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patient-analyst sort of transient romantic attachment. At least, that was what
he
thought. He wasn’t going to share
that
particular theory with anyone soon. He started stuffing his briefcase. It was getting late.
    When he got back in his car and was driving, other matters in Stephen’s life began to surface. Such as the aforementioned Jay and Ramona. And that fucking prick Lewis.
    It could be said that taking up with a woman nine years younger was not the best way for Stephen to establish a conventionally respectable profile in his department. A woman not much older than his students, a single mother college dropout with raven black hair, toned, flawless skin, and unbelievable thighs. Well, anyone who would
say
such a thing would surely be motivated by their insane jealousy over their incapacity to duplicate Stephen’s achievement. Stephen, on more levels than one, was
the man.
    His heart leapt in a giddy fashion as he hit the freeway for the short drive to campus, as he thought of last night and making love with Jay while the moonlight shone through the window, her breasts—God
damn,
those perfect breasts—pressed against his chest while she whispered to him to remember to be quiet. Jay was the most attractive woman Stephen had ever been with, bar none—and it was no small added bonus when he brought her to faculty dinners and watched his colleagues try to suck in their bellies and ingratiate themselves to her in a postmodern ironic fashion while their wives looked on in a decidedly nonironic mode of detachment and pity. Stephen had been with plenty of pretty girls. He was no slouch. But Jay’s physical essence was like sweet ambrosia. He had a hard-on now from thinking about the sight of her naked or, better yet, just in panties and a sheer tank top, lounging in her room, seemingly unaware of what an utter hydrogen bombshell she was.
    This was not to say that Stephen was sexist, or didn’t value women for their intellect—
please.
He’d had all that nonsense drummed out of him aeons ago. He couldn’t have been with Jay if her physicality hadn’t been wedded to a powerful mind. She was young, a little callow yet, and educated largely in a haphazard, autodidact fashion. Still, she had a history of being regarded as intellectually extraordinary (and now Stephen’s heart gave a very different kind of lurch, as he entertained his insecurity over the possibility that she was smarter than him) that dated from her childhood, and it certainly wasn’t too late for her to accomplish things. That is, if she could somehow become motivated to raise herself from the semidepressive rut that currently constituted her days.
    It was a rut that, he had to admit, was making her somewhat less attractive.
Somewhat.
He knew he shouldn’t be so hard on her. She had lost her mother just half a year ago—and what a mother, so knowing, so magnetic, so
hot
(and Stephen winced as he took the exit ramp off the freeway, knowing what an awful thought that was, no matter how profoundly true it was).
    Stephen knew it couldn’t be easy being a single mother. Jay had the misfortune of getting knocked up early in her sophomore year, and had let her bad luck derail her academic career completely. The father was up in Oregon someplace, utterly useless, never visiting or sending money.
His
name was Michael, and he was working on his family’s organic farm—or, to hear Jay tell it, was probably smoking pot all day and goofing off like a post-hippie, Pacific Northwest Hud, eternally juvenile, of no use to either Jay or Ramona.
    The real problem, as Stephen saw it—now he was driving into the comforting fantasyland of the university (God, the
girls
)—was Lewis. Stephen exhaled sharply. Lewis, what a creep. A manipulative narcissist of the highest order, an overbearing browbeater who—and here Stephen was entering into dangerous territory, but he had earned his right as a
thinker
to do so—had in a sense possibly caused Anna’s cancer. Stephen