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She was a bad but enthusiastic cook, and I’d always found her efforts charming, but right then all I wanted was her gone. I needed to find Nova, see what she was doing, how she was feeling, what she was thinking.

“Can I help?” I asked Amy instead.

“Just have a seat. I haven’t gotten to feed you in a while.”

I didn’t care for her tone or her wording but couldn’t exactly take exception to it. We’d been broken up for a long time, it was firmly over between us romantically, but sometimes when she visited and we were both unattached, we hooked up. It was nothing. Just casual sexual relief with someone who knew the right buttons to push.

Or it hadn’t been, but I was feeling almost gross about it suddenly, like we had done something wrong that I should regret, something that could be held against me, could possibly be taken in such a way that it would hurt Nova if she found out.

Amy was humming under her breath and smiling at me in a familiar way. “Will your teenager sleep in, do you think? I was hoping for a morning romp. I didn’t mean to pass out on the sofa last night. It’s been ages since I’ve gotten laid.” She grinned. “I miss your dick.”

I opened my mouth to speak when Nova walked in. “Oops,” she said flatly. “Did I interrupt?” She turned around and left. The look on her face would haunt me.

Amy looked mortified. “Oh, God. She heard me. How embarrassing! You know I was just messing around. Mostly.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Should I go talk to her?” Amy asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll do it.”

“Oh, God. How awful for you.”

She had no idea.

I excused myself and went after Nova.

It was as bad as I was expecting. She was crying and packing up her stuff. I shut the door softly behind me and approached her.

She shook her head, warding me off with her hands as she backed into the closet. I cornered her there, holding her when she tried to move past me.

“I’ll scream,” she said into my ear. “Let me leave or I’ll scream.”

“Calm down,” I began. I should have known better, but it just sort of slipped out. I was wise enough to know that you couldn’t tell a woman to calm down as you broke her heart.

It was, obviously, the wrong thing to say. She started thrashing against me, and I dragged her to the floor and pinned her down with my whole body until she couldn’t move.

“I don’t care if you scream,” I told her nastily. “I don’t care what you do or say or what Amy sees, I’m not letting you leave like this.” I took a deep breath. “Now let me explain.”

She started fighting me again. It got her nowhere except pinned harder to the ground. “I don’t care,” she sobbed. “I don’t care what you say, I want to leave.”

I kissed her face tenderly, wanting to cry myself. Seeing her hurt like this tore me up.

“Please, baby girl,” I told her gently, licking her tears. “Please let me explain.”

She was still sobbing, quietly now, but she said, “Fine.”

“That wasn’t what you think. We weren’t planning to hook up, okay? I was about to tell her no when you walked in. I swear it.”

She was silent, her eyes closed. Eventually she asked. “She was talking like you hook up all the time, like it was assumed you’d have sex. I thought you were broken up.”

“We are. Very broken up.”

“But you still have sex?”

“Not for a long time.”

“How long?”