an erection. But, she knew, the headline would be about her.
“I’m not really here for pleasure,” she said.
Nobells’s brow furrowed. The decade-plus had treated him well. The lines on his face had grown deeper, but they added to his charm. His hair was still thick and espresso with no grays; his stubble was still intoxicating. Cleo remembered how he used to kiss her with that stubble until her cheeks felt raw, how she’d slather on coconut oil the next morning to try to disguise how he had left his mark.
“Do you need legal advice?” he asked.
“No.” Cleo let the silence rest between them. She wanted him to squirm, to feel as off-kilter as she did, or as she had, especially that night with the roast chicken and the Italian merlot and with his wife and children out of town.
Cleo had still been uncertain about his intentions, even when they clinked their wineglasses and he pulled the chicken out of the oven and insisted on serving her. He led her to the dining table, pulled out her chair, then placed a linen napkin on her lap. It was so intimate that Cleo couldn’t meet his eyes when he asked her if she’d like a refill on her wine.
Dinner was exceptional, as promised: the chicken and warm rolls with butter and a salad with pears and pine nuts and a champagne dressing that he also made from scratch. For Cleo, who was used to eating microwavable macaroni and cheese or the remnants of whatever Lucas left on his high-chair tray, it was, honestly, a bit of a miracle. Like manna from the heavens.
They went through Cleo’s bottle of wine quickly. Even the next morning, back at home with Lucas, Cleo realized that they’d gone through it too quickly, and maybe if they hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been so reckless. But they had, and she couldn’t turn back time.
She stared at him now, all these years later, and remembered how his bedroom had smelled of cologne and of sex and also of waffles, which he whipped up for her at ten p.m., once she begged off staying the night (she had never spent a night apart from Lucas and had no intention of doing so even then), and in lieu of the breakfast he said he would have made. She could hear him singing along to Toto’s “Africa” while she was still tucked under his duvet, naked. And maybe that was the moment to get up and walk away—while he was cracking eggs and adding vanilla extract, only one mistake made rather than a hundred of them, but she was twenty-three and exhausted and had no way of knowing how far in over her head she was.
After dinner, Cleo was certainly drunk. She didn’t know if he were or not: she hadn’t been around many middle-aged men and really didn’t have any idea how many glasses of wine it took them to wobble their way to the couch. She certainly wobbled her own self over, plunked down, and wondered what on earth would happen next. She remembered feeling like a bystander in her own story, telling herself that if he kissed her, she’d allow it, and if he didn’t, she could leave without embarrassing herself. Of the list of many concerns that Cleo had in her life, embarrassing herself was certainly up there. Top three, perhaps.
But he joined her on the couch, his leg pressing against hers and then his arm slipping around her shoulders. He told her a story about how, in his days just out of law school, as a newbie clerk for a federal judge, he slept in his office some nights because he was so terrified of missing filing deadlines or otherwise disappointing his boss, and Cleo closed her eyes and imagined this superstar professor, who was shining all his attention now on her, as a young man not much older than she was. She hoped that he was sharing these words because he saw the same potential in her. Even in her wine-soaked haze, she could tap in to her ambition, how closely it was tied to her self-perception. She liked to think that’s what Nobells saw in her too: that she was on a rocket ship to the top, and honestly, though she thought he was sexy as hell, if he hadn’t invited her here, if he hadn’t stopped her after class and run his hand down her arm, if he hadn’t kept refilling her wineglass, she