Red blaze in the club, O.’s tan button-up and chipped teeth and bad posture, D.’s bobbing dancing and kind brown eyes. Outside a small nondescript club that was still open past 4, I fell asleep sideways on D.’s lap and pulsing chest. The taxi ride home every nonsensical thing I’ve ever done flashed through my intoxicated mind with the red-brown blurred streets of the city on either side of me and D.’s muscled arm wrapped around me. My dress fell around my tired naked body on the leather seat. I’d never felt so wonderfully tired. 

Blue light and broken blaring song lyrics poured out of clubs’ swinging doors on corners of the ruddy sidewalks that lined the wide cobblestone streets, an intricate maze of narrow and open walkways that led up to the college, another school on a hill overlooking a city. The sweet, tart taste of cigarette smoke was still in my throat when I swallowed the next morning.

O. who liked J and D. who liked A: two friends, one cigarette smoking and lanky and in possession of antic energy and smart alec phrases and ring-adorned knuckles he cracked often, as a nervous habit. The other, shorter, with less fire in his eyes and a warm smile and hung-up soccer cleats and stories of sleeping in a woman’s apartment last night–Oh an Italian girl? Actually she was from Dallas.

On Sunday morning, I crossed the bridge in the smaller neighborhood, where the yellow edges of a warm blue sky melted into the river flanked by stone benches we sat on, legs dangling over the edge, drinking vodka last night. I think everyone’s a little in love with D. I just get that warm feeling when I think of D: his night-out uniform outfit of a wrinkled button-up shirt and khaki shorts and those warm, kind brown eyes. 

Katharina! he always says when he sees me. Everyone’s a little in love with D., I think. The blond girl in black in the club who could see that I liked him and told me she just wanted coke from him, the girl from the sorority clique who D. rejected. . . . 

D. has restraint and is steady. He is not at war with himself, as far as I can tell. He’s an easy, enjoyable person to be around. I would go anywhere or do anything with him–but not for him, though, at least not yet. D. has Brazilian ancestry and you can see it in his face, his ears, the shade of his skin, cool and smooth, the dimples of his smile. You get a pang when you think of some people–not D. D. strikes me as the type of boy who is liked by older women–by any type of woman–any woman would like D.

Katharina! he says when he sees me. D. does not have O.’s mystique and impulsivity and charisma and tattoos and bad posture, nor does he have F.’s deep voice and blue eyes. He has his sensible demeanor and warm brown ones. I would go anywhere with D. Maybe this is only because the third time we met I fell asleep in his lap. And he put his arm around me then and in the car his heart beat in a slow, steady rhythm, in such a different way than the nervous energy of the last heartbeat I felt close to me, in an important moment I realize now is not so important now, a rite of passage that people write about and read about and plan about that was so much less dreamy and warm than that car ride floating, flashing through the streets of Florence in D.’s arms, adjacent to his warm body–everything about him is so warm, warm, warm is the word I think of when I think of D. There are cold, crumpled, broken, cynical people, and there are warm people like D.

Is this your girlfriend? someone asked D.

It’s Katharina! he said loudly. My friend!

Later, sitting next to a Slovenian man: I am better than your boyfriend.

He’s not my boyfriend.

That’s not the way you were looking at him.

Bello, I admitted. D., unmoved, on my left, our legs touching slightly as we sat on a stone bench in an open, empty square. Katharina, mi amiga!

The first night I was here I cried myself to sleep about something that happened to me last year on the brink of a winter, seasonal and emotional. I suppose I am starting to think about that in a different way than I did–I know it’s something I will revisit time and time again in my life–but when I was asleep with D. in the taxi that was the first time I felt different about it, or it felt different to me. The warmth lacking from that experience, the comfort, the intimacy, I found that night with D. We never kissed.

He took me back to my room and hugged me good-bye. I think I said, in my drunken state, “That’s it?” and I don’t remember if he said anything. The next morning my roommate said, There was a boy. 

D., I said clearly, remembering.

The first time I met D. he talked to me first. “You said you were from Connecticut, right? I was born in New Haven.” At that time I was more interested in F., who happened to be walking behind us, and I barely indulged D. in conversation so that I could talk to F. But the night D. carried me, very drunk, nearly passed out, back to my room in the early hours of the morning had made me forever inexplicably smitten with him. Perhaps it was the physical memory of sleeping against his body. The caring way he had treated me, without a second thought, starting the moment I passed out in his lap on the edge of the sidewalk. I trusted him now. And the next night–a Saturday, at the same club, he recognized me first. Kate! Katharina! I always liked F., but I loved D.