty-two years because I haven’t found a person worth losing it to, and that remains true regardless of—”
“Yegor’s cousin.”
“I didn’t say it was him.”
“You didn’t say it wasn’t.”
I pressed my lips together. Looked away. The club moved around us in its loud, indifferent current—men at the bar, a card game at the far table, someone laughing at something that didn’t require explanation in this world.
“I don’t even know him,” I said.
“You didn’t know him four days ago either, and apparently, he left enough of an impression to still be with you now.”
That landed somewhere it shouldn’t have, and Camila saw it land, because Camila saw everything, and her expression shifted from teasing into something softer and considerably more dangerous—the look she wore when she was being honest with me rather than entertaining herself at my expense.
“He sounds interesting,” she said quietly.
“He sounds like a problem,” I corrected.
She smiled. “Those are usually the same thing.”
We drank.
Not carefully, not moderately—the specific way you drink when you are in the only space where the rules that govern the rest of your life temporarily suspend themselves, when the person across from you is the one person who has known every version of you and chosen to stay for all of them. We talked about Camila’s son, about my coursework that my father kept finding reasons to interrupt, about the fundraiser and Maverick Wiese and the particular way my father had engineered the evening as though my feelings were a variable he could simply remove from the equation.
We talked about our mother, which we did sometimes—not with grief, exactly, not anymore, but with the specific tenderness of people carrying something precious that they occasionally needed to take out and hold together before putting back.
By my third drink, the room had acquired a gentle, pleasant instability.