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“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…

“Hey,” they said. The young woman in the couple had hair down to her butt and wore a bra that was somehow a shirt. She looked me up and down not understanding that my outfit was sexy, too. We all went inside. Were we going to spend the whole night with this couple? I wanted to cry. The girl tossed …

He wasn’t as young as he looked, but he was younger than he thought he was. Thirty-one is young, I said. He winced like I was just being polite. He felt like a fuckup, like he should have done more by now. He’d wasted time on stupid shit. He was working overtime these days; he needed to save up twe…

What do you mean? we all said. Harris just shrugged, took a sip of his drink. He doesn’t talk much at parties. He hangs back, not needing anything from anyone, which of course draws people toward him. I’ve watched him move from room to room, running in slow motion from a crowd that is unconsciously…