By the end of February, when my Not Yet Lover came to Chicago for a conference and I picked him up at O’Hare, I got out of the car to greet him even though it was freezing, because I didn’t want to miss the chance to hug him. He was staying in our basement, which my husband and I had dubbed “The Visiting Writer’s Suite,” and through which many touring or conference-going writers before him had passed. This time, no one was dead thousands of miles away so that I was stranded with only him as comfort; there was no longer any acceptable reason for us to hold each other all night, or really for any period at all beyond hello and goodbye hugs. So I took off my red mitten and—for reasons I couldn’t explain—swept the woolly, flap-eared hat off his head to touch his newly short hair while he stood holding his guitar case and luggage in the cold. I opened the trunk of my family’s SUV to put his things inside, and there in the Arrivals lane in front of bleary people waiting for shuttles and rides, he backed me up to the edge of the car and kissed me so hard that we half-fell together into the trunk.

Then we got into the car and, my mitten still off, I held his delicately ruined hand, conscious of every centimeter of our touching skin—my skin, his skin, only ours—and steered the car back toward the city.