I confess his sinning was what interested me. He was so ridiculously, overtly on the make, it sort of took me aback and even impressed me. Here I was, being so good, trying to keep my shit together, trying to be better than the craptastic girl I’d been, and he was just running around being bad. I didn’t know anyone bad (or thought I didn’t—more on that later). I wanted to keep watching him in action. Maybe I would like to, um, receive some action.

He gave me a disbelieving look. “You’ve never kissed anyone besides your husband in—how long? How many years have you been married?”

“Fifteen years. But we were together for a year before that and I never cheated on him.” Fact. “So sixteen years since I’ve kissed someone else.”

“Just…Wow.” We gazed at each other over the crevasse that lay between our world views: his flagrancy, my virtuousness. My virtuousness, which on some level I knew was a veneer or an overlay.

“Well, what’s the worst thing you have done?” he asked, settling left ankle onto right knee, leaning forward, really interested.

“This,” I said. But I smiled at him. Love me, said my smile.

In the morning there was a funny e-mail from him. He’d looked up an article I’d written about Raymond Carver. He said he thought I was cool. I groaned, as if in pain. He knew how to get under my skin: looking me up, calling me cool. He was reading me as easily as I’d read him. Or maybe anybody and everybody would like these things; maybe I just wanted to be seen, to be read, to be pulled, to be kissed by someone new. Maybe the short-story writer was simply who was there; maybe anybody would’ve done.