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still looking around, waiting for something original. Maybe it was the wrong place to look. A man kept coming up behind her and gyrating against her ass. She had to grab his hands to keep them out from under her shirt. Geezus, she thought. This one’s way too wasted.
    “I have a boyfriend,” she said.
    “I won’t tell,” he said.
    It wouldn’t have happened if they had followed the golden drinking rule: Leave no girl behind.
    Tom stood out in his simplicity and the fact he wasn’t trying so hard. He wore a simple white shirt and drank vodka laced with ice cubes. He didn’t have gel in his hair. He wasn’t trying all that hard to get her attention, but he gave her a soft smile.
    She walked over to him at the bar and was relieved when he didn’t start incessantly groping her.
    After a few drinks together, he asked to come home with her. She said she couldn’t. She just wasn’t that kind of girl.
    “Please , you don’t understand. I really don’t have anywhere else to go tonight,” he said.
    Why did she believe h im? There was something about him she trusted, a kindness in his eyes. She paused for a moment and drank out of the thin, red straw.
    “Fine but no sex,” she told him. “I don’t take strangers home.”
    Ultimately, it was the four long islands that made her agree, because taking a stranger into her home was exactly what she was doing. She felt drunkenly invincible.
    “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ve got a girlfriend anyway.”
    “Why doesn’t she let you stay with her?”
    “She’s mean,” he said, leaning closer to her and touching her arm. “Maybe I should find someone nicer. Someone like you.”
    “Oh, so original,” she laughed, as she tried to hail a cab full of people. She shivered and he put his jacket around her shoulders without asking if she was cold.
    Claudia didn’t remember exactly what happened after that, but when she woke up the next morning, she had an artist sleeping in her spare room and he hadn’t left since. She was almost disappointed he turned out to be such a gentleman. At first she wondered if he was gay.
    The stranger was strange. The gentleman was gentle.
    The first thing he did when he got up that morning was walk through the whole apartment, running his hands along the bare white walls. His fingers touched all the empty surfaces, searching for something that wasn’t there.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Claudia asked him. She stared at his hands, then the messy black hair sticking up in all directions and his wrinkled, white shirt. He was too lost in thought to care what he looked like.
    “How boring,” he said more to himself than to her. “Nothing at all on your walls. How can you live like this?”
    “I don’t really think about it, I guess,” she yawned. “It just doesn’t seem that important to have something hanging on the walls.”
    “Really? If I knew you better, I’d slap you,” He held back his hand and grinned. “What you’ve got on your walls is important. Well, to me, at least, nothing’s more important than the art that speaks to your soul. It’s who you are.”
    Claudia rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers. Even though she was hung over, she couldn’t help but smile.
    “That’s sweet, but I don’t have the money to go off buying art,” she said. “You’re not insinuating that my soul is cheap and empty, are you?”
    “Maybe I could help you,” he said.
    “Yeah, that’s an interesting way to put it,” Claudia laughed and nervously folded her bare arms. “Cause I’m the one who needs help.”
    She felt strangely exposed in her T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. She may as well have been wearing a negligee the way he seemed to see through her.
    “You’ve got a spare room,” he said. “I could paint you some in exchange for room and board for a month. Please. I really need a place to stay for a little while. The honest to God truth is my girlfriend kicked my ass out cause I didn’t have