I don’t remember him sitting down. The door opened onto a hallway that opened onto a lobby, if I’d been turning to look every time I heard footsteps I wouldn’t have been able to drink my martinis so quickly. Besides which I didn’t want to seem too desperate. I mean more desperate than I already appeared, a woman sitting alone at a bar, not looking at a book, not thumbing at her phone. It was the situation we’d all, the girls of my generation, been warned against, been warned, specifically, against getting ourselves into. In my adolescence, this was the early nineties, the women who marched with Take Back the Night were still hysterical, consent wasn’t yet affirmative, and though no means no was the standard it was also understood that it wouldn’t protect you. And so we were told to keep to well-lighted streets. To carry pepper spray, a whistle. To keep keys between the second and third, the third and fourth, the fourth and fifth fingers of our dominant hands. No short skirts and watch your drink and tell a friend where you’re going and call her when you get there and again when you get home. When we thought about sex we thought mostly about ways to defend against what we didn’t want instead of ways to pursue what we did. So that now the way I thought to attract a man was to make myself vulnerable to attack: sitting alone, drinking too quickly, my legs bare and my shoes no good for running and the hem of my dress riding up. I’d made myself a sitting duck and deliberately because men were attracted not to predators but to prey, not to strength but to weakness, this is what I was thinking when I felt a hand on my upper arm, the grip gentle but the splay wide, the fingers thick, promising. “Is someone,” he asked, “sitting here,” another hand gesturing to the bar stool next to mine. I smiled and shook my head, bowed it to indicate, Please, yes, go ahead. Thinking, Better not to speak just yet, better first to figure out what it is you want me to say.