He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn was a little straitlaced, like Sasha, and she was a little awkward, like her, and also like Sasha and very much unlike Celeste she was meant, clearly, for existing with someone in the world—and perhaps all the things he’d done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he’d made, all the money he didn’t spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they’d spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he’d allowed to slip through his lips—not to mention his sexual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now—he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn’s and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn’t do right all that he’d once done wrong.