they’d crossed the street, she put her hand on Jake’s ass, slid her fingers into his back pocket.
He swung toward her and gave her a look, some combination of vulnerable and predatory, and then he cupped the base of her skull, pulled her mouth onto his and her tongue toward his and her pelvis toward his. They walked another block and he did it again, and then another block, and he did it again.
He smelled like smoked meat, which was not something she minded. They made their way to a pharmacy for condoms and ibuprofen and then back to Richard’s house, and in her crisp guest bed, they had sex. Fiona remembered only once, riding on top of him, that she was most likely someone’s grandmother now. Mostly she felt no self-consciousness at all; Jake was so beautiful, the skin of his upper arms taut and goose-bumped, that it was easy to be lost. She ran her left hand through his chest hair, as thick as his beard, and kept her gauze-wrapped right hand tight on the bed frame. It would hurt worse in the morning, but she didn’t care. Jake finished with a long, helpless caveman grunt, and then he lay next to her and slipped his fingers between her thighs, which she didn’t think would work, until it did.
She imagined Jake would go to sleep afterward, but instead he propped himself up on one elbow and told her about his first college girlfriend, a woman who tied him to the bed and left him there an hour, which was something he thought about all the time, and he hated her for it, but it was also the reason he still wasn’t over her. Pillow talk, good God. Fiona wanted to kick him out, but it was only ten o’clock, and she couldn’t imagine Richard and Serge returning for a couple more hours. She’d need him gone before then; not that Richard would judge her, but he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease her, either. And she was fifty-one, and she didn’t quite believe Jake was thirty-five, and she couldn’t bear for the age difference to be a topic of prurient interest.
Jake said, “Tell me about your first.”
“What,” she said, “are we bonding?”
He laughed, not hurt. “This is one of the best parts. It’s like, there’s foreplay, and there’s afterplay.”
She rolled toward him. What the hell. “I lost my virginity to my cousin’s science teacher. I’d already graduated high school, just barely. Different school.”
“Damn.”
“I don’t know, all my friends were much older. They were my brother’s friends, and then they were mine. It was hard to get excited about someone with acne.”
“Did you ever sleep with your brother’s friends?”
The laugh that escaped her was embarrassingly gooselike. The idea of her younger self with Charlie Keene or Asher Glass! She’d been madly in love with Yale, but that was different. Without expectation, without hope, a crush could remain pure and platonic. It was never lustful, never selfish. She was always just looking for excuses to touch him, talk to him, lean her head against his arm.
“Not so much?” he said.
“Not so much.”
“So what I don’t understand about that triptych, about the guy in the triptych, is that—”
“My God, shut up. Come here.” She tried to kiss him, just to stop him from saying another word, but he pulled back. “Didn’t I already cut my hand over this? You’re being kind of . . . vampiric.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I’m being a journalist. But also, like, isn’t it something you should talk about? To process it?”
“I’ve been processing for thirty years,” she said. “I’ve been processing since you were watching Saturday morning cartoons in your pajamas. I have a shrink for this stuff. I don’t need a journalist.”
“But you don’t have sex with your shrink. I mean, do you? Because seriously, when you talk after sex, it’s different. I think it’s why Freud had everyone lie down.”
“Did Freud sleep with his patients?”
“I think so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fine. Julian died—God, I don’t even know how long ago. You know, depending how close you were to someone . . . There were some people who drew you in, leaned on you, and you spent more time with them in those last months than you ever had before. And there were people where if you were outside their closest circle, they shut you out. Not in an unkind way, it’s just they didn’t need you. You’d have been an interruption, you