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“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”

“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

“So maybe it’s okay.”

“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all …

The next day he was busy when I arrived so I had to sit beside a customer in the row of connected chairs while he rented a car to a woman my age. I tried to figure out from her back if she was flirting with him. It made me crazy, other people around him; he gave himself so freely to these customers…

But our moral codes were entirely different. He keeled over, like he was having an ulcer right then and there. And he actually might have been. He had never done anything like this, never even been tempted.

“It’s only because it’s you. Anyone else I’d be able to resist.”

This was meant as a g…

“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the…

“You recognized me,” I said tightly.

“Well, sure. I saw you talking to that guy at the gas station and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then we had the thing when I cleaned your windshield.”

“But you couldn’t see me, the glare—”

“What are you talking about? We were looking right…