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would lie on top of the real one in my head, covering it over. But that day the air was sweet with the beginning of spring, and I was happy, and Peter came to the house to see me.
    I was in our room, drinking wine from a jar and trying to hang the pretty Indian cloth I’d just bought for curtains. Sophie was in the editing room, and I’d just started to wonder when she’d be home. These days I wanted her to spend all her time with me, lazy in our bed, like I imagined she’d do if I were pregnant. But it was more like she was having the baby, and she had to work hard every day to make sure it got born right.
    One of our housemates must have let Peter in. I heard someone on the stairs and I ran to the door with my face all shining, ready for Sophie, and when I saw Peter I turned away. I was embarrassed to let him see me so happy, like I was waiting for him.
    “Hi Allison,” he said.
    “What do you want?” I asked.
    My mother always said good manners were for people who deserved them. This attitude used to get her in a lot of trouble, but it was one of the few things I ever learned from her that I liked.
    “I want to talk to you,” he said.
    “Well I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
    It wasn’t true. Really I wanted to ask him why, why he thought he could act that way to me, just shove himself against me without warning when we’d already gone over the scene. I was worried there was something about me, something that said, Do what you want with this one , some kind of smell on my skin. That’s why when Peter said again that he wanted to talk to me and asked if he could come in, I moved aside and let him sit at the edge of the bed. I stayed standing, holding my wine, looking down at him like that would give me the advantage somehow.
    “First,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry.”
    “A little late,” I said.
    He went on. “I’m sorry because I knew you’d be scared when I kissed you, and I did it anyway.”
    He was talking fast and flat, like he’d written the speech out beforehand, and he wasn’t meeting my eyes. I didn’t want to give him any more power than he already had; I didn’t want him to know how much he’d rattled me.
    “I wasn’t scared,” I said. “It was just a shitty thing to do, that’s all.”
    He looked up at me then. “I knew it would scare you,” he said, “because Sophie told me it would.”
    Sometimes when something bad is about to happen, I get this rushing feeling, almost like joy. Right then I wanted to jump in the air or throw my jar of wine across the room. Instead I sat down on the bed next to Peter.
    “What did she tell you?” I asked.
    He stared at the floor. I was embarrassed about the T-shirts and panties and wine corks that lay there, all the evidence of the monthswe’d been fucking and drinking and sleeping and loving in that room, but it was too late to clean anything up.
    “She said she didn’t like the way things were going. She wanted the last scene to be different.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. “What didn’t she like?”
    He paused. I could tell he was choosing his words and that he wasn’t very good at it.
    “It wasn’t that she didn’t like your performance. She liked it. It’s just, she wanted something more intense for the end.”
    I could feel acid rising up my throat. Ever since the beginning, Sophie’d had only good things to say about my acting. She was always talking about how we were going to make so many more movies together. I wanted to kick Peter out, tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, but I also wanted to hear the rest of the story.
    “And?” I asked.
    “She said I should get in your face a little bit, to make the scene better.”
    “Get in my face?”
    He stuck his hands in his hair, looked at his shoes. “I don’t remember how she put it—she just said I should get close to you, even kiss you maybe. She told me to do that. I wouldn’t have come up with it on my own.”
    I thought I had him