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churn the flask in the air beneath his nose, leaned forward as if to follow when at last she retracted it. It smelled like a coffee house, like dark beans or maybe the liqueur they squeeze into brandy chocolates. When she tipped it to her lips he watched her swallow, her neck again.
    He wanted to reach for her hand and lead her away.
    Her house was a few blocks away – the basement suite of a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot house. Two other girls, half her age, lived there too, but they’d gone home for Christmas. It was almost, she said, like having a place of her own.
    The chocolate vodka didn’t last long. It was the first step in losing their clothes, there in her well-lit bedroom. Kelly slid her hands around his grey-haired chest, over his gone-soft biceps, and Ray stared at nothing but that bedroom light – how could he turn it off without being obvious? But, perhaps sensing the unease in his stiff, trembling shoulders, she flicked the light so he didn’t have to. Then, for the first time in three years, he kissed a woman.
    Soon after, naked under the covers, he plucked a bolt of lint from her belly button and she giggled. Kelly’s body disappeared beneath the blankets, her muscled legsonly shadows against the curl of his palm. Ray caught a glimpse of himself, his pasty gut, his mangled hands on her stomach – how could she be genuinely interested in him? With this awareness went his boozy haze, and, with that, everything that mattered at a time like this. He focused on Kelly, the sound and sight of her, the way she shifted with his hand and tongue.
    He thought of Tracey, followed the memory of curves and moans and the way she would sink her teeth in the soft of his ear. But Tracey was not the woman laid out beneath him; his memories did not match the curves, the sway of breasts. He imagined how Alex would’ve acted at a time like this, or how he would’ve acted with her thighs sticky against his jaw, those muscles that must reach like taut ropes toward her knees. Christ, she was a good-looking woman. His old body hovered above Kelly, spread along the length of her, limp. His lips grazed the coarse hairs between her legs but it didn’t matter, nothing was going to matter.
    Ray rolled off her and sat on the edge of her bed. One of her legs touched his lumbar beneath the sheets. Amber light from a street lamp leaked through the tiny window; it blanketed his feet and lit his discarded pants. She shifted. The blankets rustled. He wouldn’t do this well with a woman ever again. His cock dangled against the bed. The sight of it made his cheeks hot, made his fists ball. Kelly fidgeted behind him. If only she would say something.
    Then: a hand on his back, between the shoulder blades, warm in the winter cold. He imagined the contours onthose fingers, the nicks and scars and the chewed nails and he felt a tingle, down there, but it lapsed as he noticed. He shivered and leaned away; her fingertips lingered on his spine.
    A real man would save face, blame the booze, answer with bravado and nonchalance – but Ray had long moved beyond that. You get less and less invincible, he figured. Or you give up trying. Years ago he would have demanded a blowjob and passed out halfway through. Instead, he hooked his jeans with his big toe, slid them toward him, and tugged them on. Her hand disappeared. The denim balled at his kneecap.
    â€”You can stay, if you want.
    He did want. He wanted so bad to stay there in that bed, sexless and warm, snug against the tight muscles in her lumbar. He wanted to wake late with his face buried in her hair and watch her dress in the blaze of daylight, naked and his, even for just this once.
    â€”I’m sorry. About this. It has nothing to do with you. So much depends on this night and I don’t know. I don’t know why.
    He felt her shrug.
    â€”So go to work on Monday and tell them everything they need to hear.
    Something like relief passed through