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I watched a couple go by, burrowing into each other so that they were nearly facing each other but still walking forward, like on the cover of that Bob Dylan album. I pitied them. I saw the girl in the couple, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I knew now that in a few years, that gi…

“SO WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Toby on the phone. I’d loved the Nahid story—this prisoner trying to gain freedom for herself through the random secret fucking of men in her apartment. It was like a dirty fairy tale.

“She just wasn’t who I thought she was,” he said.

“What was she?”

“She was ju…

He couldn’t think of a follow-up question that didn’t sound completely patronizing, because honestly, that was how he felt. He felt patronizing.

[...]

She reached across the table to take his hand. He squeezed hers back. He never realized her arms were so hairy. It was a dark, thick hair that…

They went back to the room and he started to pack. He said, “This was a mistake. You get that, right?”

Of course she did. What had she ever been thinking? She couldn’t take Miriam Rothberg’s place. She couldn’t fade into that kind of existence. She was herself. And the kind of woman she was was …

Her crystal understanding of all of this came in layers. Yes, for sure, Sam was hoping she’d stay some kind of alpha fantasy for him—a fun power fuck with not an emotion in sight. Yes, for sure, he was never going to stay with her because where does a woman this ambitious leave a man? And yes, for …