“Look, let’s go find you one,” Mark said. “You can watch me pour it. No glowworms.”

My palms were suddenly sweaty. This wasn’t actually a tease. Not anymore. This was a real thing.

I wondered how Cole felt when he slept with a girl on tour.

Was it this? The game. The chase. The kick to the ego, the warmth in my guts, the knowledge that my lips wanted to be kissed and I wanted someone to unzip this dress and see how good I looked in my bra.

I could tell him I’d get the drink myself. I could wait for Lars, although there wasn’t a chance in the world Lars was going to bring something nonalcoholic, because I knew guys, even if I didn’t know him.

I just wanted something to happen. I just wanted to stop walking around this party alone, waiting for . . . I didn’t even know. When I would know I was done. When I would know I had partied, past tense.

I said, “Let’s go find something.”

“Be right back, man,” Mark told Grubb.

Right back. Right back. Because this was nothing.

I followed Mark. To my surprise, he really did lead me to the bar, where he drew a glass of water. He offered it to me, his gaze holding mine. He waited. My heart was jerking. I wanted to accomplish something, anything, even if that something was making out with Mark.

I said, “Where am I going to drink this?”

It was all Mark needed. He said, “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

Something turned out to be a circular-walled concrete observatory at the end of one of the stretching balconies. It turned out to be a little bedroom inside, with a curving custom mirror on one wall and a chic red mattress just inches from the floor, all lit by skylights that let in the floodlights. It turned out to be Mark closing the door behind us and taking my glass from me and setting it on a low end table.

Then he grasped either side of my waist on the vinyl-orleather dress and kissed me.

It was probably vinyl. There was no way it was real leather at the price I’d paid for it. But on the other hand, I’d gotten it at the secondhand shop. So it could have been someone’s expensive castoff.

We were still kissing. He was as fierce and urgent about it as Cole had been. It didn’t matter that Mark didn’t really know me. He still approached my mouth as if it were limited edition, going out of style, get it now before it’s all gone. It was somehow freeing and depressing to know that love didn’t seem to have anything to do with passion.

He gripped my hips, hard, and it didn’t feel disagreeable. So this was what it was like to be an object. This was what it was like to objectify. If he had no name, how did it change things?

If he had no face? If he was only his hands or only his pelvis pressed up against mine — He pulled back, just for a second.

“Don’t say anything,” I said.

He laughed under his breath.

“No, seriously. Shut up.”

He shut up.

There was nothing unpleasant, physically, about making out with this person. In fact, the opposite, if I was reductive. My mouth parted beneath his. My belly pressed into his abs. His fingers teased down the zipper on the front of my dress, and my breath skipped when he kissed the edge of my breast. I felt like someone else. From the outside, I thought we probably were a very pretty couple. This seemed like a very grown-up, L.A.

moment to have. Two pretty people kissing in an observatory built to study people, groping beside a bed meant for things beside sleep. I knew he would take off my dress if I let him, and I didn’t see why not. It probably wouldn’t be bad, even if it wasn’t good. It would be a chic and distinct story, anyway.

His shirt had tugged up. He was ripped and not offensive in any way. This was fine. I was fine.

Beneath his right palm, the material of my dress had made uneven waves. Surely vinyl wouldn’t move like that? I really didn’t know. Now I felt like I was going to have to look this up online.

He unzipped my dress straight down to my belly button.

So, I guessed this was happening. I kept waiting to feel half naked.

Mark leaned back.

“God,” he said, “you are beautiful.”

His voice sounded precisely like it did when he walked into the back room in the evenings to do paperwork. Precisely like it had when he’d asked me if I knew Cole. Which was to say, precisely like Mark, because he was Mark. What was the point to him even saying that? Possibly he’d misunderstood what this was all about.

I said, “I told you to shut up.”

He laughed.

I didn’t. I slapped his hand away and tugged up my zipper.

“We’re done here.”

“What?” he said. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I expected him to protest, but he just ran a hand through his hair. His lips were smeary neon. From me. That was from my lips. Finally, he said, “Well, damn.”

Part of me wanted to tell him, No, really, let’s still go through with it. Because now I was just stuck with this bad taste in my mouth, and a dim feeling of hating him or hating me or hating everything.

“It was probably a bad idea anyway,” Mark said. “I’m not drunk enough.”

The more he spoke, and the longer it had been since he’d touched me, the more the truth was sinking in: I had almost slept with my boss’s husband. I had made out with my boss’s husband at a party. I was that girl.

“You should go,” I told him. My voice was this side of the crypt, but only barely. “Sierra’s looking for you.”

When he looked at me, his expression was confused for a second, and then it turned to something like pity. He laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, and it was at me or him. I felt naive and stupid. “No. She’s not.”

I leveled my gaze on him, blue eyes cold-dead behind their mask, and waited until the uncertainty crept back into his eyes.

Then I said, “I have to fix my lips.”

By the time I had fetched my purse, he was gone, the door barely cracked. I stood in front of the mirror and observed my neon-smeared lips. I cleaned them up and carefully drew my cool pink lips back on and readjusted my hair around my face and tugged the zipper of my dress until I looked the same as I had before.

Then I took my phone out of my purse. I redid my eyeliner, careful not to smudge the neon blue Sierra had put on my eyelids.

I took a breath.

I dialed Cole’s number.

“Are you sober?” I asked.