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It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her …

Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?

Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was…

“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”

He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun waveri…

She looks up. I’ve caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it’s like that paper mask is transparent. I’m looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear…